TooTallToby and The Gamification of 3D CAD - Too Tall Toby - ep 157

Speaker A: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Engineering Entrepreneur podcast, episode 157. As always, it's your host, Scott Tarcey, and I run cadesignhelp.com head on over there. There'll be a little pop up and enter your email and we'll send you a free PDF of the top four mistakes inventors make. And you'll also be on the list so you'll get notification for new episodes and blog posts. Uh, leaving some reviews on itunes would be great. And for any feedback, you can reach me@infoaddesignhelp.com so I guess this week is too tall. Toby, he created a website which is called that tootalltovie.com and it's about all about CAD modeling challenges. So he uh, took it in a different way than uh. So when I was trained I went uh, like way back, 20, 20 years ago to like a three day SolidWorks class. Really expensive, honestly, and kind of boring. And he's turned this more into a game of learning. So Toby, thanks for coming on. Why don't you tell us more? Well, just tell us more about yourself first and then you know how you created this site and everything about it.

Speaker B: Sure. Scott, thanks so much for having me on the show. Um, that's awesome too. I'm excited to read about those top, uh, four mistakes that inventors have made. I'm sure I've made some of those mistakes in my, in my limited run of being a hobbyist inventor. So that'll be, uh, that'll definitely be some insightful reading. And uh, yeah, thanks for having me on. I mean, you said you went to some SolidWorks training classes. I made my career doing SolidWorks tech support and SolidWorks, uh, instructor. I spent um, about 16, 17 years doing that. I've actually closed over 10,000 tech support cases for SolidWorks, so I've heard just about every issue.

Speaker A: I bet 9,000 more. Uh, I can't log in a lot

Speaker B: of toolbox questions though. Maybe that'll resonate with you. We got a lot of toolbox questions in my time.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't even use it. It just messes up so much that I just, I mean, I will use it up, actually have to, but it's a last resort kind of thing because of how many issues it has.

Speaker B: Well along the, along the way, getting those types of calls, getting those types of questions. Um, and uh, you know, both from people calling in for tech support and also from teaching classes. I taught a lot of those classes similar to the ones you took. Uh, people would often say to me, what is the best CAD out there? What's the best one? You know, is it SolidWorks? Is it Creo? Is it Pro Engineer? Is it Autodesk inventor? Fusion360? You know, what is the best CAD out there? Um, and, uh, often my answer to them would be that, you know, it really depends on the person running the system just as much as it matters the CAD system itself. If you get an absolute wizard in ptc, uh, Creo, and you get an absolute wizard in Autodesk Inventor, and you pit them against one another, you know, with the same challenge, it's going to be pretty close. You know, who's going to finish that challenge first, who's going to finish that model first? It's going to be pretty close. If they're both very well versed and if they really have their fundamentals down when it comes to 3D CAD, which are things like deciding on the best location for the origin or if the model is symmetric, using strategies to facilitate that symmetry, you know, both of those users are going to be pretty close. But at the same time, I always kind of wanted to know what that would look like. I had this vision in my head of almost like a Wizards battle where you have these different CAD users from different CAD systems. And uh, you know, that kind of lingered around in my head for a few years. And uh, I started to think to myself, like, how could we create an, a truly CAD agnostic platform where we could help users from all these different CAD systems, whether they're new users or whether they're advanced users, to learn CAD in a new way, you know, in a different way and more of a gamified way. And ultimately for my own satisfaction and curiosity, how can we get some of these wizards to actually battle one another? And so the answer to the first question was that we created this collection of 2D to 3D CAD challenges where you can practice against the clock and you can kind of learn CAD in a new way. And we also started hosting an annual Cadverse CAD World Championship of 3D CAD speed modeling. And I'm very happy to say that since we've started hosting that tournament, we've had a world champion using SolidWorks, we've had a world champion using Inventor, we've had a world champion using PTC Onshape, and we've had a world champion using Fusion360. So I think that, uh, my, my theory, uh, was correct. It's not so much the wand.

Speaker A: Yeah, but no one's, but no one's using free CAD or Uh, Blender, as you can see.

