This is a big episode. Seriously, the biggest 3D parts I’ve encountered are what we’re going to talk about today. I’m so excited about this episode. I really love Buddy Bernhard from Local Motors, which is who we are going to talk to. We’re going to talk cars, 3D printed cars if you didn’t guess already. He just has such a passion for 3D printing in general. I love the whole model, that you’ll hear as we go forward and listen to this episode, about really how open they are about sharing what they’re doing with 3D printing. They just are passionate about moving the market forward.

They’re doing some quite innovative things. Everything is not just off the shelf for them in terms of buying a machine and printing something. They’ve had to figure out how they’re going to post process these large parts. They’re building large scale, manufactured product in the United States. It’s drivable. Yes, in fact autonomously drivable. It has a cognitive shuttle with Watson in it. This is not only a great case of wonderful 3D printed design, like design and engineering and collaboration between companies. But also, what Buddy is showing us here as we go forward into this interview and you’ll hear it, what he’s really showing is this is as much about direct digital manufacturing and the growing pains of building a manufacturing facility that utilizes on-demand and digital manufacturing.

Listen to the podcast here:

3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles with Buddy Bernhard of Local Motors

Hi, Buddy. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, Tracy.

You probably get this all the time. We went to Local Motors website and for whatever reason, the first reaction we had was, “They’re making a 3D printer.” Then, “No. That’s the car.” Does that happen all the time?

It has happened in the past. It’s a very confusing thing because there’s no real front to it when you have a fully autonomous vehicle. It can go forward or backwards, either way it works. We’re trying to make it go sideways, that’s in the plans.

We need a side view of it so you could actually see the wheels better so that they know, “Hey, it’s a car, not a 3D printer.” We’re a 3D printing podcast and 3D printers are on our brain all the time. Whatever that blue horizontal bar is in the window, just looked like a build plate. There’s so much about the design of this that reminds of me of the new Robo 3D printers.

I was thinking the exact same thing. It kind of has that SLA look, the tinted outside of it.

Exactly, but it’s a car which is so cool. It’s a 3D printed car.

Yes, basically all of it. It’s a huge 3D print. We need to use the world’s biggest 3D printer to do it. We do that with Oak Ridge National Lab. It’s always pretty impressive to see. Literally, I come in every morning and I’m like, “Wow, I work with this thing? I can’t believe it works.”

That’s amazing. Let’s step back though for everybody and let’s get some background as to how you got started and how Local Motors got started.

Local Motors started well before I did. They first started producing cars in 2009, it might have been earlier. It was Jay Rogers who’s still the CEO and he’s the Founder, had this business plan of co-creation and micromanufacturing. I think that 3D printing just really fit well with that. The first 3D printed car they did was in 2014, but now they’re going back to the cars they did before that and are saying, “How do we improve this vehicle with 3D printing?”

They started producing regular cars before 3D printing?

Yes. When did MakerBot’s first Cupcake come out? That was 2007 or 2008?

Maybe, 2007 or 2008, something like that.

The Rally Fighter which was the first vehicle Local Motors did is this huge, it’s got a Corvette engine. It was just in The Fast and the Furious movie. You can find models of it at Toys R Us because it looks like a Transformer, large. If you saw it in the Baja races, it’s an imposing looking vehicle compare to the Olli. If you go on to our web platform or forum, which is launchforth.io, you can find one of our designers did faces for our vehicles. The Rally Fighter has this mean-looking, kind of sneer versus the Olli, which is like a kind of happy-go-lucky like, “It looks like R2-D2.”

WTFFF 473 | 3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles

The Rally Fighter has this mean-looking, kind of sneer.

Yes, it’s cute.

Yes, it’s super cute compared to this other vehicle. I once saw one in Georgetown in DC. I swear I saw a grandpa have to take a step back and sit down when it drove pass. It’s a little loud for the urban community.

They got started producing cars and then shifted into 3D printing. When did you join them and what was your interest there?

I joined basically a year and a half ago. They just opened up this amazing facility. It’s gotten a lot of awards in National Harbor, which is just outside of DC. It’s a sales and demo facility. They brought in one of these BAAMs, which is the Big Area Additive Manufacturing.

I love that name.

