Donair, the sweet and salty delicacy that was named Halifax’s official food in 2015, is quickly becoming the city’s favourite Christmas tree ornament.
Inspired by the donair cam, a 24-hour live feed of the famed spit of rotating meat at King of Donair on legendary pizza corner, engineer and tinkering enthusiast Gary Marsh used his 3-D printer to create a replica.
He took it to work, connected an old motor, stuck it on the company Christmas tree in the lobby and proceeded to post a little video to the Halifax subReddit.
“It just exploded into, ‘I will buy that. I want one. I want 10. Gimme, gimme gimme,’” says Marsh, a native of Torbay who moved to Halifax after clewing up his engineering degree at Memorial University in the early 2000s.
“At that point I thought I might have something here.”
Once his idea made the rounds on social media and some media outlets started expressing interest, Marsh knew he was on to something.
But with interest mounting faster than a pile of the finely ground beef mixed with breadcrumbs and spices shaved onto a warm pita and only one 3-D printer as his disposal, not to mention a full-time job, Marsh knew he would need some help if he hoped to meet the demand.
He contacted Mohammed Issa, owner of EurekaTek, a Lower Sackville-based small business that offers 3-D printing, laser cutting and engraving, prototyping, electronics and more.
“With some changes and with his help, we came up with a really good, easy to print, quick design that we could print lots of with minimal clean-up afterward,” Marsh said.
They also designed authentic cardboard packaging that closely resembles what a real donair would be served in, complete with tinfoil wrap around its base.
Online sales for the first 50 donair ornaments went live late Monday night and people started gobbling them up faster than the donairs that inspired the non-traditional holiday decoration.
“The next morning at around 9, we were sold out,” says Issa. “I woke up and emails started flying in with orders. I was looking at the stock levels and every time I refreshed the page it kept going down until it was out of stock. We’ve been in backorder since.”
As of noon on Wednesday, there were close to 200 orders pending.
“It is sort of unbelievable,” he says.
In order to meet that demand and hopefully get the ornaments on people’s trees in time for the holiday season, Marsh and Issa knew it would require an organized production plan.
Issa, who has one employee at EurekaTec, recruited his wife, sister and a regular customer who volunteered to assist, giving him an assembly team of five.
He also dipped into his own stock and unpackaged 3-D printers he had for sale. By Friday morning, he expects to have 10 printers working at capacity.
“Everything snaps together, like the little shaft it spins on is a bent piece of copper wire, the packaging has to be printed and laser cut and folded up and taped together and the foil put on it,” says Marsh. “There’s a lot of hands-on assembly behind it.”
The finished product, available at eurekatec.com/shop/donair-ornament, retails for $14.99 plus tax.
Unlike the prototype Marsh built, the ornaments for sale are not motorized.
“To make a spinning ornament, we’d have to source motors, probably with a long lead time, come up with a much more complicated design with gears or belts to make the thing work, and run it through all this testing,” says Marsh.
“Suffice it to say that wasn’t going to happen in time for Christmas.”
Issa says Marsh’s creation is a perfect example of how 3-D printing allows an idea to go to full production far quicker and cheaper than employing large-scale production such as injection molding.
“Let’s start with 3-D printing, let’s create the base of it, the structure of the piece, let’s put it together, let’s see how well it works, let’s modify the pieces,” Issa explains.
“That could be a process that’s done in hours. It doesn’t have to be months and tens of thousands of dollars before you see your product for the first time.”
As for whether or not there’s an opportunity to explore a market for the product outside the Christmas season, both Marsh and Issa are interested to see if the consumer demand is strong enough.
First, though, they just want to get through the holidays.
“The way this whole thing came together was just amazing,” says Marsh. “It was Thursday that I stuck this silly thing on the tree and it was late Friday that I decided this was something I could make. Fast-forward three days we’ve got an army of 3-D printers making these things.”
Twitter: kennoliver79
