Tracy Hazzard From CEO Space Live With Ryan Treasure

For most people, only businesses and large-scale industries benefit from the use of 3D printing. That’s not entirely true, as you can enjoy this technology even right at your home. Tracy Hazzard talks about utilizing the power of 3D printing in this live interview with Ryan Treasure from VoiceAmerica during the CEO Space Live at Las Vegas. Together with Tom Hazzard, she discusses the best ways to learn 3D printing, even if you are unfamiliar with its fundamentals. She explains how it can be used for more personal purposes, particularly creating personalized gifts. Tracy and Tom also share their work with retailers through ghost designing and their podcast about 3D printing, WTFFF.

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 Listen to the podcast here

I have this interview with Tracy Hazzard and Tom Hazzard from Hazz Design. You can check out their website at HazzDesign.com or find out all about 3D printing at 3DStartPoint.com. Guys, thank you so much for joining the show. Welcome.

Thanks, Ryan.

Thanks so much for having us.

We appreciate it. CEO Space, what a great event. All the people are learning how everybody network and get together and talk about next-level steps for their businesses and what they’re going to do for 2016, and then wrapping it all up in the end with a nice expo-style environment of networking. It’s an amazing place.

This fantastic. This is the biggest expo that we’ve seen at CEO Space yet.

This is our third event.

Are you guys new for 2015? Have you’ve been to multiple ones in 2015 or previous years as well?

Multiple ones in 2015 and I can’t believe we didn’t know about it before. This is like the biggest hidden secret.

Jeff Spenard, the CEO of VoiceAmerica, has been friends with Berny for quite some time. We’ve been to a bunch of CEO Space events over the course of the last few years. It’s been cool to watch it grow and become a little bit larger entity as time goes on, and then meeting awesome people like both of you. In the space that you’re in, I’m a big technology dork.

I deal with all the technology and the team of technologists and engineering for audio at VoiceAmerica. When you guys came up and I’m looking at Tom’s tie. It’s a 3D-printed tie. If you were to look at it and Winston, we’ll get some photos of this 3D printed tie that will get posted up on social media at Facebook.com/voiceamericatalkradio. When you look at the tie and it lays flat, you don’t know that it’s a 3D printed tie. It looks like a regular tie. Tell us a little bit about that thing.

It was quite a challenge to create this tie, but wanting to have something to wear for these types of events, we went and made a design project out of it. It’s a bunch of interlocking pieces and even all the way around my neck because it’s not a clip-on tie. This thing goes all the way around it.

The cool thing about it is, it’s printed in one piece on a 12-inch, 3D printer bed. It’s like a challenge not only in terms of a design structure but how you build it and how you print it. It took over 100 hours for Tom to design it and 100 hours for him to dial the technical settings in to produce it.

That is amazing and really good work. It’s fantastic. Guys, go check out some of the stuff that they do. I know you have the WTFFF!? Podcast that’s on 3DStartPoint.com. Tell us a little bit about the radio show and what you guys do with that.

We try to decipher FFF. What is FFF? What the FFF? FFF is Fused Filament Fabrication, which is the technical term for 3D printing. What we’re trying to do is get businesses and individuals, especially, students and teachers to understand what 3D printing can do, what the opportunity is, and what the advantages are. Get started and scale the learning curve as fast as possible so that they can get going printing because it’s not easy, but it’s great to start to take advantage of such an early technology at an early stage.

I was talking a little bit before we started the interview here that I follow some 3D printing stuff as it relates to the second amendment and people making different gun parts and different things out of the 3D printing devices. I think it’s cool on the technology side because it’s advancing. I see some cool things ahead of the curve when it comes to plastic car parts.

Especially for some of the people out there that do restorations of old cars and it’s hard to get a pair of plastic tail lights for a 1950s vehicle or maybe even a Camaro or something like that. I definitely like the way that the technology is going in the space. Why don’t you guys give us a little bit of a rundown on, specifically, what’s your niche or what you guys do with Hazz Design?

Within the 3D printing space, it’s our mission to bring 3D printing to more regular consumers. It’s been very popular in the engineering space and the makerspaces for a lot of years. We’ve used 3D printing in developing conventional products for many years but now, desktop 3D printing is making that accessible to regular people who want to get into it. There’s so much opportunity for them, and this is going to change the face of retail and localize manufacturing in the US. We’re trying to help make that attainable and reachable to average people so they can understand it.

