From a birthday gift to a Cape Town print studio.

How it started

I go by Shay. I studied audio engineering — I've always loved guitar, and that's what pulled me toward the engineering side of things in the first place. From there I moved into software engineering, and spent time working in civic-tech here in South Africa.

3D printing wasn't the plan. I was building home automation projects with ESP32s and all sorts of electronic modules, and needed a way to make enclosures for them. So for my birthday, I bought a Creality Ender 3 V3 — fairly convinced I'd get over it quickly.

How it grew

I didn't get over it. Once I get into something, I tend to get properly obsessed, and 3D printing was no exception. I wanted to test what was actually possible, so I picked up a second printer — a Creality Hi Combo — so I could try multi-colour and multi-material printing, and stop manually swapping filament every time a job needed a different colour.

From there it grew on its own. I started selling prints on Facebook Marketplace, and at some point it stopped feeling like a hobby with side income and started feeling like something worth testing properly as a business. That's how Forge & Figures came about.

Outside the studio

When I'm not at the printers, I'm usually cooking, tinkering with electronics, playing guitar, or adding to my card collection — the same curiosity that got me into 3D printing in the first place tends to show up everywhere else too.