Design CAD & Print NZ

28/05/2026

Garden water tank inline rain water diverter. The RainSaver inline valve automatically diverts water to 55 gallon (220 litre) garden tank. When the tank is full it switches the switches the water back to going down the pipe.

Just a light smattering of rain this morning for about 20 minutes and the tank is already half filled. The efficiency of the RainSaver valve is such that I think it captured close to 100% of all the water coming down the 80mm diameter downpipe.

18/04/2026

Replacement gear for a worm drive on an electric chair (no not that type!).

The customer is hoping theses will prove tougher than the original injection molded nylon piece....we'll see.

This was the first test piece for this project, that we printed for destruction testing. If you zoom in you will see some damage I inflicted on it trying to break off some of the teeth with pliers and by twisting a large flat bladed scew driver between the teeth.

Proved to be incredibly tough printed from an incredible new industrial plastic. The supplier has asked us on feedback on this new filament so we are trialling it on a few demanding projects. So far I am very impressed with it.

It needs to be printed at very high temps in a hot enclosure.

Its very expensive but still cheaper than fabricating it or printing it in aluminium.

18/04/2026

18/04/2026

Tui feeder.
Sometimes we just do stuff for fun $20.
Not everything is an engineering jig or motor sport part.

In the first version of these I didn't make the ants moat wide enough and the ants would swim across.

04/08/2025

Sometimes a small out of production part can cripple an expensive or vital piece of equipment.

This piece is just 17mm high and had to be printed in a very tough plastic to survive better than the original nylon injection molded part. It had to be FDM printed (Not resin printed) to be able to print it out of a durable enough material for this application.

I ended up printing it with a 0.25mm nozzle Polymer used has a heat deformation of 200C.

Pen in photo is just for scale

30/07/2025

A spin off of our growing industrial 3D design and print business is that we found that many commercially available printers were not up to the challenges required for producing strong, accurate, funtional production parts. .

As a consequence I also do a lot of design work on 3D printers for other specialist 3D printers. This has resulted in the development of a couple of unique kinematic systems that have been adopted by other specialist 3D printer builders. There are now over 1000 printers using components of these 3D printer designs.

A couple of years ago I designed a unique pivoting bed mechanism for be levelling, dubbed the First Principles Z motion system to overcome the inherent issues of other established designs. I have retained ownership of the IP on the 1P Z system for commercial use.

The simplicity and foolproof nature of this system has seen it start to grow in popularity. Here is another happy 'customer' using my 1P Z kinematics on an ultra fast 3D printer.

STRONG!

30/07/2025

A large amount of our business is becoming the printing of Automotive products.

Being able to select from the growing range of specialist industrial 3D printing filaments we now import with long term temperature resistances ranging from (80C to 230C) and with strengths approaching that of alloy. The range of functional parts we can print has extended.

One feature of these high temp industrial plastics is, that while they make incredibly strong and heat resistant functional parts, most of them print with a textured outer finish which looks great for some parts, but is not always suitable for parts requiring a glossy cosmetic finish.

The option sometimes (if high heat resistance is not a requirement for the part) is to change the cross section of parts to be able to get the stiffness or strength requiried from a more cosmetic plastic that will provide a smooth outer finish.

Shown below is a two part bracket I was asked to print.... and my redesigned version of the bracket (and cross sections of both designs). As you can see I increased the cross section of the design to attain the required strength and stiffness with a cosmetic plastic.
Interestingly, in this instance the cost to CNC the original part from alloy would have cost about the same as the combined cost of redesigning it and printing it......but the delivery time also changed from 14 days to just 12 hours.

My charge to CNC this bracket not including the CAD charge would have been about $120, The cost to CAD model and print it was $50.

The other reason you might opt to 3D print something like this, is that the cost to produce a subsequent identical bracket (now that I have the redesigned CAD model) would be $20, but more
intererestingly the incremental cost to do an interative version of it now (of a different length for example) would only be an extra $5.

15/07/2025

We also design for CNC manufacuturing and can offer this as a full service.