Biggar Custom Hats
Crafting the Digital Foundry.
How Thinkments bridged the gap between century-old traditional hat-making and on-demand 3D engineering to restore lost heirloom wooden blocks.
The Challenge:
Preserving the Unreplaceable
Jeff Biggar is a master hatmaker. For decades, the structural foundation of his custom hats relied on vintage, hand-carved wooden blocks—many over a century old. As his business scaled, accessing a wider variety of block sizes became impossible; these antique molds are incredibly scarce and fragile.
Thinkments was tasked with a unique problem: Digitizing the analog. How do we take a physical, degrading wooden block, capture its precise geometry to the millimeter, and successfully reproduce it using industrial 3D printing—all while maintaining the structural durability required to withstand high-pressure steam blocking?
The Engineering Pipeline
Resolving non-manifold edges from raw point clouds to create water-tight SLA and FDM ready geometry.
The STL Foundry Protocol
Raw 3D scans contain millions of vertices resulting in broken, non-manifold meshes. We engineered an automated pipeline to heal `.stl` geometry and translate it into machine-ready `.gcode`. Test the demonstration UI below.
Terminal Output
Bridge the Physical and Digital
Bring legacy hardware into the modern manufacturing era.