Speaker B: Well, we've had users using uh, free CAD in the tournament. You know, we haven't had a winner, but you do need to qualify for the tournament. So, you know, we get, we usually get about 50 people trying to qualify for that tournament and we only accept the top 16. So I will say that, uh, fusion3.6, sorry, free CAD user was in that top 16 of those qualifiers.

Speaker A: Well, how good that person be if they had like legit software, like one of the four you mentioned for that? If they can make it that far with that program.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I, I got to give it to Free Cat. They, you know, they've been for a long time. It is kind of an open source development, so it's a community development and um, you know, it does get better, it does continue to get better.

Speaker A: And I think, okay, I haven't used it, I haven't used it in 10 years, but it was pretty bad 10 years ago. Like, it was like.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's just, it's a slow, it's a very slow process to develop that when you're relying on the community and when like those developers have to move on because they get other opportunities, you know, it's understandable. But 1.0 Freecad 1.0 just came out. Definitely worth taking another look at it and certainly there's a lot of good macros you can load into free CAD too. So I got a feeling one day we're going to see a free CAD user, at least in the semifinals and I would love to see a free CAD champion.

Speaker A: That'd be cool. Yeah. Um, so yeah, you, you, you taught SolidWorks and so when did you start this website?

Speaker B: So we started the website in 2022. Uh, we officially, you know, started that up, kind of took that on as a full time gig and uh, trying to, you know, really modernize that CAD learning process. It's like you said, you know, you've taken CAD training classes, I've taken CAD training classes and for certain types of people that's the perfect way to learn. You know, it's it's totally, uh, it's exactly what they need. They like having the physical book, they like having the instructor, they like going through one lesson at a time. But there's also a lot of people who, it's almost overkill. And especially in the age we live in now where a lot of people are learning cad specifically for 3D printing, the, the real skills that they need to learn are kind of how to make these simple Parts and how to just go from point A to point B, how to have a napkin sketch and turn that napkin sketch into a 3D model so that they can 3D print it. And I think that's, that's really the, the sweet spot in the audience that we're going for with this platform is know, not necessarily the users that are in a, uh, an environment where they need to be professionally trained to develop an automobile in 3D CAD, but more so the environment of newer users who are really trying to kind of dip their toe in the water of 3D CAD and of 3D printing. And they need a quick solution and a fun solution to become better at cad. The cool thing about what we've developed is that it helps people get to that point. But because the primary app on our website is called Practice Models, what we really want people to do is to practice and then practice again and practice again and practice again. So the basic premise is we show you a 2D print, and that 2D print is organized by the level of complexity. So you could start on tier one. These are going to be very simple models that only take one or two features. You go all the way up to tier 7, where maybe you need 20 or 30 features to complete that model. But let's say you're just getting started. So you pick a, uh, tier one drawing and then you reveal that drawing, and that initiates a clock on our app on the website. And so now you're going to try and take that 2D drawing and you're going to turn it into a 3D model using any CAD system, using free CAD, using Onshape, using Fusion 360, you can use any 3D CAD system to turn that 2D drawing into a 3D model, whatever it is that you happen to be learning or that you happen to have access to. And then when you're done, what you need to do is apply the correct material density and then calculate the mass of that model. And then you go back to our website and you enter that mass into, uh, a validation field, a text box. And if you get it correct, then you earn a point for that challenge. And you've completed that challenge. The cool thing is that your time is tracked. So maybe that first attempt took you five minutes. And then you could say, you know what? I think I could do this a little bit faster, and you can go through and you can try again and see if you can do that same challenge a little bit faster, a little bit more efficient. And what's nice about that is that that gives you the opportunity to experiment. The. Because when you're designing in 3D CAD, there are often several decision branches on your decision tree. So you could say, for example, should I add these fillets at the sketch level or should I add these fillets at the feature level? You know, let me ask you, Scott, what, what do you prefer to do, generally speaking?

Speaker A: So, uh, you always add it at the feature level, at the very end, the feature.

Speaker B: That's what I think too. It's. Yeah. That way you can use.

