A plastic knob broke. Nothing important: a couple of euros' worth of moulding that simply wasn't sold any more, because the model was out of production. A reasonable person would have bought a new appliance. A less reasonable one bought a 3D printer to make the knob.
The knob got made. Then it turned out the printer rarely sat idle: a neighbour had something broken, a friend needed a bracket, and at home something came up most weeks where “I'll just print it” was suddenly a real answer. The second printer arrived because the first was permanently busy.
The scanner came out of frustration. Measuring a part by hand and redrawing it took three evenings and still came out half a millimetre wrong. The scanner did the same job in three minutes and got it right. It was hard to go back after that.
It carried on like that. Each machine solved one problem and immediately raised the question that needed the next one. From the outside it looks like a considered business plan. Honestly it was a run of individual decisions, each of which seemed entirely sensible at the time.
How it got out of hand
After that it was a slippery slope. Once the machines make sense and the software makes sense, every next purchase starts to look like a perfectly logical next step. It does not look that way from the outside.
The Matterport came from one flat that needed measuring. A tape measure would have taken a day. A machine that covers a position in twenty seconds took half an hour. Entirely logical. That it costs more than some cars only landed properly when the invoice did.
The drone came from the fact that half of any site simply isn't visible from the ground. You can't see the roof, you can't see the shape of the plot, and you can't see what's going on behind the building. Also logical.
The foot scanner came from somebody asking whether a foot could be scanned. The answer was “no, but I'll look into it”. A week later the answer was “yes”.
The pattern is the same every time: somebody asks whether a thing can be done, and I don't enjoy saying no. My family calls this a condition. I call it a service list.
What kind of company this is
A family one. Small, deliberately small, and staying that way.
I don't want a hundred jobs a month. I want ten good ones. I have no intention of ever being a corporate puppet running a hundred orders in factory mode to make the month's number. I'd rather do work that interests me, with people who are good to talk to and who like the way I talk.
That isn't a pose. It's a business decision and it has a price: sometimes I'm more expensive than somebody doing a hundred jobs a month. What you get for it is that your job isn't number 87 to me.
What that means for you
Three things, all practical.
First, advice comes from experience rather than a spec sheet. If the answer is “don't have that printed in resin, it'll snap”, somewhere there was a part that snapped and made the lesson expensive.
Second, a job doesn't stall behind the wrong machine. Large space, LiDAR. Fine detail in the same order, also here. Something to hold at the end: the printer is in the next room. No intermediate companies, no file handovers, no fresh queue.
Third, you talk to the same person throughout. Whoever answers is whoever does the work.
How things work
- Contact is direct: the person who answers is the person who does the work
- The price is agreed up front and doesn't move unless the scope does
- Every order runs on 80% up front, 20% on handover
- If something isn't worth doing, I'll say so, even when that means a smaller order
- Files are handed over in ordinary formats, not locked in
- By agreement data is kept, so you can come back to it later
About the name
4V3D: four Viils dealing with everything 3D. A family company in the most literal sense: the name comes from the surname, and there are four of them.
There is no deeper meaning. An agency would certainly have built a story behind it. That story is not coming.
“Replicating reality” is a fairly literal description, though: take something that exists and make a copy you can measure, change, share or print again.
Where your data lives
No scan ever lives on a memory stick rolling around on a car floor, or on a phone that eventually goes for a swim. Material goes straight onto a private server that isn't reachable from the public internet, with redundancy against hardware failure and restricted access.
In practice that means two things. If you need another export of the same site a year from now, the source data is still there and the work doesn't have to be commissioned again. And what isn't meant to circulate doesn't. Nothing goes to third parties without your consent.
Retention is agreed as part of the order. If you want the data deleted the moment the work is handed over, that is what happens.
Company details
- Company
- 4V3D OÜ
- Registry code
- 17515961
- VAT
- EE102990461
- Location
- Tallinn, Estonia
If you have something to measure, copy or make, write.
Get in touch