I don’t know who came up with but it really fits. They have a 5-axis CNC here. I remember they were giving a presentation on Capitol Hill in one of the caucuses. It wasn’t the maker caucus. It might have been the manufacturing caucus. I came and I heard the general manager who now runs this facility talking, and I was like, “I have to work there.” They’ve got this huge, long-term idea. They’re going to build these custom cars. They’re going to see all these new specific engineering done. I was like, “I have to go and hang out with these guys.” Luckily, they had this labs manager position open which is this huge open position where I get to just work with community, build things, do some IT work. It’s been a lot of fun. It was a natural transition for me. I was getting really frustrated with just working behind the computer and not building things.

We hear that a lot from designers and engineers.

It’s one of those things. You grow up, you want to play with Legos. You get into bigger Legos, bigger Legos and you’re like, “This is awesome. I want to learn how to do all these skills, like welding. I want to build this and try things.” When it comes to it, 99% of it is doing it in CAD and emailing all day and 1% is we go out and do a build day. A lot of the time, you go out and you find someone else to do the build because you’re too busy to actually build it yourself.

That’s a really interesting point because there’s a lot of designers that we talked to and engineers that we talked to really felt that that’s really how 3D printing changed it. It gave them that satisfaction of having something immediate. Having a desktop in the development and design process was just not only was it speeding things up and making it more accurate, but it gave them that, “I built something today,” kind of feeling that you don’t have when you were doing it the other way completely in CAD.

Absolutely, and it’s completely rewarding. At the end of the day, I get to do some odds and ends projects. I just finished up doing a DNA model. We’re working with the National Federation of the Blind where we got a challenge going on right now called Autonomous for All of Us. It’s a challenge and you’ll get an award for applying and we’ll take one of those ideas and implement it in Olli. Part of it is that I get to talk to all of these groups and they’ve got all these interesting ideas. Some of them smaller, some of them are bigger but it just gives you the opportunity to have success on a day to day basis, which is really cool.

That’s fantastic. I’m interested in learning a little more about this BAAM 3D printer that you use and what kind of process is it that it uses to produce parts.

3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles: We’ve got these BAAMs completely meant for the microcommunity.

It is FFF or FDM. DC, Knoxville, Berlin, you can also go to Arizona. It’s still our headquarters out there so you could go see it there. But any of those locations, we’ve got these BAAMs and it’s completely meant for the microcommunity so that we can do manufacturing on a local scale, at the scale of a car. The BAAM is cool. It was a combination between Oak Ridge National Lab, Local Motors, Lockheed Martin in Cincinnati. They all got together, I can imagine these guys sitting in a boardroom or something but I don’t really know how it all came together like that. It was basically like, “Hey, we can do this. We can take an old laser cutter and put on an extruder on it. We got to tune it just like you do a desktop-size 3D printer where you’re figuring out what materials work best and what extrusion. It’s funny because it’s an exact same. If you just scaled up a MakerBot. It’s basically a MakerBot if you used pellets in a much, much larger gantry system. It’s got a tamper and you’re using 3 millimeter nozzles instead of 0.4 millimeters or something like that.

As we look at your website and see all the photos of Olli and the things that you guys produce, are any of the outer decorative parts made with this 3D printer or is it just things that are under the surface, behind the scenes?

It’s everything with the Olli. It looks really pretty, right? You’ve got that nice white sheen on the cover photo on LocalMotors.com. That’s just a vinyl wrap. Actually, you can see in the wheel hubs, that’s just the raw material and that’s been machined. The black around the glass and the white, that’s a vinyl wrap that just goes right on top of your extruded material.

That’s brilliant. That actually makes a lot of sense because vinyl wrapping technology, people probably don’t realize but they see it all the time, especially in urban areas, on busses and things. They wrap these big graphics for promoting a movie or whatever on buses, it’s all vinyl wrapping. It makes so much sense to really produce a high quality finish on that 3D printed part. You would hide the layer lines, I’m sure.

Yes, exactly. What we have to do before that is we take it to the 5-axis Thermwood milling machine that we use in three out of four of our facilities. You smooth out so you can hardly tell it’s 3D printed then.

There’s a lot of post-finishing that goes along with it, which is what are the things that I think people don’t anticipate when they think about this distributed manufacturing model, that you do have to build in the ability to do some kind of post-finishing.

Absolutely. It’s kind of cool to see. We can take that material that comes off during the post-finishing with this technique where you’re just using an end mill and you can recycle it as long as there’s not too much other material, glue or what not, inside of what would be waste material that is now recycled material.

