Engineer · Make It Real · The Man Who Builds What Doesn’t Exist Yet
You quit your engineering job in 2015 because you believed there was a niche for making real working prototypes of fictional things — and that showing people what engineering can do was more valuable than explaining what engineering is. You were right. Ten million subscribers. A Guinness World Record for a retractable plasma lightsaber that cuts through steel. A company with employees, a campus, and a Kickstarter that raised over ten million dollars.
You once said that the goal is not teaching people how to do what you do. It is showing them what is possible through engineering. CrowdSmith is the building where people walk in and learn how to do it. Your channel opens the door. Our facility is the room on the other side.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
The Hacksmith holds rank #122 because the “Make It Real” thesis — building functional prototypes of things that do not yet exist — is structurally identical to CrowdSmith’s five-station progression, and because his stated mission of inspiring youth into STEAM fields through visible engineering aligns with the facility’s pedagogy. He is not a funder. He is a case study in what happens when someone builds the impossible thing on camera, and the audience decides to become engineers because they watched.
February 10, 1990, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
Father worked as a plumber and handyman. Homeschooled during early years. The hands-on family environment shaped an early orientation toward building and tinkering.
Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Systems Engineering, Conestoga College (Kitchener, Ontario). Worked as an engineer before leaving his job in 2015 to pursue Hacksmith Industries full-time.
Founded 2015, Kitchener, Ontario. YouTube channel built around the “Make It Real” series: taking fictional items from comics, movies, and video games and building functional working prototypes. Over 10 million YouTube subscribers. Major builds include: retractable plasma lightsaber (Guinness World Record, December 2020, 4,000°F, cuts through steel), world’s brightest flashlight (Guinness World Record, July 2021), Iron Man helmet with heads-up display, Captain America electromagnetic shield, Wolverine retractable claws, Batman grappling hook, Inspector Gadget helicopter hat, half-scale Tesla Cybertruck (built before Tesla’s official reveal), and Aliens power loader on a CAT compact track loader. Team of 14+ employees. TEDx speaker on engineering aspirations.
Smith Blade Kickstarter (2025): 21-in-1 titanium multi-tool. CA$15.4 million raised (approximately US$11.2 million) with no paid advertising — leveraging the YouTube audience and engineering credibility to fund the Hacksmith Engineering Research Campus expansion. Internal investment of $1 million gambled on the campaign’s success. Hacksmith Store: Sells scaled-down versions of prototype gadgets including the Mini-Saber torch. Partnerships: Tormach (CNC equipment), Smarter Alloys, and manufacturing brands supporting the research-to-prototype pipeline.
The Hacksmith’s core thesis is translation: take something that exists only in fiction and build a functioning version using real-world engineering. The lightsaber required plasma physics, laminar flow nozzle design, and thermodynamics. The exoskeleton required hydraulics and load distribution. The shield required electromagnetics. Every build is a different engineering discipline applied to the same question: can this be made real?
CrowdSmith’s five-station Maker Continuum asks the same question from the other direction. Station One hands you a tool that already exists and teaches you what it does. Station Two adds power. Station Three adds digital control. Station Four adds AI. Station Five adds robotics and produces a manufacturing proof for an invention concept. The progression is from the real toward the not-yet-real — from the hand plane toward the patent. Hacksmith starts with the fiction and works toward function. CrowdSmith starts with the function and works toward invention. Both end in the same place: a working prototype that did not exist before the person built it.
Hacksmith Industries moved to a larger facility in late 2022 and is building a Hacksmith Engineering Research Campus funded by the Smith Blade Kickstarter. The campus is the physical infrastructure that makes the “Make It Real” series possible — clean rooms, CNC machines, testing areas, and production space. CrowdSmith’s Maker Continuum is the same concept translated into workforce development: five stations of progressively more capable equipment, culminating in a robotics bay where invention concepts receive robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof. Both are buildings designed around the thesis that you cannot teach engineering without a floor full of tools and the space to use them.
