Tom HallStudio Forty Three, a multi-disciplinary creative design house and manufacturing workshop based in Hampshire, is turning 3D designs into reality
Studio Forty Three was set up in 2014 by founder Thom Bridle. The company specialises in 3D digital design and manufacture using state of the art in-house equipment including 7-axis CNC milling robot & large format 3D printers, alongside a combination of 3D scanning, modelling & CAD.
Thom Bridle started his career in Jewellery and Interior Design and owned his own gallery for a number of years. After some time he felt inspired to get more hands on and did an apprenticeship with a joinery company through which he was introduced to CNC manufacturing. After familiarising himself with the industry and spotting the emerging accessibility of 3D printing and the symbiosis of the digital modelling and the potential of sculptural CNC machining he noticed that a lot of issues on projects were due to the lack of fluidity between the creative design and manufacturing process. This was mainly due to being carried out by different entities. This resulted in a lot of ‘end products’ that didn’t work and proved costly in the long run.
Bridle wanted to create a company that could fuse the creative and practical skills into one operation resulting in greater efficiency overall while enhancing the imaginative possibilities. Thus Studio Forty Three was born. We create anything and everything, from jewellery to product development for self-playing pianos, monumental sculptures to event props, out of production car parts to tiger mountains.
Case Study: Tiger Mountain
Merlin Entertainments ran into difficulties as the hand-made maquette they had for the project was the wrong scale, so needed digitising. Studio Forty Three were then brought in to do a 3D scan of the tiger rock design and then created a model which we were able to work closely with architects to engineer the installation and production process required for such a big project. The project took a total of three months milling 24 hours/7 days a week and comprised of 260 differently separately milled pieces of polystyrene that cleverly fitted together over the steel architectural structure a bit like a huge jigsaw puzzle, which was then finished by another contractor in concrete.
Result: The parent company funding the project were extremely impressed by our professionalism, speed of delivery and the accuracy of the finished product after the digital sculptures were created. This has given the industry a bit of a makeover as projects that had previously proved more costly and time-consuming are now a slicker creative and production process altogether as everyone knows exactly what they’re going to get.
Niche: Studio Forty Three prides itselves on its in-house skill set that create anything from scratch. If you can think of an idea, Studio Forty Three can help make it a reality.