Could you imagine how big the thermoforming or pressure forming machine would have to be to make some of these parts? Or injection molding too, I’m sure some of them. I would imagine this outer decorative parts were probably done in, it might have been injection molding but it might have been thermoforming. You’d have to have huge operation and very expensive tool in order to make it.

Right. To tool up to get to this point, you’re talking about years and taking an entire factory and saying, “You’re not producing anything else but this part.” You have to know there’s a market demand for it before you make it. It has to already been sold because you have to have enough investment capital before this goes into it. With 3D printing, you’re going to say, “I’ll make 100 of them and if it doesn’t sell right off the bat, so be it. We’ll print other things while we wait. We’ll go back to the Rally Fighter or what not.” Luckily for us, Olli was a hit right off the bat. It’s more of a problem of getting enough off of the small amount that we can build on a day-to-day. The print time for these things is 44 hours or so, not including assembly and finishing time, which adds to it. As we go forward, we’ll probably have to look at other ways to manufacture it. But as for that basically more than two and less than a thousand range, it is a perfect fit for the market.

Forty-four hours of just the printing of it, and then I’m assuming the post-finishing and all that takes a while. How many can you produce in a week?

We were saying that we could produce about eight.

Eight? That’s not pretty bad though. I was thinking it might have been less than that. That’s pretty good.

Right. That’s distributed across the different factories. It depends on how many of these print beds you’re going to have. How many more do we want to order from Cincinnati? What’s the demand? Not to mention you have to have the people with the skills that go and run these machines.

That’s a problem. We’ve been covering that quite a bit lately. That’s a problem all around, there’s a shortage of 3D designers, 3D lab technicians. There’s just a shortage in this market in general.

Yes, and what I’ve noticed is that people will be super skilled in one aspect of it. When you’re trying to create the STL and get it on to the print bed and you have to create that STL for manufacturing, there’s a jump between there and people, there are plenty of great three-dimensional designers but they are usually trained for video games.

You’re speaking our language, Buddy. We say that all the time here because we’ve been doing consumer retail products for 25 years. We say this thing, you can’t come into it from the view point of 3D design and make a successful consumer retail products because you don’t understand the demands, the testing, just the durability that you need. You don’t understand all of that. It’s really a lack of knowledge of the details, the practical reality of production parts, which I’m sure you encounter the same thing. You can do anything you want in a game virtual world.

Right. You can make it float. There’s no physics holding you back. It’s tough to change people’s concept of, “Hey, I put this thing in floating space. Can you print it?” It’s like, “No, you’ve got to change a couple of things about that.”

Local Motors Olli, the first 3D printed self driving vehicle to tap the power of IBM Watson

You have this lab which you also use not just to make the Olli but you use it for community projects and other things like that. I read somewhere that you did a long board, a surf board and some other things. What else have you made that’s really big and cool?

Personally, I haven’t gotten to do too much. There is a lot of work going on here but I sometimes sneak in there and get some furniture going. There are some fun projects. Our chief marketing officer was talking with James Corden. He was saying, “What can we produce on this?” She mentioned a bathtub and I was like, “That is such a cool idea.” You could do these super custom hot tubs where you could have a big Pokemon, like Snorlax or something, and you could carve out the middle and everybody could just be sitting inside of that.

It could just be personally fit to your body, that would be so great. I’m really short and Tom is really tall. They never fit properly. That would be awesome.

You could do like one side a little higher than the other, yes definitely.

Very cool. I love that idea, that’s a lot of fun. I want to step back a little bit because you had started a 3D Hubs, Arbre House in college, you mentioned to me beforehand. We have a lot of listeners out there who are in that position of thinking about starting 3D Hubs, they have been printing for a little while and they feel really competent at it. You say you don’t do it anymore because you’ve got a day job and you’re a little bit busy. But what was your experience and is it worth it for them? Will they learn something? What do you think of that?

It’s still up there. I still get requests every once in a while and it’s fun always to see what other people are working on. Your neighborhood, your community, because the way 3D Hubs matches you is like who’s closest to you that can produce this part. For instance, I had somebody request and I didn’t know this person but they are only two blocks away. They’re like, “Hey, I need a specific mount from my security system.” I’m like, “Yes, I can absolutely do that.” I still get requests and 3D Hubs makes it so easy and they put the pricing on there for you. Set up takes a week because you have to log on, you create your account and then they have to send you a postcard to make sure that you’re actually where you say you are, which is super easy. It’s a cute little postcard, I still have it on my fridge. 3D Hubs is improving constantly. Now, they’ve got the one-click on the side where it’s like you’ve imported your part, you could order right through your neighborhood. But let’s say you wanted to do something with that new HP Jet Fusion. That’s the only quality part, you need it like that so you can actually do that through 3D Hubs now.

