For most of the last century, making a physical part meant one of two things: tooling up a factory, or waiting weeks for a job shop to fit you into its queue. Both options have a minimum order, a minimum budget, and a lot of people between you and your idea.
We started O43D because that equation no longer makes sense.
What we believe
- Every idea deserves a prototype. One-off, ten-off or ten-thousand-off — the cost of the first part should not decide whether an idea lives or dies.
- Production should move at the speed of design. If you can iterate a CAD file in an afternoon, you should be able to hold the part by the end of the week.
- Material and process should serve the part, not the other way around. We match FDM, SLA, SLS, CNC or finishing to the job — not the job to the machine that happens to be free.
- Say no when no is the right answer. Some parts should be machined. Some should be moulded. Some shouldn't be printed in plastic at all. Telling a customer that costs us one job and earns the next five.
What the gatekeeping actually looks like
It's rarely a person saying no. It's a minimum order of 5,000 units on a part you need twelve of. It's a €40,000 tooling quote for a design that isn't finished. It's a sixteen-week lead time on a component holding up a whole product. It's a discontinued clip that stops a working vehicle because the tooling was scrapped in 1998.
Every one of those is an economic barrier rather than a technical one, and every one of them dissolves at small volume when there's no tool to pay for. That's the whole thesis of this workshop.
What we do
We take CAD files, scans and blueprints and turn them into finished parts: prototypes, jigs, fixtures, spare parts, limited-run consumer goods, custom assemblies. We work with founders, engineers, designers, marine and automotive teams, and the occasional ambitious hobbyist.
That splits into three services in practice — 3D printing when the geometry already exists, 3D scanning when it only exists as a physical object, and custom product design when it exists as an idea. Companies running production batches or repeat spares work with us through our enterprise service.
Alongside that we run a small shop of parts we've already modelled — mostly discontinued automotive trim, browsable by brand.
Where we are
Mokronog, Slovenia. Small country, short distances, EU shipping. Being physically reachable matters more than it sounds: customers drive over with a broken part and a question, and both go home solved.
What's next
More in-house processes, more materials, shorter lead times. If there's a part of the manufacturing stack you wish worked differently, tell us — we read every message.
New here? How a custom part gets made at O43D walks through what happens between your file and the box on your doorstep.
The BMW E46 cup holder vent shown with this article is a good example — BMW never sold that trim piece as a standalone spare, so we designed and print it ourselves rather than wait on a dealer network that doesn't stock it.
SHIPS 3–5 DAYS
