Moraine WorksNorthwest Wisconsin

Design & fabrication

From the schemato the part.

A one-person shop that takes a physical product problem from brief to parametric CAD to a finished part — with the geometry written as code, so the second revision costs almost nothing.

A moraine is the ridge a glacier leaves behind: material carried by something that moved through, deposited as new ground. It seemed like a fair description of a job well finished.

Need a part nobody makes any more?

Made to order

The part they stopped making.

A plastic knob, a gear, a bracket, a clip — the one small piece that has failed and put a working machine out of service. The manufacturer dropped it, the dealer quotes eight weeks, or the only one left online costs more than the machine is worth. Send it here and it gets modelled, printed and shipped — and then it exists forever.

Step one

You send the broken part

Or photographs and caliper measurements if it's still holding the machine together. Whatever's left of it is enough to work from.

Step two

It becomes a pattern

Measured and rebuilt as a parametric model — the digital equivalent of a foundry pattern. This is the part of the job that takes real time, and it only happens once.

Step three

It's in the catalogue

Yours ships. The pattern stays on the shelf, so the next person with the same dead machine pays for a part, not for the work of inventing it again.

The pattern fee, and how you get it back.

The first order for a part that doesn't exist yet carries a one-time pattern fee — you're covering the modelling, not the plastic. If three more people buy that same part, the pattern has earned out and your fee is refunded in full. You took the risk on a part nobody had made yet; if it turns out the world needed it, you shouldn't be the one who paid for it.

Parts that look obviously useful to more than one person skip the fee entirely.

Good candidates

Small, functional, out of production, and holding something bigger hostage.

  • Discontinued appliance knobs, handles, dispenser parts and trim clips
  • Farm and equipment plastics — monitor brackets, guards, meter parts, covers
  • Gears, bushings, spacers, cable clips and retainers
  • Fasteners and trim clips for older vehicles, boats and RVs
  • Obsolete enclosures, bezels, feet and battery doors
  • Anything where the dealer says "that's no longer available"

What this shop won't take

Not squeamishness — printed plastic is the wrong material for some jobs, and saying so up front is part of the service.

  • Safety-critical parts — brakes, steering, lifting, climbing, pressure
  • Structural or load-bearing components where failure hurts someone
  • Anything carrying a manufacturer's logo, badge or trade dress
  • Parts still in production and cheaply available — you'd be overpaying
  • Sustained high heat or hard chemical exposure

What to send with it

  1. 01
    The part, if you can spare it Broken in three pieces is fine. Mailing the original beats any photograph.
  2. 02
    The machine it came off Make, model and year. Half of identification is knowing what it mates to.
  3. 03
    Any number moulded into it Part numbers are usually on the back or inside a rib. They are the fastest route to a match.
  4. 04
    What it has to do Does it clip, pivot, seal, take a load, get hot? That decides the material.

Design review

See it before it's cut.

Every job gets a private page. The current design lives on it — options side by side, each one carrying the consequence of choosing it. You leave your notes on the page itself, next to the thing you're talking about, instead of describing it in an email thread three days later.

Options come with their trade-offs attached
Not just what it looks like — what it costs, how it prints, where it will show a seam, which one adds a week. A choice you can't cost isn't a choice.
One thing changes at a time
Same body, same mounting, only the finish moves. Holding everything else still is what makes a comparison mean anything.
Directions are labelled apart from dimensions
A picture of an idea and a drawing you can build from are different documents. Each is marked, so nobody approves a sketch thinking they approved a spec.
Another variant is cheap
The geometry is a script, so a fifth option is a loop — not another week. This is the same thing that makes revisions cheap once you're in production.
Two rounds are included in every quote. Most jobs settle in one. If a third is needed because the brief genuinely moved, that's quoted openly before any work starts — never billed as a surprise.

Why this shop and not a print farm

Most fabrication shops can't write software. Most software people can't fabricate. This one does both, on the same job.

Made-to-order parts, cheap revisions and a live review page aren't three services — they're one asset used three ways. The geometry is written as code, so it can be reissued, re-costed and re-rendered for the price of running it again.

01 — Capability

What we do

Small-run parts, prototypes, fixtures and jigs — plus the software that makes them configurable, orderable or measurable.

Parametric CAD

Geometry written as code, not clicked. Change a dimension, regenerate the family.

CadQuery · OpenSCAD · FreeCAD

Production printing

Small-run and bridge production in PLA, PETG and engineering filaments, sliced headless for repeatability.

2 × Bambu Lab P1S · AMS

Embedded & electronics

Sensors, dataloggers and controls — the board, the enclosure and the firmware from one shop.

Raspberry Pi · ESP32 · LoRa

Survey & positioning

Centimetre-grade RTK GNSS for site layout, as-applied mapping and machine guidance.

RTK base + rover · PPK post-processing

Software

The database, the API and the interface behind a physical product. Production experience, not a side skill.

Java · Python · schema design

Fixtures & tooling

Jigs, gauges and fixtures that make somebody else's process repeatable on their own floor.

Design for the operator, not the drawing

02 — Method

How a job runs

Four steps, in this order, because each one is cheap only if the one before it is settled.

  1. 01

    Brief

    What the part has to survive, who handles it, and what it's replacing. Constraints first — geometry falls out of them.

  2. 02

    Parametric model

    The part is written as a script with its dimensions named. This is the step that makes revision three as cheap as revision one.

  3. 03

    Print, measure, adjust

    A real part in your hands before a run is committed. Fit and finish problems are found on the bench, not on your floor.

  4. 04

    Run and hand over

    The batch, plus the generator that made it. You own the geometry — it doesn't live only in this shop.

03 — The shop

What's on the floor

CapabilityEquipmentWorking envelope
FDM printing2 × Bambu Lab P1S, one with AMS 256 × 256 × 256 mm
Multi-materialAMS, 4-spool4 colours / materials
PositioningRTK GNSS base + rover, LoRa link ~10 mm, 5 km baseline
CADCadQuery, OpenSCAD, FreeCADScripted, version-controlled
WoodworkingTable saw, router table, dust collectionFixtures and patterns

Heated garage shop in northwest Wisconsin. Work ships anywhere; local clients are welcome to stand at the bench while a part comes off the plate.

04 — Start

Bring a problem, not a drawing.

The best jobs arrive as a description of something that keeps going wrong. The geometry is the easy part.

Email the shop
jacob@moraineworks.com (715) 523-1435 Shell Lake, Wisconsin — work ships anywhere
Draft — before this goes live. Contact details, the town, real photographs and any named client work still need to be added or cleared. The equipment table reflects the shop as of 30 August 2026; the second P1S lands 31 August. The name is not yet trademark-cleared and no domain has been registered. The pattern fee has no number on it yet, and the earn-out threshold of three is a starting position, not a tested one. jacob@moraineworks.com does not receive mail until Cloudflare Email Routing is switched on — see sites/README.md.