Speaker A: Well, okay, and let me give you a reference for that. So that's. That might maybe, I mean, I can't think of a reason you wouldn't do it that way. But the main reason that I do do it that way is for injection molded parts with draft and everything. Once you have a fillet in there, you'll never be able to draft it. Right. So if you're gonna. Unless, uh, the way I typically do it is I usually draw everything square and then I add draft at the end. It's just a lot easier to reference planes that are 90 degrees and faces and stuff. Then I had the draft, then I add, uh, fill it to the very end. So, you know, that's, that's the logic there. Because if I do anything before that, it's just really hard to get, to get the draft in there and you know, whatnot.

Speaker B: So. And I'm glad that you brought that up because I also have a bit of an injection molding background and I can. First of all, I completely agree with your workflow. That's absolutely the way you got to do it in, uh, order to facilitate that draft. Although I will say in onshape, I've been using onshape a lot lately, you could actually have the fillets first. And the onshape draft does this like magic to uh, to create the draft. Even though the fillets are out of order, it's, it's definitely worth taking a look at if you're an injection molding guy. Take a look at that, uh, the way that the OnShape workflow works for drafted fillets. That's a little bit of a tangent, but, uh, the thing I wanted to mention to you is that, you know, if you're entering into the workforce and you're entering into a field where you're doing a lot of injection molding. Well, these challenges on the website, you can filter them based on what skills are being taught. So, so some of those skills that are taught are things like thin walled parts, drafted parts, ribs, you know, These are all things that you're going to commonly encounter in the world of plastic injection molding. And so it's very beneficial to be able to create a model that has a rib in it, and then to be able to go back through and create the model again. Maybe the first time you do it, you create the rib as a thin feature. Then the second time you do it, you do it as a solid feature from the side profile. Then the third time you do it, you create it as an actual rib.

Speaker A: And.

Speaker B: And the thing that's nice about being able to practice and practice again like that is you really start to learn the nuances of the tool. Like, as I'm sure you know, in the rib command, a rib doesn't extrude up to next in three different directions, essentially. And so if you've never used the rib command before, you get one of these practice models, you go through, you try to do the rib. Most of the time, what people do is they draw that rib on the very bottom surface, and then it doesn't have any faces to terminate the extrude up to next end condition. And. And so the rib fails, and they're like, why is this happening? Well, in. In the app on our website, we also provide tutorial videos. So then you could watch somebody else modeling that part, and you could say, oh, I'm supposed to create a plane first up in space, and then I can create that rib. And, oh, I also noticed that person didn't draw the entire line for the rib. They just drew a little segment of the line, and it, uh, automatically extended up to the two side walls. That's pretty cool. I didn't know you could do that. And so this is more of kind of the modern way of learning where you're learning by doing. You're. You're challenging yourself to do the model first, and maybe you kind of hack and slash your way through it, only using bosses and cuts and fillets, because those are the only tools you know. And then you can watch somebody else modeling the part that you just modeled, and you realize, oh, you could do it that way. Oh, you could do it that way. I personally think this is such a great way to learn, because after you've done it yourself and you've struggled with those challenges, you're almost curious about how an expert would do it or how another user might do it.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Um, you know, and like, I've been doing this so long now that I've. I basically on my own, different projects I've been hired for, and done everything. You're basically saying you're just, you're giving people a platform to do it on if they weren't, you know, they didn't have a business like running, you know, like to try different things.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And even when you do, you know, one of the common comments that we hear from users of the platform is they say, thank you for posting these because I never do sheet metal. You know, my job all day, everything that I'm doing all day is, uh, is injection molding, is plastic parts, and I never get to do sheet metal. But it's kind of cool to learn, you know, learn a new area of the software. And there's actually some stuff that you do in sheet metal that I didn't, I didn't even realize you could do that in regular SolidWorks. Like, I didn't know that when you do a convert entities, it makes like a, a soft relationship at the end point and you, uh, could actually just drag that relationship off of that endpoint. But I learned that because when you do an edge flange in sheet metal that you're able just to drag the edge of the flange over even though it looks like it's fully constrained. I didn't realize that you could use that in other areas of the software too. So a lot of times, you know, just learning about some new areas of the software, you'll learn things that you actually can use in your regular job and help make your regular job a little more efficient.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Um, I'm curious about the world championship thing. I'd heard of that. This, like this world championship for Cat. I didn't know that you were the guy running it.

