Our new company blog will cover all things chastity (and more!). For this first post, our founder will tell the story of how KINK3D originally got started.
Guess what I didn’t plan to do with my life?
By: KD
If you’ve been around these parts for a while, I've probably connected with you at one point or another. In fact if you’re a true Cobra early adopter, it might have been back when all the Reddit messages you received from this mysterious but oddly communicative internet rando were signed with the not-very-natural-sounding pen name “K3D”. Thankfully someone pointed out to me that K3D doesn't exactly sound like a real name.[1]
So, in the spirit of continuous optimization, I shortened it. Which means...
Hi! I’m KD. I founded KINK3D and am the designer of our cages.
I’m usually quite private about myself. Writing this post about the origin story of the company is taking me a little outside my comfort zone. If you like it, you can thank Chris, our fantastic new head of marketing, for encouraging me to do it. If you don’t like it, the responsibility is, of course, all mine.
Looking back on everything that’s happened with KINK3D, one of the (many) crazy parts of the story is that I became obsessed with CAD modeling, 3D printing, and industrial design of chastity cages in large part due to giving up on the prospect of male chastity cages entirely.
Let me back up on that.
As an all-around bondage and gear fetishist since, well, forever, at some point chastity cages had come across my radar and intrigued me. Like the rest of us who shared a certain cast of mind in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s, I’d seen photos of the CB-6000, the Holy Trainer, and a handful of other iconic products circulating on places like Tumblr and Reddit. I’d read blogs like Denying Thumper and forums like Chastity Mansion. And I’d bookmarked just about all the arcane chastity lore that was floating around at the time (anyone remember when “the stocking method” was treated as standard protocol for putting on a cage?).
I tried out the market-leading plastic models, and quickly learned three things:
First, if your brain is wired a certain way, and you put a cage on, it is immediately compelling and arousing in a way that’s almost impossible to overstate.
Second, there was no way I could wear one of the existing injection-molded plastic cages for more than about an hour, let alone continuously for days or weeks, without getting hurt. The cages that dominated the industry all had sharp edges and narrow (1.25” / 32mm) entrances. Some also had seams where the pieces were glued together. I couldn’t find any way to wear them without risking a skin injury from rubbing, pinching, or laceration. Not to mention the alarming situation with cleaning and hygiene.
This was all perplexing to me. Plenty kinksters online seemed to be wearing these cages for months at a stretch (if not longer). Were other people’s bodies just built differently? Or was there some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth from the fetish masses?
To this day, I’m honestly not sure how to square what I saw on Chastity Internet with what I learned firsthand about the reality of caging. Perhaps the yearning on the part of chastity enthusiasts to satisfy their desire for being locked was just so strong that it overrode everything else.
Third, even if a cage could be worn safely, it seemed disconcertingly easy to pull out the back and cheat. I had no idea about this when I got introduced to cages. I genuinely assumed that if the cage was on, you were stuck, and your orgasms were at the undefeatable mercy of whoever held your key. Discovering the truth, it felt like the entire internet had colluded to keep this aspect of chastity products under wraps.
At this point, with some wistfulness, I gave up. I figured, there are a whole lot of kinks in the sea, and I’m drawn to, um, many of them. As much as I wanted to make it work, maybe locking up just wasn’t meant to be part of that mix for me.[2][3]
A chance encounter
Fast-forward a few years. In 2018, I stumbled on a post by Reddit’s u/mcqueen455. The specific post is sadly no longer available, but it showed off a two-part locking cock ring. It was similar to the one that you can see here (NSFW). I got intrigued! Could this be a solution delivering 80% of the fun of locking with only 20% of the practical issues that had led me to give up on cages? I had to find out.
There were only two makers of products like this at the time, so I chose one of them and placed an order. The build time was about 3 months. I remember being so excited to receive the international package.
When I opened it, of course all I wanted was to try it on immediately. But I could tell right away that the omens were not looking good. The size turned out not to be right for me, and the front ring was designed in a way that pressed down on the anatomy, which didn’t seem likely to be ergonomic (or even safe) during erections.
Authentic sparkles, not added in post-processing
At this point, something snapped for me. I could see in my mind’s eye exactly how a product could be designed differently, in a way that would work much better. It was so frustrating. I had the momentary thought: How hard can it be to make a better locking cock ring?
The answer to that question consumed the next 6 months of my life.
Put a ring on it
I want to emphasize that, at this point, making a full-on chastity cage was truly the furthest thing from my mind. This was for two reasons:
1. As a result of my early experiences, I was convinced that it was literally impossible to design a chastity cage that would be (a) comfortable, (b) safe, (c) secure, (d) durable, (e) lightweight, and (f) easy to keep clean — at least not with the technology available at the time.
