Lee’s a fabber in Sugar Grove, Illinois. Jens is a designer in Oslo. Together, they’re doing distributed manufacturing.

Lee Bernard is a designer and fabber who’s worked for a number of years with natural stone, wood and metals. Lee’s digital fabrication tool is a CNC router with 5′ x 11′ bed that he designed and built himself. See his business website, cnc.rockspainc.com.

Digital Fabber Lee Bernard

He signed up on 100kGarages just a few months ago. Lee says, “I was excited to join 100kGarages in order to connect with designers and possible customers for my work. I searched the site for collaborators, put the word out to a handful, and connected with product designer Jens Dyvik (dyvikdesign.com) from Norway.”

Product designer Jens Dyvik

Dyvik is exploring parametric design, enabling people to alter the dimensions of his designs to suit their individual needs and tastes. One of these is a chair built of “slices” of material.

Jens Dyvik and Lee Bernard cut these chairs out of plywood material

The two began to correspond via email, and they had a chance to meet in person when Dyvik was visiting Boston as part of his world FabLab tour. Lee explains, “It was the weekend after Thanksgiving. We both had that long weekend free, so Jens hopped a flight from Boston to Illinois. We spent the weekend adapting code, doing trial runs cutting the chair — basically started working on our business. I’ll be fabbing Jens’ designs for sale locally.”

It’s very gratifying to see how connections are being made via 100kGarages. One of our goals is to help facilitate distributed manufacturing, and these 100kGaragers are just getting started.

What connections have you made on 100kGarages? We’d love to hear from you.