About Us
How a curiosity about sci-fi and a first 3D printer turned into a small workshop that prints and engraves to order.
Red Wing 3D Creations is a small workshop that makes things to order. There is no warehouse behind this shop and no shelf of boxed stock — when an order comes in, a machine starts up and your piece gets made.
How this started
It began as curiosity. I work in IT, I have always been a sci-fi fan, and when I bought my first 3D printer it was for the obvious reason: I wanted to hold the things I had only ever seen on a screen.
Printing favorite fictional designs turned out to be the beginning rather than the point. What kept me at it was realizing how personal these objects could be — that the same machine which prints a dragon can print the exact thing somebody had in their head and could not buy anywhere.
The hobby grew into a small business. It is still small, still run by one person who cares a great deal about how the pieces come out, and still built on the same idea it started with: make things worth keeping, one layer at a time.
When I am not designing or printing, I am usually outdoors with my family, or working out what to make next.
What we actually do
We run two 3D printers and a laser engraver. The printers build objects up out of molten plastic, one thin layer at a time, until a shape exists that did not exist before. The laser works the other way around, taking material away to leave text, artwork or a cut edge behind.
Everything is sliced, printed, finished and packed here. Nothing is drop-shipped, and nothing is ordered in from a third party and relabeled. If you buy something from us, it was made on one of our machines.
Our designs, and other people’s
Some of what we sell is our own design. A good deal of it is not, and we would rather say so plainly than let you assume otherwise.
The 3D printing world runs on independent designers who model something clever and license it to people like us to print and sell. We buy those licenses from Cubbee, STLFlix, BitsCraft, Creative Fabrica, and directly from designers we support on Patreon.
That arrangement is worth defending. It means the person who spent two weeks getting a dragon’s scales right gets paid when we print it, and it is why we credit designers on the product listing rather than quietly passing their work off as ours.
Why the details matter
Most of our prints run at a 0.2 mm layer height, which is a sensible balance of finish and cost. But some models deserve better than a single setting applied uniformly from bottom to top.
Where a piece has fine detail — a face, a curve, a texture that catches the light — we drop to a finer layer height through that section and let the machine run coarser where nothing is gained. It takes longer to set up and longer to print. It is also the difference between something that looks printed and something that looks made.
The same instinct applies to the honest answers. If you ask us for something that will not print well, or a material that will not take an engraving, we will tell you before you pay rather than after.
Materials
We print mainly in PLA and PETG. PLA holds fine detail and color beautifully and suits anything decorative. PETG is tougher and copes better with heat, sunlight and being knocked about, so it is the better choice for anything that has to survive real use. Other filaments are available on request.
Custom work
Plenty of what we make starts as somebody’s idea rather than a listing. A different color, a piece scaled up, a name engraved on something, or a model you have found and want printed properly.
If that is you, send us a message. Tell us what you are after and what it needs to survive, and we will tell you honestly whether we can do it well — and roughly what it will cost — before anything gets committed.
Thank you for supporting a small business. Let’s make something worth keeping.