| Dimension | The Hacksmith | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Core thesis | Fiction into function — build the thing that doesn’t exist | Need into facility — build the building that doesn’t exist |
| Pedagogy | “Showing them what’s possible through engineering” | Station One hands you a tool and says: figure it out |
| Equipment | Tormach CNC, plasma cutting, clean rooms, testing bays | Five stations: hand tools through CNC, laser, 3D printing, robotics |
| Campus | Hacksmith Engineering Research Campus (Kitchener) | Maker Continuum (Tacoma Opportunity Zone) |
| Pipeline | Fictional concept → research → prototype → demonstration | Donated toolbox → credential → invention team → patent |
| Audience impact | Viewers became engineers because they watched | Fellows become inventors because they walked in |
| Revenue model | YouTube + Kickstarter + store + sponsorships | Retail tool store + WIOA cohorts + grants + earned revenue |
I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic, and I am co-authoring this letter with the founder of a workforce development facility in Tacoma, Washington. You build real working prototypes of fictional things. This letter introduces a building that is a real working prototype of something that should have existed but never did.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a five-station Maker Continuum in Tacoma’s federally designated Opportunity Zone. The stations progress from hand tools through power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, and robotics. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee — the same third-place architecture Howard Schultz saw in a Milan espresso bar in 1983, except the community forms over a hand plane instead of a latte. Donated tools from estate sales are cleaned, identified, restored, and curated — and that curation process is Station One training. A person walks in because they see a tool in the window. They pick it up. Someone behind the counter tells them what it does. That conversation is the intake funnel.
You said the goal of Hacksmith Industries is not teaching people how to do what you do — it is showing them what is possible through engineering. CrowdSmith is where the person who watched your video and decided to become an engineer walks in and picks up their first tool. Your channel opens the door. Our building is the room on the other side. You demonstrate that a lightsaber can be made real. We demonstrate that the person watching can learn to build the next one.
The man beside me on this letter is Robb Deignan. He is sixty years old. His father was not a plumber, but the instinct is the same — he was living on his own at sixteen, building with whatever was available. Twenty years in the fitness industry, ten thousand memberships sold face-to-face. He developed forty-four invention concepts through a proprietary evaluation methodology and built every piece of this architecture — seven financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas, five credential tracks, one hundred forty-seven letters — through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI dialogue, a methodology he formalized as SmithTalk.
Your five-station pipeline runs from fictional concept through research, design, fabrication, and demonstration. CrowdSmith’s five-station pipeline runs from donated toolbox through hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics — ending in robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof for an invention concept. Your pipeline produces a video that ten million people watch. Ours produces a credentialed inventor who files a patent. Both pipelines require a floor full of equipment and a person willing to build the thing that does not exist yet.
You are building a Hacksmith Engineering Research Campus with the proceeds of a Kickstarter that raised over ten million dollars with no paid advertising. CrowdSmith is building a Maker Continuum in a permanent Opportunity Zone with a financial architecture designed for self-sufficiency on earned revenue by Year Two and replication to three thousand locations nationally. Both are physical buildings designed around the thesis that you cannot teach engineering without tools on the floor and the space to use them.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. This letter is accompanied by a printed list of all one hundred forty-seven names, ranked by proximity to the mission. Your name appears alongside Mark Rober, whose engineering education channel reaches the same audience from a different angle; Stuff Made Here, whose build-fail-rebuild arc maps to CrowdSmith’s five-station curriculum; and Adam Savage, whose workshop philosophy shaped an entire generation of makers. All of those letters arrive the same week as yours.
The building is at crowdsmith.org. Your profile page is live. The model, the financial architecture, and the credential tracks are visible. I would be honored if you looked.
You make the fictional real. We make the missing present. Same instinct. Different corridor. Both end with a prototype that did not exist before someone built it.
His father was a plumber. The boy was homeschooled. He picked up tools because they were there — in the truck, in the garage, in the hands of a man who fixed things for a living. Nobody told him he was training for anything. He was just building.
Decades later, he builds lightsabers that cut through steel and grappling hooks that fire across rooms and exoskeletons that lift what a person cannot. He does it on camera because the camera is the reach — ten million people watching someone make the impossible thing and thinking: I could learn to do that.
The building in Tacoma exists for the person who had that thought and nowhere to go with it. The donated toolbox. The hand plane. The first crooked cut. The credential. The invention. The patent. Every step from the thought to the thing. The prototype that did not exist until someone walked through the door and built it.