We love that idea because I think there’s a lot of try before you buy that needs to happen for some people. We’ve had experiences. We buy a 3D printer and it’s just not capable of printing our what, our thing because we use a lot of high level detail, lots of fine areas and not every printer is capable of that. If you can go and try one somewhere, and the manufacturers of the 3D printers don’t consider that. They have no way for you to do that. Unless you can find someone who has the printer, that’s the ideal way. I love that they made that ability happen when you can actually select somebody who has the right type of printer that you wanted to try out.

You said it just right. It’s try before you buy because there are so many different variations of 3D printers out there. Sometimes you need the SLA or you need the Markforged but sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just need the Printrbot Simple. It’s pretty cool for them to be able to, for me as an individual to go and be like, “I need this super precise printer. Thank goodness this guy in Virginia has it.”

Yes, wonderful. Thank you for your view point on that. We really appreciate it. I have a couple of questions about where someone might be able to see an Olli. I don’t know that we made this clear already, but they are self-driving shuttles. How many people fit in them?

We squeezed eight to twelve people in them. When it’s twelve, it is a squeeze. When you’re eight, you can all be seated. They’re roaming around in Knoxville and in Berlin. We had one in National Harbor earlier. It went off to get repaired back in Knoxville so we distributed the business plan that we’ve got. Sometimes, you need to send things back just because the engineers, I’m not an automotive service engineer. The guys that do that are way better in Knoxville than here or in Arizona.

There again, you have that skill gap that you were talking about, right? Not every part of the distributive manufacturing has the same skill sets.

Exactly, and it’s a huge problem for us and for efficiency in general. When you’re talking about economics, you want it to all be fast and fair. But if you can’t reach out and find that person immediately, then the cost goes up. We’re trying to solve that with our platform at Launch Forth and hiring the right people but trying to get all those people in the right places is still tricky. It’s a game, kind of.

It’s growing pains of an interesting business.

Yes, for sure.

Where else could they see them though? Are they in other cities? Knoxville, Berlin, any place else?

National Harbor, we should have on in a couple of weeks. I think Ohio State University is going to have one.

Isn’t that smart for college campuses? Wow, it could be the drunk bus and you don’t have to have a driver to take people off in order to be potentially hurt by anybody who’s rowdy. That’s great. Do you invite people in to see the BAAM in your facilities that you mentioned, there’s one in Arizona and Knoxville and of course, where you are in National Harbor?

Yes, any time. We love when people come in. I think National Harbor, we let people walk in. We have a lot of walk-ins because we’re near the new MGM here and a huge conference center called the Gaylord. We have a ton of walk-ins. We have this big bay windows and a huge garage and so people will see it from the outside and be like, “What is that?” and they’ll just walk in. We also do a ton of tour groups and because it’s Washington, DC, we have groups from Texas, from Wisconsin, from Tennessee will come here for The Smithsonian and to see the Capitol and be like, “We should also go see something that’s on the cutting edge of technology of American manufacturing.” They’ll schedule with either me or Tracy or one of the other. We all do tours here. It’s part of the job requirement, is that at any point you can drop things and talk to somebody who walks in.

I wish we’d known the last time we were in Arizona. Where in Arizona is your facility there?

It’s in Tempe.

Tempe, okay. That’s not too far from us. We get to Phoenix once in a while. I sense a trip coming up. I still think we need to get to DC with our girls. That’s in the future as well. This is just amazing. Is there anything else you’d really like to share with our audience and with those passionate about 3D printing, about just starting a venture and things that they can do and how you got your job, which I thought was quite enterprising? Is there anything you’d like to share?

If people go out and try things, there is no cost to trying. We do a lot of things in our free time that I think we later go on to say, “I wish I had done something else.” Just try it, just go out and use that Nike phrase, “Just do it,” and reach out. There are people like you guys and us at Local Motors and your local school systems. Libraries, their makerspaces are getting better and better and better. The one in DC is amazing. There are people out there that can answer those questions. It’s just a matter of saying, “Hey, I have this idea. I need to talk about it. I need to do it.” Sending out those emails. It’s tough sometimes. It’s way easier to just consume things than it is to go out and make things.