2. I still had no clue how to design anything using 3D modeling software (CAD), and the shape of a cage seemed so complex and intimidating that I couldn’t even begin to imagine where to start.
But I was just optimistic and horny motivated enough to think that I could make a cock ring that would work better for me. All I had to do was (a) make a size that fit me correctly and (b) give it a recessed area on top, so it wouldn’t push down as much on erections. These goals seemed achievable.
I had a vague sense of what CAD software was, and I’d read that the easiest way to get started making things designed in CAD was with 3D printing. So I started mainlining YouTube tutorials for the most powerful modeling software that could be downloaded for free, which was Autodesk’s Fusion 360 (I wonder if LarsLive knows how many amateur chastity designers he’s helped over the years). Very slowly and painfully, I got better at creating models.
I also knew zero about 3D printing. I decided that the best thing to do would be to search for 3D printing on Yelp (it was 2018, the dark ages). I found a local place, sent them my design files, asked them to make a set with whatever material they thought was best, and waited.
They used PLA. This was not the correct choice. The parts were extremely brittle — so much so, one broke almost instantly when I took it out of the box, before I could even attach the two pieces together, let alone wear the device longterm. In fact I later learned that if I’d left them in my car for too long, they might have melted.
You have to start somewhere
Fortunately, a big enough piece survived for me to break out my $18 Amazon calipers, check how close I'd gotten to the correct dimensions for the lock, and make adjustments before moving on to a second attempt.
I started testing all the online suppliers I could find that offered different types of 3D print technology and materials. Upload the files, wait impatiently for a couple weeks, get the package in the mail, analyze potential areas of improvement (usually regarding smoothness), harangue their customer service with a level of persistence that in retrospect must have seemed insane to them, modify key dimensions by tenths of a millimeter — rinse and repeat.
After months of work, I eventually landed on this:
It was a print made with selective laser sintering of PA12 nylon, strong enough to withstand actual wear, not very smooth, dubiously porous — but promising enough that I felt good about posting it online.
Interlude: What's in a name?
The name I started using on Reddit for the purposes of getting emotional validation helpful feedback from the community was u/kink3d.
Let's get it over with: It's pronounced "kink three dee". Not "kinked". Pronounce it wrong too many times, and the Chastity Fairy will make all your keys disappear when you're least expecting it ;)
The idea of the name was (1) I was literally using 3D printing to make kinky stuff; (2) as a devoted gear fetishist, I wanted to allude to the satisfaction of taking kinky fantasies and turning them into three-dimensional, tangible reality through design and manufacturing.
Notching a win
After some additional testing and design tweaks, plus a switch to better production technology that improved the smoothness and reduced the porosity, I posted Version 2 of the locking cock ring design that I was then calling the X-Lock. (This is why to this day, many of our base rings have an 'X' on the back. It's also why so many counterfeits of our products have an 'X' on them, probably without even knowing the origin story!)
Version 2 met my original goals for this extremely obsessive and niche personal project: it had the smoothness, material density, durability, and ergonomic shape to be comfortable for daily wear. (If you're wondering, it lives on — in an even more polished form — as our Shaft Ring.)
This was a moment of real personal satisfaction for me. I was genuinely proud of it. I think at this point an alternate universe timeline could easily have been that I hung up my spurs and turned my attention to more responsible traditionally-career-advancing uses of time. In retrospect I am therefore extremely grateful that the response from the Reddit community was essentially: Nice work bro, but come on, you know what we're all here for. Why aren't you designing a proper cage?
Well, there's an answer to that! Please refer back to the concerns I listed above:
1. I didn't think it was possible to make a chastity cage that was (a) comfortable, (b) safe, (c) secure, (d) durable, (e) lightweight, and (f) easy to keep clean.
2. Designing a cage seemed like such a complex and intimidating technical project, and when I first got into 3D modeling, I didn't have a clue how or where to start.
Let me address these sticking points in turn, because for anyone working on creative projects, I think there are useful takeaways from each of them:
Getting past the first obstacle required convincing myself that I didn't have to make something perfect. (This was not easy.) Up to this point, I'd had the idea that if I was going to design a cage, it had better meet all six of the criteria that I'd laid out for a quality device, otherwise it would be a disappointment and not worth bothering. But all my work so far had given me a much greater intuition about what was possible with the materials and what was achievable with 3D-printed geometries; I realized that I might be in a position to hit five out of six criteria. I just had to let go of the remaining one: security.
