Home Practice & Makers Redefining Product Development with Maker Tools – Interview with Adam Kumpf from...

Redefining Product Development with Maker Tools – Interview with Adam Kumpf from Makefast Workshop

Makefast Workshop, founded in 2016 by Maura Atwater and Adam Kumpf, is based in Ohio, USA, and specializes in rapid prototyping and innovative design solutions, with a strong emphasis on 3D printing technologies. Their expertise spans additive manufacturing, electronics, and subtractive fabrication, enabling the efficient production of complex geometries and functional prototypes. In an interview with 3Druck.com, Adam Kumpf highlighted how Makefast Workshop blends traditional and modern techniques to create innovative, functional prototypes using accessible maker tools.

The workshop is equipped to meet diverse project requirements, combining 3D-printed components with complementary materials to improve performance and expand functionality. Their capabilities include interactive electronics, precise subtractive fabrication techniques (such as laser cutting and CNC milling), and flexible additive manufacturing methods. By maintaining a well-stocked inventory of raw materials and components, they minimize downtime and keep projects moving forward, even under tight deadlines.

One notable innovation is their development of midair 3D printing techniques. By modifying G-code to control extrusion flow and print speed, they fabricate unsupported structures like coil springs without traditional supports. Another breakthrough involves embedding materials such as sand and metals into 3D-printed parts, enhancing the functional potential of printed objects.

To support the maker community, Makefast Workshop shares these advancements openly on their Hacks page. By documenting their methods, they encourage experimentation and collaboration, further advancing the potential of 3D printing technologies.

Interview with Adam Kumpf

In an interview with 3Druck.com, co-founder Adam Kumpf discusses how Makefast Workshop uses accessible maker tools and innovative approaches to enhance prototyping and design processes. He provides several examples of creative techniques, highlighting how these methods expand the functionality and potential of 3D-printed objects.

How do you see your tools and prototypes helping to make innovative design and creation more accessible to the maker community?

Co-founder Adam Kumpf

Makefast Workshop develops functional experience prototypes for leading-edge tech companies. One might assume it takes a large-scale R&D lab to do this kind of work, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, much of the value our clients gain by working with us comes from our ability to be super agile, quickly pivot, and try out new ideas with minimal overhead. All of this is made possible because of the democratization of maker-style tools, which anyone can use at home or in their local maker space.

For us, it’s how you use the tools that matters. It’s critical to move beyond the excitement of simply downloading a CAD file and hitting “print.” Most new ideas we work on begin as rough marker sketches, with design teams reimagining what a product or experience could be and exploring why it’s meaningful and important to pursue that direction.

Those sketches lead to quick mock-ups and tests using whatever materials are available (like cardboard, hot glue, paperclips, foam, and Arduino-level electronic components) to get a tangible sense of what’s possible. Only then does the idea progress to CAD and subsequently to 3D printing, laser cutting, milling, painting, wiring, programming, and assembly into a more refined form.

We are extremely grateful for the wide range of accessible maker tools available today, which enable us to do what we do. The entire process—from initial sketch to fully functional prototype (works-like, feels-like, looks-like)—can take as little as one week with just a team of two working from home. That’s pretty amazing! Naturally, many projects allow for a few iterations over three to four weeks to further refine the concept—a stark contrast to the typical 12- to 26-week development cycle for a single iteration, the norm for most companies’ R&D efforts.

It’s only natural that we want to give back to the maker community whenever possible. To do that, we freely share our non-client efforts on our hacks page. All hacks posted by Makefast Workshop are open source and offered without any strings attached for everyone to enjoy, use, share, and continue experimenting with.

What new tools, materials, or methods for 3D printing do you think have the potential to really open up the world of DIY projects and small-scale prototyping?

Our approach is to constantly challenge assumptions and find overlooked opportunities, and the world of 3D printing is no different. We’re now surrounded by inexpensive, precision 3-axis tools with a heated nozzle, and we believe those capabilities can accomplish a lot more than just printing plastic layer by layer.