Design is the biggest challenge part of it. Our regular business Hazz Design is focused on consumer retail products and we’ve done 250 consumer retail products that you buy every day. We are what you call ghost designers. You don’t know we designed it, but we did. We decided that we would help people focus on how to make good products through 3D printing so that they can change the businesses and do things like you were mentioning about automotive replacement parts. There’s a whole industry and a whole business that could be developed there.

3D Printing: 3D printing will change the face of retail and localize manufacturing in the United States.

Tell us a little bit about, as it relates to the industry with 3D printing. If I’m a home person, I want to get started with 3D printing. Give us a list of the five most needed items, if someone wanted to get started on a hobby basis doing some small 3D projects at home.

You need to get into a CAD program and learn how to use one. There are several that are good entry-level products and they’re free online. Autodesk 123D, Google SketchUp and Tinkercad. These types of programs are something that there is a video tutorial series on YouTube and you can learn and jump right in. You’ve got to learn how to make something in a three-dimensional model if you’re going to make unique things to 3D print.

Tom mentioned video tutorials. That’s the first place I would start, there’s i3D Creatives and a bunch of those. That’s a great place to start to see what you’re getting into.

It starts with the design process and some type of 3D modeling software, and then once you get the design implemented in a digital environment on your computer, then at that point you would move that design into a hardware function to do the FFF.

That’s right. There are have been a lot of advances in 3D printers and you can get one as low as $350. There are some good ones around the $600 price point. As you get more into it and you want a little more advanced features, then you go between $1,000 to $3,000. It’s very accessible now.

I was under the impression that it was much more expensive to get into something like that. Thank you for letting our readers know about that information. I know that there are quite a few techie people that listen to the VoiceAmerica.com site that would be interested. Coming up, we also have Mr. Winston Marshall Price, who jumped in as well. Winston, thank you for joining the interview.

It’s so nice to be here once again. I have a question for both of you. Because I can follow along with conversations, my question is, where do you start the education of people who are ignorant of what you do and/or are functionally ignorant? Why should I do this? I have no idea. I didn’t know what this was, even before I met you. This is just me speaking. Where do you start that education?

The great part about 3D printing is that they’re a lot of service bureaus and other things out there. You don’t have to know anything about 3D printing to start to experience it but think about it this way. You’re married. You might want to give your wife a wonderful anniversary present that’s very personal. You can go to a department store and you can buy a bottle of perfume. Imagine if you could buy a bottle of perfume, you could go online and you could go to a service bureau and you could type in her initials, love and your name, all of that and have a topper made for that perfume bottle, and then box it up and give it to her. Isn’t that a better gift?

Imagine if it was your mom and you made her gift completely from scratch on a 3D printer and sent it to the UPS store to have it printed out. That can be done and all of that doesn’t involve skills. That involves a good model library, which has some great things that you can customize. It’s changing it in that you don’t have to go to a retailer. You get to be and choose what you get to buy.

3D Printing: There are a lot of service bureaus on 3D printing out there. You don’t have to know anything about it to start experiencing it.

I didn’t even think of it like that. It’s almost the way that video production works in some instances. With my media background, I do some small animation projects in 3D space and after effects and things like that. One of the things for me when I’m working on a project, especially if a client doesn’t exactly know what they want, they say, “I want something that looks cool.” I can then send them to a template website where they can look at a bunch of templates of after-effects projects, and choose something that they like. We’ll then take that and then customize it specifically for what they’re trying to do. Is that what you mean with the template library kind of similar thing?

That’s a great way to talk about it. Think about what PowerPoint would do without templates. That’s where 3D printing is going to go much wider in the market is when there are good high-quality templates. 3D Clipart sounds a great way to talk about it. I love the old car thing too. I have a ’72 Karmann Ghia convertible that I need to make a new little lens for light inside the car.

I can do that if I have those skills, but what about people that don’t have those skills? There’s a lot they can do, and especially with gift-giving like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s and day Father’s Day. Imagine this tie for your dad with his initials in it. Buying a ring. You’re going to buy an engagement ring for someone. Maybe a custom 3D printed ring holder with your fiancee’s name on it. It makes it a little more special.

Also, marry me.

You guys are fantastic individuals. Thank you so much for joining us and talking a little bit about your business. For everybody reading out there, you can go check out Tracy and Tom at HazzDesign.com. Check out their podcast at 3DStartPoint.com, co-hosts of WTFFF!? Podcast, all about 3D printing. Thank you, guys, so much. I appreciate your time.

Thank you, Ryan.

Thanks so much for having us.

Watch the episode here:

VoiceAmerica With Ryan Treasure