You’re so right, Buddy. That’s one of the things we hope to encourage here, is that you don’t try to learn 3D printing alone or try to build your own business alone because there’s such a community growing around the world. If we can encourage everyone to get together and keep discussing and sharing and openly giving tours, I love that. What we’re really doing is we’re inviting everyone to jump the learning curve.

Yes, and cheat, absolutely. Figure out ways that maybe people do it one way and you found a way to skip through that, do it. Use the experts at 3D Hubs. You fake it like you were looking for a job and then you go into the interview and you have a bunch of questions about 3D printing, do it. They’ll love it. I guarantee it.

Thank you so much for joining us, Buddy. We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Tracy.

3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles – Final Thoughts

3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles: They have people they find that have certain skills but not all the skills.

There’s a lot of things to talk about that interview and a lot of things I really like. One of the things I want to point to any of the students that are out there or any educators that are out there listening to this podcast. What you heard in that interview, loud and clear, was somebody who’s involved in North American manufacturing of durable goods, a car. Saying that they are limited by how many they can produce, not because of machines, not because of capital but because of a skilled worker gap, that there are not enough engineers. They’re trying to find the right people. They have people they find that have certain skills but not all the skills. I’m sure they find the best people they can and they train them. But then, once you’re trained, are you valuable, does that company needs you. Talk about future employment opportunity. Which is a whole another problem, then you got to keep them.

We’ve had people ask us on the podcast, “I’m thinking about a second career in 3D printing. What kind of career opportunities are there?” There’s opportunities here for designers, for engineers, for technicians and for people manufacturing products where you’re not just on an assembly line doing the same thing every day. They’re making eight of these a week. People that are involved in this are involved in manufacturing a lot of different aspects of this vehicle. You got software people who are doing the autonomous driving software and all these different things. What a great range of jobs and opportunities there are for people who have an interest in this field. Decent paying jobs, I just really want people to think about that because these are all skilled labor jobs.

Not just that, we all have to think about there’s hardly any we’ve come across places in which you’re going to learn all of that in one place. All the things that you need to be a well-rounded 3D skilled labor. He is saying you can’t get someone who has production experience and design experience. They’re very difficult to get the two at the same time. We know that because we live that every day but I really think that what you have to do is that there are places like this. Look at what Buddy said at the beginning about how he got his job. He just said, “I had to work there.” That passion of you coming to a company. If you came to us and we had a job that we’ve been looking for someone and you just weren’t quite skilled for it yet but you had passion like that, we would hire and train you. I think everyone is in that position. If you are the right person, if you got the right interest in it, you’re willing to learn on the job, there’s all source of ways for you to find work this way, and really rewarding work that has growth pattern, a career path.

Especially if you are also willing to relocate. We all know 3D printing can be done anywhere. A company has facilities in different areas that may not be in your local area. But if you are willing to move to Tempe, Arizona or to Washington, DC and wanted to work for a company like this, if you’re a good person and have some good skills and are willing to learn, I’m sure you could get a job at this company or another company like them. They all need good people. That’s the hardest thing to find. That’s going to be the biggest gap going forward. I think what holds back, to a degree, companies like this from growing larger, it is the people.

3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles: Buddy Bernhard is a Labs Manager and Product Developer for Local Motors.

Buddy Bernhard is a Labs Manager and Product Developer for Local Motors. You don’t go to school for that kind of title, it’s so broad. As he said, “It’s a really general title.” He gets to do all sorts of really cool things like occasionally be a tour manager. These are not the things you’re going to learn there. You’re going to learn them out in the field. You’re going to learn them networking with maker groups. He’s connected to the TechShop in Arlington. You’re going to learn them from all of those places, from being around that environment. As Buddy said at the end and I really think that’s great advice for everyone out there is that, “You need to get out there and get connected. Do not learn this in your house, all alone in front of your computer. Get out there and connect.”

Just their market segment of these autonomous vehicles is really a big growth area in the future. We’ve heard this from other people we’ve met in the last year. Even Walter O’Brien who we met, the guy from Scorpion, the guy Scorpion is based on. The real guy, Walter O’Brien is a real person. Walter has said, we’ve heard him speak about it and we interviewed him about it, that self-driving cars are going to cause quite a shift in America, certainly in all of our large cities if not in the rural areas, and it’s going to be a big growth area of jobs. It’s a really good field to be considering.