To unlock new ways of using 3D printers, it’s worth taking some time to learn about g-code (the instructions that machines like 3D printers and CNC mills use to run in a specified way). While telling a machine to do the wrong thing could break it (you’ve been warned!), it’s also the key to experimenting with new uses that go beyond what slicer software does today.

We’ve seen how accessible coding can be, with students as young as five years old learning to program robots with graphical programming languages. But somehow, we presume programming languages like g-code to be less accessible or important; therein lies massive potential for DIY makers, artists, and engineers to explore new territory.

And those same types of questions and reframing can be applied to every aspect of maker tools. What else could a temperature-controlled hotend do? A 3-axis workspace? A 1.75mm precision feed mechanism? A heated chamber? Precision leveling? These are all open for tinkering by anyone with a printer.

What are some of the most exciting or memorable projects you’ve created using 3D printing technology?

We rely on 3D printers nearly every day in our work, but there are a few standout projects that have fundamentally shaped how we use them.

The first was a hack we shared back in 2016, using paused additions to embed sand, liquid, and metal into parts while they were still printing. Plastic is incredible, but look at any successful functional product, and it’s clear that other materials are critical to good design. There’s a reason that even the best 3D printer kits themselves only use printed parts for a portion of the system. There are also metal fasteners, hardened linear rails, precision bearings, metal supports, and rubber feet that work in concert with the printed parts. That project was a good reminder that 3D printing is about a lot more than just plastic.

The second was a pair of hacks to print in midair without the use of supports: first a coil spring and then a rectangular wave spring. By slowing the print speed to roughly 1/100th of normal operation and pulling the nozzle above the build plate, a controlled strand of hardened plastic could be sculpted in free space. We focused on springs because of their inherent usefulness and simplicity, but the concept of midair printing has potential far beyond that – horizontal overhangs (or even negative slopes) could be a reality in future slicers using exactly this approach.

Image: Makefast Workshop

Most recently, we’ve been using our 3D printers to test the waters of medium-scale production. With our latest product, a solar powered generative music box called opdo, we’ve been printing shippable components without needing to rely on an outside factory for part fabrication. There’s a printed housing on the back of a solar panel for voltage regulation, a custom speaker enclosure to give better audio response, end caps for an included fiber optic cable, and a colorful encoder knob to serve as the primary interaction callout. And the merits of printing are already clear – we can make minor modifications at any time without needing to halt production to create expensive new molds or take significant financial losses on large-scale inventory.

Looking ahead, how do you envision 3D printing and other emerging technologies evolving to make creative projects even more accessible for individuals?

It’s important to remember that none of this “new” technology is happening in isolation. It’s all a continuation of a long line of connected efforts in how we make things. Well before 3D printing, humans were creating structures out of stacked stones, bricks, and wooden beams; we just do it in little strands of plastic now on our desktops.

And AI is just another step along that path, increasingly intersecting the full spectrum of maker tools. But contrary to how it’s often presented, AI is not new at all. We’ve been using data to inform machines so they can more effectively perform tasks for decades. And before that, we were dabbling in the AI space with mechanical Turk chess-playing machines to mimic what we imagined machines could someday do. AI has been a part of our lives for at least the last 50 years – we’re just doing it much more effectively now.

In short, I think we can all benefit from thinking bigger about the myriad maker tools and what we actually want to do with them. The most interesting, meaningful projects start with compelling insights and provocative questions. We could all benefit from taking a step back and not immediately jumping to fully embrace the up-and-coming disruptive technology, assuming it will save (or ruin) the day.

We believe accessibility to making things is more a mindset than anything else. Start with the tools and materials you already have at your disposal (especially pen and paper) and bend them to your will. Only after that should you consider increasing the fidelity. Maybe that means some kind of futuristic matchbox-sized AI 3D holographic liquid metal printer, or more likely, maybe you just need a hot glue gun, some paper clips, and an actual matchbox.

You can find out more about Makefast Workshop on their Website as well as the Hacks page.


Subscribe to our Newsletter

3DPresso is a weekly newsletter that links to the most exciting global stories from the 3D printing and additive manufacturing industry.

Privacy Policy*
 

You can find the privacy policy for the newsletter here. You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time. For further questions, you can contact us here.