About Konstantinos

Hi, I’m the owner of MiniToyMakers, Konstantinos. I get asked these 2 questions the most, “When?” and “Why?” So let me answer all of those by going on a quick trip with us about the 3 years of MiniToyMakers. This all started in 3rd grade when I wanted to make stuff for people. I thought “Oh I have a laminator.” Nope! “How about printing stuff?” And that’s when it came to me, I had a 3D printer sitting in the dusty corner. So maybe I print stuff? That was it. You wouldn’t believe how many orders I got when I first announced it. 1-2 pages, of compact names and orders, every day. I somehow completed them, but issues started forming. I lost papers because I had so many, everything was a mess in the queue, and the final straw was the cost. All of it, the filament, repairs to my old printer, and the electricity.  This was the end of the 3rd grade year. Fast forward to 4th grade, I didn’t want to do this all again. Everybody wanted it so I had no choice but to bring it back. And so, it was brought back, again with the same amount of orders, all going smoothly. Until disaster struck. I got infected by this thing called laziness. I also completely forgot about MiniToyMakers (or as it was known before, 3D printing). Again, fast-forwarding to the end of the year, we need to do a how-to project in class. Thinking of maybe Coke and Mentos? All was a failure until like in 3rd grade, I forgot about my 3D printer, the old TOYBOX sitting in not the dusty corner this time, but instead, in another dusty corner. I yanked it out, turned it on and it printed in 3D form (hence the name 3D printer). Get it? So I brought it in, did the whole PowerPoint thing and woah, I wish I could tell you, my friend went BANANAS when it wouldn’t connect to Wi-Fi. It was so funny. Here’s a quick transcript, between me and my friend Joey.

     “Why did I even agree to do this stupid thing with you? I should have just done how to hit a hockey stick.”

     “What am I supposed to do Joey? She won’t let us connect to the WiFi! You want me to bring my whole house?” Do you know sarcasm? Well I don’t think he understood.

     “Well yeah if that’s what it takes! Why are you recording me?”

And the flipping out kept going for about 15 minutes. So I ended up printing everybody a toy. Let’s now skip the summer to 5th grade, specifically November. In November, the official as we know it today, MiniToyMakers begun. The MiniToyMakers.com website spun up, email, everything. Well not in a good way. Website was trash, only saying “Jobs” and “Shop” on the top. That’s all I knew at the time. Anyways, 3rd graders and 5th graders are 2 different things. 5th graders made me get like 2-3 orders a day, 3rd graders, maybe 30 a day. So, I did the orders, and then, I wanted more. It was getting boring. So I printed business cards. Didn’t help. Put my site on Google search. Didn’t help. A phone number. 1 order. Didn’t help. I almost gave up, but then my TOYBOX started printing sideways. It made too many mistakes. It started to fail. Now, I go to TOYBOX, and they give me a newer discounted printer. The Alpha 3. Prints a tad faster, and more quality. I started again. Turns out for Christmas, my aunt and cousins were planning on getting me the Alpha 3. That was the best mistake we could have ever done, getting me the Alpha 3 before Christmas was good because that pushed my family towards a higher end printer. Let’s skip to Christmas, they ordered me a higher end printer, it came right after New Year’s 2026. It turned out to be a Flashforge AD5X. Now when it works, its a good printer, when it won’t, not so much. First error, ramming the walls. I fixed it. 2nd error, it says there is a gcode error, even though it made the gcode. Did not fix that. 3rd error, started ramming the walls. That was my queue to get a camera for it. I started watching it and canceling it when it rammed. But school was still a thing. If you can’t tell, we have moved from like January to September. I came home from school, to an airprinter. I will link that video below. Then the “Blob of Death”. I haven’t found out how to fix that yet, but i will link the photo below as well. That concludes it all about me!

-Konstantinos Gikas