Nate Petre
When Nate Petre’s girlfriend drove her motorbike off the side of a mountain in the summer of 2014, it was a eureka moment. ‘I’d customised the lights and front end using my 3D printer. Once I’d dragged my girlfriend back out of the bushes (thankfully unharmed), and looked at the bike, I realised that, with the CAD in the cloud, all I’d need to repair it was someone with a printer,’ says Petre.
The idea of Disruptive Distributed Manufacturing (DDR) – individuals and communities manufacturing locally using 3D printers, rather than relying on international factories – had been rolling around Petre’s head for a while, but it was on that Basque hairpin bend that he first saw how smoothly it could work: instead of ordering new parts and waiting, he could simply print out the pieces he needed,
