Leading the way in reindustrialization with SLS at 67 Designs.

Posted by FIT THAI on March 6, 2026

Gavin Stener, owner of 67 Designs, is a manufacturer and product development specialist who works with clients across all industries, from large-scale automotive to marine and aerospace equipment. Since 2012, 67 Designs has established a reputation for delivering high-quality products designed and manufactured in the USA.

Although 67 Designs has achieved considerable business success, Stener actually started it to expand his personal mission: to help train and transfer knowledge to a new generation of manufacturing workers, ensuring that traditional manufacturing skills don't disappear as highly skilled workers age.

“I am interested in pushing the urgent issue of the need to revitalize our country's industries and enable us to produce what we need domestically. Those who can help transfer that knowledge are aging and gradually leaving the workforce.”

Gavin Stener
Owner of 67 Designs.


67 Designs is helping to bring "Made in the USA" back into the spotlight. These Mini iPad holders, shown inside the Fuse Sift machine before media blasting, are manufactured as components for use on Fuse Series machines in low-volume production.	In-house manufacturing with the Fuse Series ecosystem makes small to medium-volume production possible and cost-effective. 67 Designs has numerous customers who order hundreds to thousands of 3D-printed parts per production run.

In the commercial sector, 67 Designs integrates advanced additive manufacturing technology with traditional manufacturing methods such as turning, molding, tooling, and fabrication. Part of their approach involves using the Fuse Series Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printers for applications requiring shape flexibility, rapid production times, or where overall cost makes additive manufacturing a more viable option.

The Fuse Series is also important to Stener's goal of helping train and transfer knowledge to the next generation of workers. He sees additive manufacturing technology as a great starting point for students and learners (of all ages) to begin building real products. “Turning, casting, tooling—these things won’t disappear, but I think additive manufacturing is perfectly suited to playing a role in inspiring people and making it easier to start working with real products,” Stener said.

From start to finish: driving, flying, or sailing on the water.

Post-processing techniques such as dyeing, coating, or vapor smoothing can make parts printed with SLS 3D printing almost indistinguishable from injection-molded plastics.

For replacement or aftermarket parts in automobiles and boats, these post-processing techniques significantly add value to the parts with minimal increase in production costs or burden.

Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printing makes it possible to create parts with complex shapes that would be difficult to produce by machining or molding.

For certain parts that the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) has discontinued, having them custom machined or molded can cost thousands of dollars, while 3D printing is significantly cheaper and faster.

Stener built his business through word-of-mouth. His first clients in the automotive industry in 2015 were adventure vehicle enthusiasts who wanted custom modifications for off-road vehicles or vehicles for long-distance travel. “Most people interested in exploratory vehicles also tend to like flying or boating, so they keep coming back to us for new projects,” Stener said.

The high quality of the company's consumer-grade components, such as small accessories like phone holders for off-road vehicles, often leads those users to contact 67 Designs again when they need help designing products for their routine corporate use. "We get a lot of companies approaching us because they've used our products in their daily lives or are interested in having us do custom, small-batch production. People who love our products are often those who want something different or a unique, specialized use case," Stener says.

This need for customization makes 3D printing a crucial part of the design process, even if the final product might still be manufactured using traditional methods. Initially, Stener started with the Replicator, an accessible Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printer that allowed him to see and touch what a part would look like in the real world. “FDM is great for making small prototypes to test shapes or concepts, but using supports has always been a problem. And when we started in 2012, supportless printing technology was only available on large systems costing around half a million dollars,” Stener said.

In-house SLS 3D printing allows for shorter product development times and enables all production processes to be carried out internally. Here, these Ledge Universal Holder components are about to undergo a fuse blast surface cleaning process.

Once the packaging is complete, the Ledge Universal Holder is ready to be shipped to end-users. And the best part is, the entire process is handled in-house.

For this product, they chose to use a genuine Apple MagSafe Charger instead of a white-label product.

While building a customer base and reputation for 67 Designs, Stener remained visibly informed about powder bed technology on the market. In some cases requiring rapid time-to-market, he would outsource the production of functional, powder-coated parts using SLS technology to service bureaus before investing tens of thousands of dollars in injection molding dies.

“Using SLS was a no-brainer. There’s only one way to get a product accepted in a wider market: get it to market. My vision is, if the production orders aren’t at least 10,000 units, you can’t make metal molds. You have to be fast and innovate fast,” Stener said.

After years of using Shapeways' services, Stener watched the Fuse Series ' market entry and remotely assessed its production capabilities. “We wanted to make sure our SLS printers were ready for mass production, that tolerances could be controlled, and that we could maintain print accuracy. Once we were confident that the Fuse met those requirements, we decided to move forward,” Stener said.

The benefits of Fuse Series for small manufacturers in the United States.

Since bringing the first Fuse 1+ 30W printer into use, Stener has added several more. “I believe in redundancy. If one goes down, production doesn’t have to stop. The risk of having one $500,000 machine is greater than having five $100,000 machines,” Stener said.

The Fuse Series enables 67 Designs to achieve continuous production, supporting higher volume orders from customers and corporate partners, while simultaneously producing its own designed products, such as the off-road phone holder, one of the company's best-selling items.

Having a flexible and agile workflow enables 67 Designs to produce products that outperform competitors in every aspect, and this Ledge Universal Holder comes with an Apple MagSafe Charger .

By maintaining consistent batch dimensions across multiple build chambers, the team was able to optimize every production run and streamline post-print operations.