Speaker B: Yeah, the world championship of 3D CAD speed modeling is a lot of fun. And, uh, certainly we've had other tournaments as well, which I'll talk about, um, at the end. But the basic premise is that we collect CAD users from all over the world. We put out the advertisement, we say we're now holding qualifiers, free qualifiers for the 2025 World Championship of 3D CAD Speed Modeling. That'll probably happen at the end of Q3, in case anybody's listening and wants to compete this year. But then what happens is, uh, users from around the world who are curious about this, they come to our website and they run a qualifier speed run. And what that is, is it's modeling three models in a row and recording yourself doing it. And then that that gives you a total time. Usually these times are around five minutes. You do three models, it takes you about five minutes. And uh, you record yourself doing it. You post that video on our website, and that formulates a leaderboard. And we take the top 16 times on that leaderboard and, and we put them together in a tournament. And then what we do is we take the. We seed it just like, uh, any sporting event. So we take the first seed and the 16th seed and we pit them against each other. And what happens is both of those users share their screen. So the whole world is watching. The whole world can see both of those users. Maybe the user on the left is using Autodesk Inventor and the user on the right is using Onshape. And then what happens is we randomly select a drawing, a pool of drawings, and we say, three, two, one, go.

Speaker A: Oh, so this is not, it's not in person. Everybody's just doing it from wherever they're at. But you're, uh, right, you're just doing it online with the screen sharing.

Speaker B: Exactly, yeah. So we share that. We share the drawing with the users at the same time. Both users, Both users are sharing their screen back with me. And then the whole world is watching over our live stream. And so in real time, we're able to see both of these users kind of analyzing this 2D print, deciding where their origin is going to be, deciding what the first feature will be, and then going through and building up these models. And it's really interesting because, you know, sometimes they'll start in totally different locations. You know, one user will have the origin in the corner, one user will have the origin in the center. Sometimes they'll start with different features. You know, one user will start from the, the base plate looking down from the top. The other user will start from the, the round profile that's on the side. You know, know whatever the, the model happens to be. But more often than not, they get to the end point at, you know, almost the same time, within just a few seconds of one another. And so whoever is able to construct that model and apply, you know, it has to be a fully defined model. All the dimensions have to be correct, the material has to be correct. And ultimately what they do is they calculate the mass, and whoever gets that correct moves on in the tournament until we end up with a champion. And the, the way I was going

Speaker A: to ask if you do it the same way as the normal challenges makes sense. Just you enter the, you edit the masses like your check to make sure

Speaker B: that you did it exactly. That's exactly correct. And so, yeah, and so that's how we do the tournaments. Usually what we do is we um, we do two matches every week. So um, you know, we'll take the, the first matchup from the round of 16 and the second matchup from the round of 16 and then we just do that week after week. And usually for that 16 person tournament it runs over seven or eight weeks until we get to our official champion. We work with sponsors, we get prizes. We've had uh, 3D scanners as prizes. We've had 3D connection space, uh, space mouse controllers and some of their peripherals. They've been a fantastic sponsor of the tournaments.

Speaker A: Cash prize. I might have to enter this. It sounds interesting. I might have to enter this.

Speaker B: Oh, I would love to see you in the tournament. What CAD system would you use if you entered?

Speaker A: Are you still solidwork? For sure, yeah.

Speaker B: That's cool. I've, I've lately been having uh, a little uh, uh, affinity with onshape. Onshape is kind of my new go to.

Speaker A: If I wasn't. Yeah, I mean if I wasn't art. You know, it is like once you learn one thing, it just takes a lot more work to learn something else. And so if I wasn't already so comfortable with it I probably. Because on show with the whole cloud thing, there's a lot. Yeah.

