Disciplines, tools & capabilities.

A lot of engineering is the small, specific tools nobody sees — a fixture that makes a hard job repeatable, a machine that does one thing perfectly. Here's a run of them, designed and built across the years for different shops and clients.

Composites run through a lot of my work, and it's a rare skill set because it spans the whole chain. I can take a part end to end — design the mold, program and cut the plug on a CNC router, pull the tool, run the vacuum infusion, and do the cosmetic finishing. Most shops need three different people for that. Here's some of it.

The cap plug was too big to fit on the router, and jobbing it out would have cost around $30,000 — so we built it ourselves. We made a 3D puzzle out of MDF, cut the critical surfaces on the router, and skinned the skeleton with routed parts. Then came weeks of hand sanding until the surface was good enough to pull a tool off of.

A lot of composites work is everything that happens before the part — the plugs and molds. I design them, program the CNC, and cut them in MDF or foam, often kitting a large shape out of smaller routed pieces.

With a mold in hand, vacuum infusion pulls resin through dry fiber under vacuum for a clean, strong, repeatable part — and a kitted foam core in the middle for stiffness without the weight.

I take on composite side work too — like laser-cut panels that puzzle together for a local van-build company.

Before I designed parts, I spent years making them — and I still cut my own when a job calls for it. CNC mill and router, lathe, surface grinder to half a thousandth, waterjet, laser, and sheet metal. Knowing what happens to a part on the machine is what makes me better at designing them.

Give me a laser and a sheet of wood and I'll lose a weekend. These are etched and cut pieces — mountain triptychs, signage, and one-off art — made across the businesses and for the fun of it. The same machine that cut Whalebird's tap handles made most of this.

Across a few careers I've kept ending up responsible for moving things that don't move easily — tanks, machines, oversized loads. At WISErg it was craning bioreactors onto flatbeds; at Whalebird it was threading fermentation tanks through a doorway on two forklifts. You learn to plan the lift, not muscle it.

An after-hours obsession: a heat engine I designed and machined to turn a temperature difference into motion. I laser-cut the turbine, machined the core myself, and chased its efficiency further than I probably should have. It's the honest answer to what I do for fun — if a thing can be made to spin, I want to understand exactly why.

Everything I build starts in CAD, and a lot of it ends there too — as photorealistic renders that sell a product before it exists, as full models of real buildings, or as 3D scans that turn a physical object back into geometry I can design around.

Renderings and animations done primarily in SolidWorks Visualize — great for product demonstrations and showing a concept before it physically exists. This is a full animated render of the Space Campers Wedge.

A local entrepreneur was turning a big building into a public market and needed to show the city what it would become. So I measured the entire facility — down to the last railing — and built a full 3D model of it inside and out, then produced renderings the owner used for permitting.

3D scanning captures a real object as accurate digital geometry you can build from — reverse-engineer, design around, or render. Here it's capturing a full vehicle body.

Designing a product is only half the job — someone else usually has to build it, and they can only build what's documented clearly. This is the skill of turning a finished design into a complete handoff package: exploded assembly views, every part labeled, a full bill of materials, and step-by-step build instructions, so an outside shop can quote it and build exactly what was designed. Below is a real sample — the full package for a unit I designed.

Marketing a product is its own craft, and over the years I've made a lot of it — product photography, brand artwork, demo and teaser videos, renders, and animations. This is a teaser we created for the Cap, our Cybertruck camper. The rest runs through everything on the brand pages.

I think of myself as an engineer first, but building businesses has become as much of my background as building products. Across my own companies I've done the whole arc — financial modeling, raising capital, global sourcing, brand development, and taking a concept all the way to an investor-ready pitch. These days I also advise founders as a mechanical-engineering advisor for the local Small Business Development Center. If you're early-stage and need someone who can speak both engineering and business, that's the gap I'm built to fill.