The key insight was that none of the existing market leaders had security either and that was okay — despite this limitation, kinky humans still liked the chastity cage product category, still bought cages in large numbers even though they could slip out the back, and still got genuine satisfaction and (prevention of) pleasure from the products. Therefore, if I could significantly advance comfort, safety, hygiene, and durability, even if the security stayed the same, that would still be a worthwhile improvement that would make a real difference for people's daily lives.[4]
What's more, some of the design choices of the existing market leaders seemed to me to be security theater: features aimed at making it marginally harder to pull out (but still easy), at the cost of dramatically worse comfort and safety. I decided to ditch the security theater.
Getting past the second obstacle — feeling intimidated by the scope of the project — was accomplished by already having a locking cock ring in the bag. Without quite realizing it, I was already at least halfway to a cage.
Designing good interfaces is very hard. Developing the KINK3D interface and gradually iterating on it over time has taken up thousands of hours of my life as well as serious work by our engineering team. One sign that it's been a success is that the KINK3D interface has been copied by a truly astounding variety of illegal knockoffs and fakes.
Yes this fine fellow is infringing on our patents
What I realized was that the X-Lock (locking cock ring) was equivalent to a cage interface. If I stuck with it, thought of it as an unalterable constraint, and built a cage design around it, then the intimidation and decision paralysis would be significantly mitigated.
At this point, I was also hooked on CAD, and coming up with a cage design felt like a great way to motivate myself to keep improving and adding to my skillset.
In this way, the development of the Cobra cage design was organically chunked into (barely) manageable pieces.
It's a cliché to talk about the value of breaking up big projects into parts. So if I can add one slightly different take on the subject, it's that what really helped in this case was having a big project get broken up such that the component parts were individually satisfying steps along the way. This is a true cheat code for the dopamine system. I am not so naïve as to think that the universe always carves kinky projects (or other projects, but what use are those?) at the joints like this; but if you can find a way to do it, then absolutely you should take advantage.
Enter the Cobra
I am going to pass over an in-depth analysis of the functional and stylistic decisions that went into designing the Cobra. This is already a long post, and I think the subject of cage design may deserve a separate blog treatment in the future.
What I will say is that the Cobra design has come a long way from its starting point:
Render of first ever Cobra model (even derpier view here)
With a rough jumping-off point in hand, I started making prototypes, collecting real-world feedback, and gradually refining the design and building out the size lineup based on conversations with testers who came to me on Reddit — people who somehow had the horniness trust and faith in humanity to PayPal a stranger on the internet who didn't even have a website (Thank youuu 💕).
It took many small adjustments — from the angle of the head, to the fanning out of the hood-shaped top bar (which ultimately inspired the Cobra name), to increasing the containment with more crossbars on the head, to internally thickening the bars at the tip of the head to protect the glans, to adding the Y-shaped "forked tongue" sidebars that have become an iconic part of the design, to hundreds if not thousands of tiny changes to every possible dimension to optimize the proportions — but I'm very proud of where it ultimately landed.
🎵 One of these things (is not like the others) 🎵
Thanks for coming along for this reminiscence about the early days! I'm excited to write more posts in the future, and you'll also be regularly hearing from other members of the growing KINK3D team. Coming up next week: our first guest post from the community.
🐍💕🔐
[1] Yep! This is the kind of blog that has footnotes. Anyway: That someone was Paul, the first person I hired to help out when I realized that Cobra cages were becoming more than a solo project that could be run forever out of cardboard boxes on the floor of my apartment. He's had a huge effect on the growth of the company, has sized many of you along the way, and has gone on to become our COO.
[2] The main point I want to make here is that when talking about other cage designs, especially ones from the past, I always try hard to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses, but without disparaging the underlying creativity of the designers. Because the truth is, making something new is hard. There is zero chance our products would exist in their current form without the ingenious work of A.L. Enterprises and their original CB-2000 device that invented the category. Same goes for Holy Trainer and their resurrection of an arcane German keyhole lock meant to keep nosy cousins out of your furniture drawer. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
[3] I should note: Perhaps a metal cage from one of the half-dozen or so legendary artisans working in Europe, Canada, and the US could have solved some of these issues for me. But I tend to be very physically active, and (rightly or wrongly) I was convinced at the time that a heavier device wouldn’t be compatible with my life.
[4] Over time, I realized I could expand my goals to include intentionally aiming for stylishness, as well as offering a huge range of ready-to-ship sizes that now massively exceeds any other product on the market. But these additional goals were well beyond the scope of my original vision.