Speaker B: Onshape. Onshape works, you know, it's very similar to goo, the Google suite of tools. You can go from nothing to having an OnShape account being logged in and creating 3D CAD in under five minutes. And, and I, I can say that with confidence. I actually did that uh, on, you know, on video. I have a video of me doing that like going from no experience at all, just SolidWorks experience, to being in OnShape and creating.

Speaker A: If I was, if I was, you know, if, if I was a 19, 20 year old right now and I was getting the CAD, I would, I tell, I tell them every time I would. I uh, mean SolidWorks is cool but like the headaches of getting started with it and the licensing and all this stuff don't even mess with, Just go to onshape or Fusion. Yeah, those two are so much user friendly for the beginning part of it, like in the logistics part of it, like the administrative stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah. Someone asked me the other day like what's, what's the, what's the thing about onshape that's the most appealing to you? And he thought that I was going to say something about like finite element analysis or the rendering tools or whatever, but I just said it's just the ability to kind of jump around from Device to device. Like all your settings, so all your key bindings, all your S key menu, your materials library, like your, your default units, everything that you've set up in your profile is in, is in your online profile. So when you go from device to device, all that stuff is just there. You're. The way you've got your documents organized, it's all just there. So just that simple, like, ease of being able to jump from computer to computer. It's.

Speaker A: You can even do it on your phone, can't you?

Speaker B: And you can even do it from mobile. Yeah, you can do it. In fact, one of the, um, the, the speed run challenges I mentioned before, where you do three models in a row, where we had a user do that on a Samsung Galaxy phone and he did all three models and I think nine minutes from a phone and

Speaker A: fully, there's no way you're going to win. You need that mouse. That 3D mouse is huge. But like, that's crazy that he could even, uh, get that far.

Speaker B: That's exactly what I thought. I couldn't believe it that he was able to do that and do it that quickly. Like, you know, when you're doing it from your phone, you have to bring up essentially a number pad, you know, on the phone to enter in the parametric dimensions. But he was able to do it. It was so cool.

Speaker A: What place did he finish in?

Speaker B: I think he was. He didn't make it into the qualifiers on that one, if I remember correctly. Like it was like I said, most of the people who qualify get five minutes or under for all three models. I think he was closer to nine minutes. But again, that video is on my, my YouTube channel. So it's called like Shape on a M Mobile or something like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've got about maybe five, ten more minutes. Let's talk about the YouTube real quick. So you have a pretty big following there. 27,000 subscribers plus me now. So you have 27,001.

Speaker B: 27,001, yeah. Thank you so much for that sub.

Speaker A: So how did that start? Was that the same time as you did the website to just help drive traffic to it?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the YouTube channel, it's such an important part to have a good community and have the community work with the community to kind of pull their information and help, you know, help them help you. And so the YouTube community is such an important part of that. So we, what we do on the YouTube channel is, uh, we do tips and tricks for 3D CAD primarily. OnShape and SolidWorks are the tips and tricks that we put out there, we do tutorials. So start to finish, here's how you model up this part. A lot of times those parts come from the practice models challenges on the website, so there's definitely some overlap there. And we host a weekly live stream with the community. It's the best chat in the, uh, 3D CAD community. Hangs out with us on Model Monday Live. So that's at 1pm East coast, every Monday. And what we do on that live stream is I show the, the, the audience a 2D print, you know, very similar to what we do on the website. I show the audience a 2D print and then they all, at the same time on their own computers, try to come up with the mass of that model, and then they enter it into the YouTube chat. And so it's really fun to watch. It's, it's, you know, while they're doing that, uh, I'll share some news or some updates about what we're doing on the Tudel Toby platform, what we're doing with the app, what's going on with the tournaments. But what the users are doing, you know, while that's going on is they're creating that model, they're coming up with a mess, and then they're talking to one another and they're saying, wow, you got that done really fast. What did you do? Oh, I did it with a sweep. Oh, uh, I didn't even think about doing it with a sweep. I did a bunch of extrudes that would have been so much faster. And so they, they interact with one another and they share tips and tricks about how they came to the solution for that challenge. And then we keep a running tally of that. You know, again, this gamification idea, giving people points and recognition. So every time you're the first person who answers correctly, you earn a point on the Model Live leaderboard. And then that runs all throughout the year. And so we, you know, we, we always try to kind of encourage that community engagement. And it's just such an important part of what we're doing. You know, it's. It's all about the community. And that's the other big thing that makes this different. You know, like, we talked about how cat education can be kind of boring. Well, it's a lot more fun when you've got friends or colleagues who are able to kind of share with you how they're doing on the challenges, how many challenges they did, how they solved it, and you're able to all kind of share the same Tips and tricks about those same challenges.

