25 Sept 2026
He Never Told His Friends About This
Somebody in chat asked if we could see a picture of a young RetroMaker, and he said sure, he had one right there on his desk.
Christmas, 1983. Glasses. He's doing a little overbite on purpose, to be cool. And there in the shot is his first boombox.
The boombox he designed to be 3D printed, the one that more or less started his whole retro catalog, is kind of based on that one. He didn't lead with that. It came out twenty-some minutes in, because somebody in the room asked for a picture.
That happened all night. I'd ask about a model and the answer would turn into something he did as a kid, or a movie he loves.
When I asked him for the elevator pitch he said 3D designer and handyman, and then told me he doesn't really have one, because he works for himself and doesn't pitch anybody. A few minutes later he gave me the real one without trying. "I'm into the past." Old movies, old TV shows, old pop culture. He has a set of coasters based on the pattern on the kitchen wall in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He designed a trunk made of a pile of printed parts and covered it in travel-sticker labels, all Colorado ones, including the Overlook Hotel and the Gold Room from The Shining. Ask him his favorite movie and he'll want to say Blade Runner, but he always goes back to The Shining. He figures he's seen it twelve or fifteen times.
Then he told me something I didn't expect. In high school, around Rochester, the George Eastman House used to show old movies, and he went. He was a teenager and everybody else there was about sixty and older. He never told his friends.
"I was into all sorts of stuff that my friends didn't know. Cause I was embarrassed."
Now on Fridays he runs trivia on his Twitch and then shows an old movie. Right now it's the Star Wars-ish independent stuff from the late seventies. So the same old movies he used to keep to himself, he now puts on screen for whoever shows up. He says a lot of them he hasn't seen either, so he gets to watch them too.
That thread runs through more of him than the movies. He told me he's always kind of been shy. He's been DJing since 1999, mostly as what he calls a basement or bedroom DJ, and at one point he took a job DJing weddings for a company that handed him the gear. Nobody pushed him into it. He wanted to get on a microphone in front of a bunch of people and make himself do it, and he says it made a big difference. He has a separate DJ channel too, once a month or so earlier this year. Two to five people watch, and he says he does it more for himself, and for the graphics. He loves building intricate OBS overlays.
The retro work itself started with a favor. A streamer friend who does puppetry wanted his puppet to break-dance, and he needed a boombox with a Bluetooth speaker in it. So RetroMaker figured out a boombox with a lid you could drop a small speaker into. Then a 1967 TV you slide your phone into. Then radios, including a 1930s radio he actually owns, rebuilt for printing with a speaker inside.
Before any of that, there was a cardboard fort. As a kid he built a whole fort out of corrugated cardboard, something from the 1700s or 1800s,, held together with toothpicks and glue. Drafting class in high school. A grandfather who was an architectural engineer in New York City and took him onto big building sites. An architecture degree from Virginia Tech, from a program so arts-heavy he learned watercolor, darkroom photography and printmaking along the way. He couldn't find an architecture job when he graduated, so he did graphic and web design for about ten years.
He told me he still kind of regrets not following through on it. What he's thinking about now is getting his building models and dioramas good enough that it becomes a way back in, maybe making models for an architecture firm. Watching him talk about the chapel, I believe it. The stonework is made of panels that each have to match the next one so the pattern runs continuous. He's been working on it