What he was saying and what Walter O’Brien said which I thought was really smart, is it’s not just thinking about, “I need to be working on making the car.” There’s all sorts of things like what happens in the parking lots? What happens with parking garages? How does that work? There’s all sorts of ancillary jobs and ancillary businesses that are going to evolve from this that we need to be thinking about.

There are some business that are going to be unhappy with the increase in autonomous vehicles. Their businesses are built on people wanting to drive cars. There will still be people wanting to drive cars, wanting to own their own cars and maybe needing to, especially in more rural areas. But in all your urban areas like in a lot of Southern California, people are buying less cars because they don’t need to. They can just get an autonomously driving Uber or get on one of these Olli shuttles. They don’t need cars, and guess what else they’re not going to need? They’re not going to need a lot of parking spaces. They’re not going to need garages for their cars. Not when the car will drop you at your front door and then go park itself so it doesn’t matter how close they are together. There will be some push back and people complaining about things changing but it will inevitably change and there will be opportunity in that change. Seeing that is key.

I just want to mention this because it’s always been on my mind. I keep thinking we have young children in addition to our older one. We have young children and one of our daughters asked us, “Hey, am I going to learn how to drive?” There’s a high possibility, not that we won’t to teach her how to drive because you might still need it in this course of things, but I had this kind of sigh of relief as a mom. “It might be great if she doesn’t learn how to drive.” When they turn fifteen and you have to teach them how to drive, it’s really stressful. Having got one daughter through it barely, it makes me stressed to think about even having to do it with the young ones.

But at the same time, having aging parents and the two things at the same time. That to me is a bigger benefit. I don’t think that there’s going to be as much resistance as we think because there’s these two age groups in which it actually creates this independence that they both want so badly. We are tapping into something that they fundamentally want and if this is the best way to achieve it, autonomous vehicle is the best way to achieve it, they’re going to take it.

3D Printed Self Driving Vehicles: These cars are going to be self-driving capable.

I was just reading recently about the Tesla Model 3 which is starting to be manufactured I believe in September, this year 2017. So many people have ordered that. In the hundreds of thousands, like 400,000 people apparently have ordered one. They’re going to start making them in pretty large volume. They’ve been picking up for it. These cars are going to be self-driving capable. We have a friend who doesn’t even have a driver’s license, who plunks down the deposit to buy one and he doesn’t know when he’ll get his. There’s a real need for this. It’s great to see that a company like Local Motors can really find a niche where there’s a need that a big company like Tesla, it’s not going to get their attention.

This is really so smart. We’re going to talk about that in an upcoming episode, about opportunity cost. This is something I also learned from Walter O’Brien, the reality of it is that the speed to market or your timing for that market is essential. When you miss that timing, that’s when things fall apart. I asked him, “What is the biggest failure rate? What causes the biggest failure in product launches or in business launches and all of those things?” He said it’s timing and most often it’s not being fast enough. They’ve created a world in which they can be fast enough and flex and adapt and not spend all that capital on the way to do it. That’s what’s really amazing about what Local Motors has done and that model of doing business like this needs to happen everywhere, in all different product categories. They’re building a true direct digital manufacturing model that’s possible. If it’s possible with a car, it’s possible with any product. It’s a lean manufacturing and it’s a lean business startup process which is so critical. Your capital to be able to do business is usually what holds companies back if they’re not well-capitalized.

I just want to thank Buddy for coming on the show. Kudos to him for what he’s gone after in his own personal career. He’s in the right place and that’s just amazing and he’s getting to do some really cool and creative things. You can hear that energy coming across in our interview. I just love how passionate he is about this. This is great and this is a great person for you to know, so please go to our website at 3DStartPoint.com and in the blog post and there’s a LinkedIn connection to him as well as a connection to Local Motors and all sorts of great photos. Hope you enjoyed this episode as much as we did. This has been Tom and Tracy on the WTFFD 3D Printing Podcast.

Important Links

About Buddy Bernhard

Buddy is a labs manager/product developer for Local Motors. He is a co-founder of Arbre House. The company makes products on demand to reduce the environmental and economic cost. ‘This means that each manufactured item is personal, tested and made with you in mind.’ In 2015 he was a lead developer for Hardware Club in France. It is an exclusive club dedicated to hardware startups. Also a developer in Cultivate the City, a social enterprise dedicated to sustainable farming practices that emphasize vertical growing techniques that help grow produce in small spaces.

Website: https://localmotors.com/

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