3D printers are so f*cking hot right now. People are making everything from houses and stem cells to guns and violins. A Japanese company is making paperweights from an MRI of a fetus, for God’s sake. It’s like the industrial revolution all over again, only we’re just building things that already exist.
Red Bull‘s Fettler series – where fettler means a person who’s devoted to making something perfect with their hands – covers some pretty interesting people. In the second installment, they sat down with a man named Adrian Smith, who has jumped on the 3D printing train and started building carbon fiber based mountain bikes.
Sort of.
To be exact, he’s using the printer to create moulds that have been designed using CAD software.
The interesting thing about Smith isn’t so much that he’s building bikes, though – it’s that he built his own 3D printer from scratch… without the use of a 3D printer.
And now, out of a garage at his house in Leeds, he’s designing, printing, and building these incredible (yet affordable) downhill bikes under the name Carbon Wasp.
