I'm Hugo, the BrokenITguy. I spent almost 20 years in tech and eventually ended up doing IT support for a TV sports channel that felt like home, the job I honestly thought I would retire from. I kept pushing through back pain like I always had until it finally caught up with me: an ER trip, surgery that got pushed almost a year longer than the doctors wanted, and nerve damage that hit so hard that even after several surgeries and procedures I wound up medically retired at 37, right in what should have been the prime of my career.
For a long time after that, I felt like I had lost the life I knew and liked. First it felt like something dying, then for years it was mostly numbness. A few years ago I started watching YouTube again, mostly IT guys and tech content, and it woke something back up in me. I started playing video games with my kid again and little by little I started feeling more like myself.
That is part of what led me here. I had already been tinkering, learning about design, and buying a few 3D printed parts from other shops to fix things around the house. For my birthday, my wife was planning to get me a 3D printer, and while I was researching what machine to get, I went down the rabbit hole.
The more I learned, the more I realized this could be more than a hobby. The quality of modern printers is on a different level now, and the fabrication side of the business felt like something I could actually do even on bad pain days. I can control a printer from my room on a laptop or my phone, and I built this setup around making the physical side of the work manageable.
BrokenITguy CustomWorks grew out of that. This is not a print farm pumping out a hundred of the same thing. This is on-demand, made-to-order work for tinkerers, builders, and problem solvers. The people who need a custom bracket, a working prototype, a replacement for the part nobody makes anymore, or a specific one-off nobody else will take on.
Twenty years of IT work taught me that the hardest part of any project is rarely the build. It is finding someone who actually understands what you are trying to do. I spent too many years being that person inside server rooms. Now I get to be that person for other makers. Today that means instant quotes on print-ready files. Soon — when the Studio opens — it means sending me the napkin sketch and the calipers measurements too.
The kind of work I care about most is the one-off stuff. A prototype for an engineer building something new. The enclosure that finally makes the Raspberry Pi project look finished. That one D&D mini nobody else has. Sometimes it is one piece, sometimes two, but the point is that it matters to the person who ordered it.
What I want you to understand is simple: I am not a print farm. I am a fellow maker taking your project seriously and making the right thing. Not a hundred of them. The one you actually need.
This shop is not just a business to me. It is part of building a life again, one project at a time.
