“Dream Big, Print HUGE” was the phrase I kept running into while researching the company I’d decided to spend my summer with. I’ve always tried to be someone who dreams big. I was one of the only people from my graduating class in Arkansas to leave the state for college, and I’ve spent the years since trying to reach for things that weren’t handed to me. So there I was, 20 years old, moving into my own place in a city where I knew almost no one, fully supporting myself for the first time. “I made it,” I remember thinking, walking down South Congress the night I moved in, staring up at the Austin skyline.
On my first day I left the house early, and I knew I’d landed somewhere good the moment I saw that same mantra painted on the side of the building. Justin Turner, a face I’d only ever seen on a screen, met me at the door and walked me around, showing me where I’d be sitting for the next 12 weeks. Then came 9 a.m. and my first of many daily standups. I introduced myself and immediately felt welcomed in a way I hadn’t expected. Everyone seemed to be working on the coolest project in the building, and I wanted in on all of it. At the end of that first standup, Taylor Boutté asked me to go around and repeat everyone’s name back. Time stopped. I couldn’t even remember the name of the person standing next to me. The room went dead silent for what felt like forever, and then everyone started laughing. That was the moment I knew I’d landed with the right group of people, and that I was about to have a great summer.
Week one was simple by design: learning how re:3D operates, getting familiar with LFAM machines, figuring out how my skills translated to the Gigabot, and designing shelf organizers for production parts. I was itching to get my hands on the biggest printers I’d ever seen, but I also knew bigger machines meant bigger problems, so I took it slow. That patience paid off when I got to tag along on a customer service visit to the ReStore and see one of our printers out in the wild for the first time. I helped diagnose and replace a faulty limit switch causing a z-homing issue, then watched and practiced leveling a TerabotX bed, a process that was completely foreign to me and unique to a printer that size.
That introduction to customer support ran alongside my first contract printing project: a set of dual-color rings for a customer. I shadowed Justin as he quoted the job, and he walked me through a pipeline I’d never seen before, accounting for material mass, support removal time, slicing time, and a handful of other variables the customer never even sees. His patience explaining all of it, to someone who’d never touched a contract print before, set the tone for how I approached everything else that summer. I helped remove support material, watched how the team interacted with customers, and prepped parts for handoff.
Once I’d built up some confidence around the printers, I started running jobs on my own. Pressing print for the first time, watching the nozzle creep toward the build plate, my heart in my throat: that nervousness was real. But finishing my first contract print from start to finish, from quote to slice to final part (my first time working outside PC filament), made it worth every second. I picked up the routine fast: check for contract requests, quote, print, remove supports, hand parts off to the Army Sequential and LunaRecycle teams.
In my spare time I wandered both buildings, soaking up every project the company had ever pushed through: a full-size surfboard, a project meant to 3D print on the moon, you name it. My curiosity kept getting the better of me. That’s how I found BlackBot: an abandoned printer sitting in the corner of the R&D building. No extruder, cables routed in a spaghetti pattern, panels missing, couldn’t even power on. I looked at that machine like it was an abandoned kid nobody had time for, and decided I’d be the one to bring it back.
Getting BlackBot running was its own education. The Y-axis wouldn’t move without a sharp grinding sound, and with Mitchell Mashburn’s help troubleshooting the code, we traced it to the Y1 stepper driver and rerouted it to a spare port. From there it was a slow, steady process of versioning a machine I’d never built and barely understood. When I noticed the aluminum extrusion the Z rails rode on had been cut short, I knew this project was going to take some creative problem-solving, which turned out to be my favorite kind. Along the way I redesigned and modified a handful of production parts in SolidWorks, including a custom Y belt tensioner mount to fit the machine’s odd geometry.
Domenic Cordova trusted me with a Beacon surface scanner to help test the rebuild, new technology to me and honestly kind of magic, turning a warped build surface into a highly accurate bed mesh in a few seconds. The stock mount wasn’t built for BlackBot’s linear-rail Y-axis, so I got to go back to the drawing board and design my own: one that bolts to the hardware mounting the carriage to the slide and lets the Beacon sit snugly between the two nozzles without getting in the way of any parts. Having someone hand me a piece of expensive lab equipment and basically say “figure it out” meant more to me than I think Domenic realized.
Even with BlackBot printing again, there was still plenty left to do: no proper cable carrier, rusted linear rails, missing panels. I spent hours sourcing parts, routing more wire than I’d like to admit, and mounting everything back into place. Piece by piece, BlackBot came back to life. And when Domenic lent me one of his MicroSwiss hotends for testing production components, I knew he’d started trusting my work, which meant redesigning my Beacon mount again, this time extending the arm 15mm for clearance. That hotend was the last piece before BlackBot earned a new name: EagleBot, officially back in production.
My favorite project of the summer, hands down, was the rPP drone build. I’ve always liked projects where I can follow a process from start to finish and actually own every parameter along the way. We were handed old polypropylene gas filter canisters from Fort Leonard Wood, and my job was turning them back into usable feedstock. Working alongside Jake Celmo, we built and documented the entire process, from virgin canister to granulated feedstock, meant to be used company-wide. That project sharpened my documentation and communication skills more than anything else I did this summer, and Jake’s patience walking through it with me made it stick.
From there, the project pushed me: polymer characteristics, profile development, a material that felt like it was actively fighting me. rPP only wants to stick to itself, so the temperature differential between the heated bed, cooled layers, and fresh plastic became the whole battle. Chris Hong was the resident expert on printing PP, and I leaned on him constantly. We tried sheets of packing tape (also polypropylene, and by far the most effective, if a pain to reapply every print), PP sheets held down with clamps, and various glues, all of which lost to the tape. Chris never made me feel bad for asking the same question three different ways until it clicked.
Past the adhesion problem, the drone frame itself hadn’t been designed with FFF printing in mind: thin outer ducts that bowed near the top and killed surface contact, plus zero retraction on the GBX printer, which made every travel move a liability instead of a convenience. So I redesigned the frame around single-path extrusion, connecting the ducts with one continuous outer wall to boost layer adhesion up top and reduce cracking, and softened the angle of the ducts to maximize contact area without giving up the aerodynamics.
Dialing in the print profile was its own project. A raft made warping worse; a wide brim turned out to be the fix, giving me somewhere to add weight and counteract the tape’s lifting adhesive. Concentric fill on the first layer and infill rounded things out; the geometry’s holes lent themselves naturally to that shape.
If a 13-year-old me, who’d just bought my first printer and started making in his basement, could see where I am now, I don’t think he’d believe it. I came into this summer knowing how to run a hobby printer and left having rebuilt one from the ground up, run contract jobs from quote to delivery, and helped push a genuinely new material into a real application. None of that happens alone. Justin taught me what it actually takes to run a print business, not just a printer. Mitchell talked me through code I had no business understanding on day one. Domenic handed me equipment most interns never touch and let me learn by doing. Jake and Chris both gave me their time, over and over, on a project that was as much theirs as mine by the end. And the whole team, starting with that standup where I blanked on everyone’s name, made a kid from Arkansas who knew nobody in Austin feel like he belonged from week one.
I came to re:3D wanting to dream big. I’m leaving with a much clearer idea of what that actually takes: the patience to fix something nobody else wants to touch, the humility to ask the same question until you get it, and the confidence that comes from watching an idea go from a pile of broken parts to something flying. That’s not a bad summer’s work.
Westley kleinman
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