While his legs fought the Devil's Backbone, his head danced with an innocent riddle.
Then again, Doug Collins often does his best thinking in the saddle. And on a morning a few months ago, that's exactly where he was, atop his mountain bike, riding a popular trail situated 500 feet above and six miles west of his company's headquarters in Loveland, Colorado.
All around Collins were the scrubby grasslands and rust-colored rock formations that flank the Devil's Backbone ascent. Yet his mind was focused on work and a customer conundrum-specifically how his 3D printing operations could offer a new client a fast, cost-effective solution.
"Ideas often pop into my head when I'm on my mountain bike," says Collins, founder and Global 3D Printing Business Development Director of Avid Product Development, a mechanical engineering and additive manufacturing services provider.
"What's usually churning in my head are challenges we've been working to solve during recent weeks."
Doug Collins says he often gets inspiration for digital manufacturing projects while on his mountain bike.
Most of Avid's 17 employees, many of them engineers, are used to hitting a nearby mountain biking trail together once or twice a week for lunch rides while others may join them by jogging. Company offsite meetings in Steamboat, Colorado, tend to combine skiing and work.
It's all very Colorado. And that high-country flavor is definitely part of the brand, Collins says.
"It's who we are," Collins says. "If you're going to have long hours grinding it out, you want a culture that's enjoyable."
When COVID-19 struck, they had to find new ways to keep that culture alive from afar while many of their projects morphed around personal protective equipment (PPE).
"Now that restrictions are easing, I might go out really early in the morning," Collins says. "I know some of the others are doing the same thing."
Luckily the same kinds of ideas that often come to them on the trail, were flowing in March, at a time when PPE was in short supply and time was of the essence.
"As lockdown went into effect, we took a few days to connect with our engineers and see what solutions we could come up with using HP Multi Jet Fusion and the other technology that we have at our disposal," Collins says. "A day or so later, one of our engineers, Connor, had the idea for a face shield that we loved. He did some modeling, and we prototyped it that same night."
The Avid team let HP know what they were working on and production went into high gear. Within about 10 days they shared their design files with the rest of the digital manufacturing network. Flash forward several weeks, and Avid, HP, and other manufacturing partners have now collectively produced more than 2.3 million 3D-printed parts for medical devices in the battle against Covid-19.
The 3D-printed face shield Avid engineers developed for COVID-19
"We've seen competitors become almost like partners as they've been able to print with our design," he says. "I think we're all having good success through a combination of donations and sales of the face shields." Avid customers are also coming to them with ideas for PPE-from door handles, to mask parts and more.
One local organization put in a request for ventilator components. The team did some reverse engineering and had a solution within days.
The rapidly evolving solutions that have come out of this crisis are ultimately part of what drove him and Avid's Global 3D Printing Operations Director Ryan Bilson to get into 3D printing to begin with.
Billson agreed to join the company about five years ago while sipping a beer with Collins at Loveland Aleworks, a microbrewery located five blocks from Avid. There, Billson received some 3D-printed parts that Collins had just produced for him.
But at that meeting, Collins also revealed his vision to grow Avid's base of employees and customers, driven in part by his passion for 3D printing.
Billson was sold.
"Avid, as it is today, started over a beer at a microbrewery," Collins says. "It doesn't get more Colorado than that."
To help propel its growth, Avid recently added an HP Jet Fusion 5210 3D printer to its existing arsenal of two 4210 3D printers. The Jet Fusion 5200 3D printer series boosts speed, productivity and predictability in additive manufacturing.
In its Loveland factory, Avid uses the HP printers to meet the on-demand, manufacturing needs of local, national and international customers. The company website offers a colorful product gallery that includes chess pieces, baby pacifiers, bike parts, springs, pipe connectors, a human skeleton model and tools like wrenches and augers.
Collins launched Avid in 2012, but the mechanical engineer has spent more than 20 years in the design and 3D printing field, originally using that technology to make prototypes and to test product concepts and ideas for customers.
"That's where 3D printing was for decades. The market was about prototypes," Collins says. "Now, with HP 3D printers, we can solve many more problems for our customers and help them bridge the gap from simply creating prototypes to scaling their businesses through full-on, high-volume manufacturing-and that's something COVID-19 has only accelerated."
Avid's 3D-printing work for customers has included the creation of virtual reality headsets for gamers, parts for wind turbines, and ActivArmor casts worn by injured pro athletes and banged-up weekend warriors.
Diana Hall, ActivArmor's founder and president, recently approached Collins with one goal in mind-to vastly increase her production rate.
"I like HP printers because of the scalability," says Hall, whose company is based in Pueblo, Colorado, about a three-hour drive south of Avid's factory. "3D printing allows us to get the fit right for individuals, down to the skin contact.
"I had been printing everything on fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers, which will make one at a time," Hall adds. "That's fine for one-offs. But to do an overnight batch of 20 custom-made casts, I needed an HP printer. Otherwise, it would take 20 FDM printers for the job."
A selection of custom ActivArmor casts that Avid 3D prints on HP printers
Printed with PA 12, a durable and light nylon, ActivArmor products are removable, breathable, waterproof and hygienic-a crucial refresh of the clunky plaster cast.
Entrepreneurs like Hall are core to Avid's customer base. By relying on 3D printing, they know they can have their parts or products made in just a few days and, often, at lower cost when compared to traditional manufacturing methods.
Most of those same customers are similarly committed to having their creations built in America, leading Collins to view 3D printing as an engine that can help spark U.S. manufacturing.
Given the national availability of HP technology, Collins says, U.S. companies can connect with regional manufacturers already using HP 3D printers, have their parts printed locally then have those fresh parts supplied to their factories quickly and in large volumes. With global supply chains disrupted by the pandemic, this has become an even bigger advantage of 3D printing.
"I think the country needs it. As we come out of this, we need people who are still going to put in a hard day's work and make something," Collins says. The seeds of that thinking are rooted in his childhood days, back on the family farm in North Dakota.
Three generations worked together on that grain farm. When Collins was 8 years old, he routinely disassembled and rebuilt field equipment with his grandfather. He learned how to maintain and repair all the machines, mastering how each one operated, including combine harvester and the plow.
"If you broke a blade, you had to figure out how to fix that or how to fabricate a new part to replace it. Whatever it took," Collins says.
That philosophy ultimately steered him (like many former farm kids) into mechanical engineering. It also stoked what became his belief in the commercial self-reliance that's provided by 3D printing.
Just as important: It shaped his ethics.
"You work hard. Nothing is going to be handed to you," he adds. "You put in the effort. You get the job done."
On some early Colorado mornings, when Collins is mashing down on his bike pedals and straining to once again conquer a trail, those are the thoughts that still drive him to the top.
Today, he remains an eternal creator but is facing the same uncertainties as every other business owner. "None of us know what will happen in the next several months," Collins says. "All we can do is prepare. We're lucky at Avid that we've still been busy and are able to work safely." As for COVID-19, he says, "If it does spike again, our printers and our PPE files are ready to go."