About

Our team is a small Ottawa 3D-printing project laboratory hub created for experimenting, designing, building and learning.

We turn ideas into physical objects using 3D design and additive manufacturing.

Where does EXCUBUM come from?

EXCUBUM is about thinking outside the box - and then making what you imagined real.

The name was inspired by two old words:

EX comes from Latin and means “out of” or “from within.”

CUBUM comes from the Latin word cubus, meaning a cube - one of the simplest building blocks of a 3D world.

The Latin Cubus means a cube, die, or cubic form, comes from Greek kybos, meaning a six-sided die and cubum is one grammatical form of that word.

Put the ideas together and you get EX-CUBUM:

Out of the cube. Beyond the box.

UM is what you find there also - uncertainty.

A cube can be the beginning of almost anything. In 3D design, simple shapes can be stretched, cut, combined, twisted and transformed into something completely new.

That is what EXCUBUM is about.

We start with an idea.
We imagine something that doesn't exist yet.
We design it in three dimensions.
And then a 3D printer turns that idea into something we can actually hold.

So for us, “thinking outside the box” isn't only an expression.

Our logo started the same way every Excubum project starts - as an idea. It was drawn, designed, and 3D-printed by one of our young makers.

The logo three faces read:

X – Q – B

Say the letters aloud:

X → “ex”
Q → “cue” / cu
B → “bee” / beginning of bum

So the logo is essentially a compressed rebus for:

EX – CU – BUM
X – Q – B

That explains why Q works better than C. The letter C would be pronounced “see,” which does not represent the “cu / cue” sound in Excubum. But Q, when spoken aloud, gives almost exactly that middle syllable: cue.

There is another nice consequence: the logo isn't just displaying the first letters of pieces of the word. It requires the viewer to decode it. That is perfectly aligned with Excubum's “think outside the box” idea.