“Our team knows what to expect, and performance becomes a natural process,” Stener said.

“Easier access to SLS technology has given people more options, and the use of actual SLS parts is helping consumers become more familiar with products manufactured using additive manufacturing, paving the way for bringing products to market even in areas previously considered impossible,” Stener said. However, bringing products to market alone isn't everything. To change the image of 3D printing, which is often seen as only for prototyping, the quality of SLS-printed products for practical use must also be high.

“You need discipline and a real manufacturing mindset. We build our own calibration tools for our Fuse machines and regularly check them to make sure everything is still working correctly. Even smaller companies need to have a big company mindset when it comes to manufacturing quality, and this discipline comes from the foundations of traditional engineering,” Stener said.

Another principle of 67 Designs is that additive and traditional manufacturing are not interchangeable. Stener remains the primary designer for almost all products 67 Designs manufactures, both for the company and for clients. If the final product requires the strength of cast or machined metal, he will design for subtractive manufacturing, even if the prototype is 3D printed. However, if the application doesn't require that level of strength and might benefit from a lighter structure, generative design or free-form structure is preferred. This also applies to cases requiring approximately 100–5,000 small plastic parts; he might design specifically for additive manufacturing. “I don’t expect AM parts to function like injection-molded plastics. They’re a different breed of animal, and I don’t see them as interchangeable,” Stener states.

While the 67 Designs team is capable of producing products using both traditional and additive methods, one advantage of 3D printing that they find increasingly appealing to some clients is intellectual property protection. “For overseas manufacturing, some clients worry that their products might be copied or their ideas stolen. One way to leverage additive manufacturing is to design features that cannot be replicated with traditional tools,” Stener says.

iPad Mini holder

Consumer products printed with SLS 3D printing not only perform comparably to injection-molded plastic parts like these, but also significantly reduce waste. As consumers worldwide face challenges of forced obsolescence and declining access to the “right to repair” resource, SLS 3D printing offers a cost-effective alternative.

“When Apple inevitably changes their devices (which they always do), we don’t panic. We don’t have to clear out massive amounts of outdated inventory or take on write-off costs. We simply adapt quickly and move on,” Stener said.

The design and manufacturing process of 67 Designs helps reduce or eliminate the following:

Waste generated from excessive packaging during manufacturing.
Carbon emissions from transoceanic transport.
The environmental impact of trucking goods from the Port of Long Beach to Dallas.

“Fuse has given us something incredibly valuable: control. We can manage production cycles with precision and adjust each cycle to best match actual market demand.”

The size of the build chamber is just right, perfectly suited for producing our clamps in compact batches while still being flexible enough to seamlessly integrate other SKUs into the production process.

"It is efficient without becoming overly rigid and can be scaled up without creating unnecessary waste."

Gavin Stener
Owner of 67 Designs.

Pittose tubes for aircraft.

A Pitot tube is a device used to calculate the velocity of fluid flow by measuring both the internal and external pressures of the tube. For aircraft, the Pitot tube is crucial for measuring airspeed.

Therefore, a Pitot cover is necessary to prevent insects from entering the tube while the aircraft is parked on the ground. These covers are typically made of fabric. However, fabric covers can easily be blown off by the wind, allowing wasps or other insects to enter the tube and build nests, posing a significant safety risk for subsequent flights.

67 Designs has therefore developed a plastic Pitot pipe cover that is easy to install, easy to remove, and remains securely attached during normal use .

“Fuse allows us to create custom pitot tubes in shapes that are not easily achieved with injection molding, enabling us to design precise and deliberately precise forms.”

Fuse also gives us the flexibility to produce these high-quality pieces while simultaneously combining production with other SKUs that have longer production cycles and higher volumes.”

Gavin Stener
Owner of 67 Designs.

Ledge multi-purpose device holder

One of 67 Designs ' most popular products is the Ledge Universal Holder , which combines the Apple MagSafe Charger with adaptable hardware manufactured using a Fuse 1+ 30W machine. The core components of this holder are produced on a Fuse 1+ 30W machine and are poised to be the product in its class with the lowest carbon footprint.

Initially, 67 Designs opted for additive manufacturing for this part because traditional methods, such as mold making, would restrict them to a single design. For products that require modifications to adapt to changes by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), injection molding would be economically unviable.

“If we opted for injection molding, this product wouldn’t be cost-effective, and we’d be tied to making expensive molds overseas, which are often manufactured in China and are costly, plus they take 2–3 months to develop,” Stener said.

Distributed intelligence

The accessibility of the Fuse Series, both in terms of size and cost, enables the creation of streamlined manufacturing workflows centered around this technology. This allows small businesses to become manufacturers of practical components without having to invest heavily in traditional manufacturing processes and tooling.

67 Designs isn't attempting to replace traditional manufacturing with 3D printing, but they specialize in finding situations where parts produced using additive manufacturing can complement or improve existing processes.

With recent interest and support from the U.S. government focused on revitalizing domestic manufacturing networks, businesses can view 67 Designs as an example of what Stener calls the concept of “produce local and consume local.” The company’s efforts are not limited to producing components domestically using 3D printing, but also extend to workforce development and education.

“Beyond the product itself, we’re investing in people. We’re training a new generation of manufacturers with advanced production skills to prepare them for stable careers at a time when U.S. companies are expanding domestic production,” Stener said.

To learn more about 67 Designs, you can visit their website. And if you'd like to try out the capabilities of SLS 3D printed parts for real-world use, you can request a free SLS 3D printed sample from Formlabs .