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Kiwi made, right here.

I spent a very interesting hour or so yesterday chatting to a couple of engineers who have set up a fascinating business venture right here in Tokoroa.

One of the "big things" of late has been the runaway success of 3D printing. These days you'd be surprised at just how many people have one of these devices in their workshop or even in their home office. They are cool toys that can waste inordinate amounts of your time and turn a reel of stringy plastic into an almost infinite range of things you might find handy or just decorative.

Over recent weeks I've been doing a whole heap of 3D printing, as I refine the design for my ADSB alarm (for drone users) into a self-contained unit you can simply clip on your belt and forget about.

The prototypes to this stage have required an external battery and power supply as well as requiring care to ensure that wires don't fall off unexpectedly due to the rather precarious phyiscal construction. 3D printing an enclosure fixes those issues and also makes it look a lot prettier.

So, my 3D printer has been running for long hours and producing lots of variants of my original case design... which means I have a couple of problems.

The first problem is that I am using a lot of this printer filament.

I've aready burned through a couple of rolls of PLA (the cheapest and easiest-to-print material) and no doubt I'll burn through a few more before the job is done.

The second problem is that I now have a lovely pile of printed cases, none of which are exactly what I'm wanting -- that's a growing stack of waste.

Which brings me back to that Tokoroa-based business.

I dropped in to see them with a view to perhaps picking up some more filament for my printing needs. Their product is more expensive than the imported stuff but they are just a 20 minute walk from my house and my workshop so I'm happy to pay a premium for the convenience.

What I wasn't prepared for was the two operators of the business and the fantastic way they've set up their own filament manufacturing business by leveraging their engineering qualifications and some good old Kiwi ingenuity. To say that I was impressed would be an understatement.

The company is called KiwiFil and they have website that includes this fascinating page which documents a little of the history involved in setting up the operation.

Both Bill and Eva are incredibly nice and well-educated people that obviously have a passion for what they're doing and perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of their production line is the way they have harnessed the power of Arduino-based microcontrollers as well as 3D printed parts to create their extrusion system. Everywhere you look there are little boxes with knobs and displays controlling all aspects of the production system -- and most all of this has been put together by Bill himself.

The heart of the process are the extruders themselves and one of these has been repurposed from its former life as a drinking-straw manufacturing machine. It was previously responsible for making the plastic drinking straws used by companies such as MacDonalds but since they've shifted to renewable materials, the machine was no longer required for that purpose. Now it spits out PLA and PETG 3D printer filament right here in Tokoroa.

I've told Bill and Eva that I'd love to make a video about their operation and they've agreed so at some time in the (hopefully not to distant future) I'll go back with my camera and see if I can capture the "can do" attitude and the amazing things this couple have done with their clever approaches to problem solving.

How interesting it is that we have a local council that is forever patting itself on the back because one or two big businesses decide to set up shop here (simply due to our proximity to raw resources such as milk and zeolite) yet they seem to be totally unaware of just how many small but exciting enterprises set up here for other reasons.

If only those who ought to be really working to support and encourage such ventures knew what they were doing this town would see a lot more small and innovative companies calling Tokoroa home. Sadly however, the council prefers to waste ratepayers' money on ridiculous things such as our "Impact Hub" which, coming on for two years after its opening, still sits empty and idle with only the girl behind the counter warming its chairs. $270K of ratepayers' money over three years with 18 months of funding still to come.

The Impact Hub was supposed to be a focus for the district's entrepreneurs -- but real entrepreneurs don't sit around talking about things, they just get on with making stuff happen... just as the folks at KiwiFil are doing.

Carpe Diem folks!

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