Mechanical R&D / Product Development — Medical Devices · Additive Manufacturing · AI-Augmented Engineering · Musical Instrument Maker · Yoga Teacher

📍 Santa Clara, CA · ✉️ tonykoop@gmail.com · LinkedIn

If you're visiting for a specific reason, these are the quickest entry points:

• Mechanical R&D / product development: suction-cup-mount, metal-powder-flow-device, tumbler-oven
• Process and lab methodology: tensile-testing, additive-manufacturing, cnc
• Instrument design and craftsmanship: ashiko-drum-workshop, flutes, djembe
• Acoustics + experimental design: tongue-drum
• Wrfcoin origin story / computational prototype: WSS-2019

I'm a mechanical R&D engineer with 9+ years across medical device prototype development, laboratory testing, and metal additive manufacturing. Currently an R&D Technician on the Teleflex UroLift 3 program in Pleasanton (via Oxford Corp). Before that: Mechanical Lab Technician at Johnson & Johnson (Milpitas), Metal 3D Print Specialist at Uniformity Labs (Fremont), Design Engineer at Excel Plastics (Minneapolis), and Senior Product Design Specialist at Bracketron (Edina, MN) — where I'm first-named inventor on US Patent 11,137,017 B2.

Outside professional engineering, I build wooden instruments — drums and flutes I've been making and studying for 16+ years, beginning with drum building at Morgan Drums in St. Paul. The two practices inform each other; the same engineering instincts that make a stave-built djembe sound right are what make a medical device prototype assemble cleanly.

I also teach yoga.

• suction-cup-mount — Inventor's companion to US Patent 11,137,017 B2. First-named inventor; assignee Bracketron, Inc.
• retail-displays — In-store signage and fixture design at Excel Plastics for Target, Best Buy, Sephora, and other national retailers.
• tumbler-oven — Reverse-engineering and repair of an industrial tumbler oven for processing powdered metal feedstock at Uniformity Labs.
• metal-powder-flow-device — A scientific measurement instrument for powdered-metal flow characterization, designed and hybrid AM + CNC fabricated at Uniformity Labs.

• tensile-testing — ASTM E8/E8M tensile-testing methodology across metal AM, drug-delivery-device studies, and current medical-device R&D.
• additive-manufacturing — Metal LPBF process-development narrative plus the longer polymer-printing thread it grew out of.
• cnc — Self-taught CAM programming, Haas operator work, workholding lessons, and AM-to-CNC post-processing.

• WSS-2019 — Wolfram Summer School 2019 archive. Early Wrfcoin prototype connecting live weather-station data to a privately operated Wolfram-based blockchain, developed after an invitation from Stephen Wolfram at Collision 2019.

A continuing engineering practice across drum and flute traditions on three continents:

• ashiko-drum-workshop — January 2015 makerspace workshop I designed and led. 8 builders, 16 stave-built ashiko drums, full CAD + jig + BOM documentation.
• djembe — Stave-built djembes — a technique I built drums with at Morgan Drums starting in March 2010. Predecessor methodology to the ashiko workshop. Includes a college Helmholtz-resonator bass-tone analysis with original handwritten derivations.
• dundun — The cylindrical dual-headed bass drums of the West African djembe ensemble (kenkeni / sangban / doundounba).
• didgeridoo — Stave-built didgeridoo design rooted in a 2013 acoustic study covering 25 musical keys.
• flutes — 150+ Native American style wooden flutes, with a parametric design table covering F4 to E5 and a build registry tracking every flute, recipient, wood species, and failure mode.
• fujara — The Slovak overtone shepherd's flute (UNESCO Intangible Heritage). Tall harmonics-driven instrument; only flute in the portfolio whose melody comes from overblowing the harmonic series rather than finger holes.

• tongue-drum — Three planned builds plus a proper design-of-experiments protocol for predicting tongue note from geometry, material, and strike data. The cleanest single repo for seeing acoustics, measurement planning, and cross-repo skill indexing in one place.
• Additional instrument documentation in progress: frame drums.

I build Claude Code and Codex agent skills to speed up the engineering and craft work. Each skill packages domain knowledge, scripts, and reference documents that an agent reads on demand.

• instrument-maker — A musical-instrument design skill that encodes 17 years of build experience: acoustic physics across 30+ instrument families (open/stopped pipes, cantilever beams, Helmholtz resonators, vibrating strings), empirical NAF bore-diameter corrections from 150+ flutes built, segmented-drum math, CNC strategy, and complete BOM/build-method generation. The repo holds both runtime variants side by side:

  • Codex variant — modular SKILL.md plus references/, scripts/, agents/, and assets/ directories. The result of a major Codex-driven modularization that broke the monolith into focused reference docs the agent loads on demand.
  • Claude variant — single-file SKILL.md with all physics formulas inline. The original shape, kept around for runtime parity.

  Drives the parametric design tables, build packets, and CAD scaffolds across the 40-plus instrument repos in this profile.

• woodworking — Segmented turning and assorted shop projects.
• chessboard-table — Segmented-construction wooden coffee table with inlaid chessboard.
• Additional documentation in progress: sewing projects and a hexacopter aerial-sensing platform with future Wrfcoin crossover potential.

• Teleflex UroLift 3 R&D — medical device prototype assembly, fixture design, design controls.
• Wrfcoin testnet launch — IoT-to-blockchain weather data project, public launch planned mid-2026.
• Finishing the BSME at Arizona State (or possibly SJSU / Cal Poly SLO) — 118 credits already in.
• AI-augmented engineering workflows — Claude Code, Codex, and command-line agents for CAD documentation, FEA setup, and technical writing.

The instrument repos and the personal-craft repos are released under CC-BY 4.0 — use freely with attribution.

The engineering repositories that document work I did at past employers (suction-cup-mount, retail-displays, tumbler-oven, metal-powder-flow-device, tensile-testing, additive-manufacturing, cnc) clarify in their READMEs — and in NOTICE.md where applicable — that the underlying designs, formulations, test methods, programs, and proprietary information remain the property of the respective employer or client. Those repositories are portfolio pieces documenting my role; they do not release proprietary CAD, drawings, toolpaths, formulations, or test results. CC-BY 4.0 in those repos applies only to my original written content and photographs.

• Email: tonykoop@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: in/anthonykoop
• Wrfcoin: www.wrfcoin.com