Speaker A: Gotcha. And people, I mean, are people motivated by like prizes and stuff or is it just like a bragging rights kind of thing?

Speaker B: Well, the tournaments certainly have prizes. Um, that's a, that's a big motivation for the tournament itself. Um, but you know, in the world of engineering, I think that a lot of times it's just about, you know, showing that you are the best or showing that you are getting better. You know, one of the big elements of the, the website is that we track all of your uh, uh, your challenges. Every time you do a challenge, we track that challenge. And so you're able to see over time against our analytics board how well you're improving, how much you're improving over time. And so like I mentioned earlier, the challenges are sorted by the tier level of complexity. And so you can look at a chart and you can say, show me all of my tier three challenges. And you can see how over time you've gotten faster and faster and ah, at creating models that have, you know, five or ten features in them like a tier three level complexity model. And so I think that that's the biggest payoff of all. It's just being able to see that, you know, this is making a difference and that you are getting better and that you're, you know, you're learning a better way to navigate your software. I always think that, you know, in engineering, 3D CAD can be fun. It can also be kind of cumbersome. The engineering is a fun part, you know, figuring out what, what is the least amount of material that we can use to still hold up this amount of mass or what is the best way to create this connection so that when it engages it's going to hold and it's not just going to come loose again. Those types of engineering challenges are really what gets a lot of engineers excited. The CAD is just kind of a tool to get there. And so if we can do whatever we can on our platform to help the users have that be more and more second nature, then that's just going to make their engineering experience that much better. And so that's where I think that the idea of practicing and practicing and practicing and learning new workflows and kind of just like really getting down the workflow that you're already using. Even something as simple as doing a boss, uh, extrude in SolidWorks, there's a lot of little nuanced things you can do to speed up that process and to make that process almost second nature so that you can really focus on the engineering and not get too bogged down and doing the cad.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I always talk about design intent, right? So, like, let's say I have a boss feature that is another body and it needs to mate with the part it's going up to. Well, I'm always going to pick extrude up the body or extrude up the surface, because that's the whole point. Like, if I change that surface and this part needs to fit with it, or maybe we say offset from it, maybe we got to give it a little clearance, like a quarter millimeter. I'm always going to do that versus just extruding it blind and then having to manually adjust it every time. You know what I mean? Like, so that's. That's the kind of stuff where I think, you know, it's like, you got to think about, like, anytime you design, if you're designing something one time, it doesn't really matter. It comes down to when you're designing something and you know you're gonna have to make iterations because, you know, like, for. And another thing about engineering like you were talking about is, like, you learn a lot more when you produce something and you have to make it work. So, like, you can design something in CAD that's great, but until you actually make it, like, you don't even know it's gonna work. And so, you know, I design something and I'm going to 3D print it, and I know it's probably going to have to be designed. Like, again, I always try to make it the smartest way I can to save myself time later because I know I'm going to have to go back and change stuff. Yeah.

Speaker B: And, uh, you know what? I'm glad that you brought that up, but I know that we're winding down on time here. And so I think this will probably be the perfect way to kind of end things, because one of the revelations we've had recently is that a lot of these exercises are fun and they are useful and they help you get better at cad.

Speaker A: But.

