About
Westley Kleinman
Founder of MONTE
I study mechanical engineering at Duke with an entrepreneurship certificate. I raced and led Duke Club Cycling, and I’ve spent years in R&D and 3D printing. The short version: I build things with my hands, and MONTE came out of that habit.
Origin
Here’s how MONTE started.
Not a pitch deck. A basement printer, a local trail system, and a few years of getting the alignment wrong before getting it right.
- 12
Age 12
EAST class, broken printers
I discovered 3D printing in an EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technology) class. I spent most of my time fixing the printers instead of sitting still.
- 13
Age 13
A Creality Ender 3 in the basement
I bought my first printer — a Creality Ender 3 — with saved-up money. It ran in the basement all through high school, turning out knick-knacks, lithophanes, and whatever else I could feed it.
- 01
Local trails
Northwoods, Hot Springs
Eventually I saw the potential for 3D trail maps — starting with the mountain bike system I grew up on: Northwoods Trails in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
- 02
Years of trial and error
Hand-traced. Hand-aligned. Sharpie finish.
The early process was scrappy and almost entirely manual. I traced trails over a PDF to build an SVG, extruded that into a 3D file, downloaded terrain as a separate mesh, overlaid the two in Fusion 360, and used a boolean intersection to carve the trail into the terrain. Then I extruded the path a few millimeters above the surface and colored the raised lines with Sharpie to mark difficulty. No fancy software. No fancy printer. And because terrain and trail were aligned by hand, it was never very accurate.
No fancy software. No fancy printer. Just trails carved by hand and colored with a Sharpie.
- 03
First sales
NICA Arkansas trophies
I showed those early maps to NICA Arkansas — my local high school mountain bike racing league. Race-course maps as trophies became the first maps I ever sold.
- 04
Today
Proprietary, print-ready
I spent about a year building custom software that pulls data from OpenSkiMap and outputs print-ready 3D files. The details of that pipeline stay close — it’s what makes MONTE possible at the quality it ships today.
That accuracy gap is why MONTE exists.
So every ridge and trail lands where it belongs — without tracing PDFs in a basement.
Get in Touch
Want to know more?
Reach out directly — I answer my own email.