Speaker B: But what will really take this to the next level is what we're doing now, and that is that we're rolling out challenges that can actually be 3D printed and not just a single part, but multiple parts that can be 3D printed. And I think that to your point, until you actually make something and it has to work, it's harder to really get engaged with whatever that task is. It's still just kind of training. But now I feel like we're really taking it to the next level. So if anybody out there is listening to this and looking for some CAD practice, not only for, know, fictional parts, but for actual functional parts that can be 3D printed, check out tootall toby.com because the latest challenges that we have, we just did one that was uh, a little case that can hold guitar picks. And then we did another one that was a two part assembly that can hold a, uh, soap. It's a soap tray that has a little fluid drain on the bottom so that your soap doesn't get all slimy when you're in the shower. You know, like these are the challenges that we're now starting to roll out as actual functional 3D printing challenges so that users can not only, you know, accomplish the challenge that we're giving them, but then, you know, and this is kind of to your point, if they made the model the correct way, they can make the changes to the dimensions so that that functional 3D print actually works in their environment. The next one we're going to do is going to be a clip for your desk to hold up your headphones. And you know, your desk is probably going to have a different, you know, uh, thickness on your desktop than mine will. And so you're going to need to know how to edit that dimension so that when you 3D print it out for your desk, it actually works and it actually clamps on. So, so that's where we are now. We're actually, you know, it's like you read my mind. We're, we're really trying to engage people not only to create these fictional widgets, but to actually create things that can be functional, that can be 3D printed so that you can make it. And then you can start to learn things like, you know, like in the case of the soap dish, you can learn how to create those tolerances between the two components so they actually fit together. Because you can't have them be one to one. You have to have some kind of an offset otherwise the parts aren't going to fit together.

Speaker A: Yep. Um, so actually the last two questions I have is what's your number one tip? So you have a lot of experience with CAD and running, uh, a business like this. Just what's your general number one tip?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, number one tip in the world of CAD is, uh, is use the S key. If your CAD system has an S key, you should definitely use.

Speaker A: Oh, that's very true. Yeah. I mean the number I, I remember like I was designing something and it was like eight hours of work. And then I thought it was saving. And I'd never seen this before. There was something corrupt in the file. So even though it looked like it saved, if you've gone to Windows Explorer and looked, the file size was 0 and I had no idea. I don't think it really mattered because it was one of those things where I had to restart the application anyways. But it's like, you know, if I had known, maybe there's, maybe there's something I could have done like save as a different name or whatever. Right before having to redo everything.

Speaker B: Maybe that's another one that I should put in my list of what, what I love about onshape. Like you never, you never have to worry about.

Speaker A: Yeah, right, I know, yeah. Or you're traveling. You don't have to bring your 20 pound laptop with the graphics card process because the graphics process, everything's done in the cloud through their own servers versus how to do it on your own. And then lastly, what's the best way. I guess the best way people get in touch with you is the website too tall toby.com, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as far as, you know, the best way to stay in touch with us and get involved is visit2talltoby.com and sign up for, sign up for an account. It's a totally free account and you can get started with those challenges for free. We got about 20 challenges in there that are free for everybody. Or just visit the YouTube channel. You know, like I said, we do a lot of fun stuff with the community on the YouTube channel. We live stream at least every Monday, but a lot of times throughout the week we have other live streams, we have the tournaments. We, we, um, you know, I mentioned before we have the World Championship at 3D CAD, but we actually just got done doing a tournament with high school students. So it was just an eight, eight person tournament that was local, uh, to a high school in California. And I was, I was here in Pennsylvania where I'm based out of. The instructor was there with the students and he and I did the co commentary on the tournament and uh, it was all just high school students. And that's, you know, that's another way to kind of get involved and, and just to watch the tournaments and cheer on the people that are running in the tournament. But you know, just tune into like an episode of Model Monday Live. If you're a CAD user and you, you know, you really enjoy the CAD community and you, you enjoy these kinds of challenges, Model Monday Live is totally the place to be visit us on the YouTube channel. And of course, if you really like these challenges, we got an entire library of them over@2talltoby.com awesome.

Speaker A: Well, Toby enjoyed it, and, uh, I guess we'll catch everyone next time on the podcast.

Speaker B: All right, great. Thanks, Scott. See you, everybody.