This tells the whole story... these numbers are so far off from what they should be that this is not a business, but a charity cosplaying as a business. It's a pity you are going to drop this, I think if you adjust your pricing and become a bit more efficient you can easily make it work. But great you're sharing your numbers, you really just need better customers.
Rules of thumb: 10x on materials, base fee of $3 / hour of print time, $100 / hour design time if < 1000 parts, above that you can start pricing it into the job total.
Well at a minimum it bought him a new printer so it’s not all wasted. And if the $3352 represents mostly fixed upfront costs, the issue is revenue imo.
> Expanding your plastic filament palette requires upfront investment
Just a guess, but the number includes buying an entire 3D printer which you don’t have to keep doing.
I would amortize it over 5 years. Plus maintenance cost for replacement parts. After 5 it may still work but your competitors upgraded and so must you.
This guy only made 50 sales and 3000 hours of print time. I'm actually somewhat confused at how they need to keep replacement parts stocked up for that kind of low runtime.
This is either a bad choice of printer, some kind of user error, or supreme bad luck.
I don't even know how to get a clog printing with PLA.
3000 hours is a lot for a 3D printer, especially if you're not printing in PLA OR you are doing lots of filament swaps OR you're experimenting with different nozzles and filaments.
If you load your printer with one 10kg spool of PLA, odds are good you'll go a while without issues.
1. It was never a business for the reasons you brought up
2. The appeal seems to depend heavily on trademark infringement that would make it even less of a viable business long-term
3. I hate to be mean to OP but the print quality of these products look pretty darn low and undesirable. And yes, I do realize the Celtics photo was an example of a "before" result.
So much of the article talks about the printer breaking down and clogging all the time and it sounds like the author's got some really bad equipment or is otherwise doing something wrong here. 50 orders and 3000 hours of runtime doesn't usually get you busted motors and a major need to have spare parts on hand like the article describes.
All logos were supplied by the customers, and a lot of them were custom logos. The real value, IMO, was the name written in text, which is what I'm censoring out in each of the photos. There's still enough demand using alternative logos, since the "job to be done" is providing a trading card dealer with a way to show off their name/logo in pictures of their wares.
I wouldn't describe the situation as "the printer breaks down all the time". Stuff, like plates, or PFTE tube, or nozzles would wear out and break. It's not a regular occurrence, but it does happen, and it's enough of an issue when you are trying to hit a shipping window that you'll want to take steps to avoid it. From a story/narrative perspective, that's the stuff I tend to remember, not the other 99% of prints that turn out well.
The Bambu X1C is reliable, you just can't run it 24/7 and not run into issues. The most unreliable component is probably the AMS, something about that, plus matte PLA, was causing clogs where you had to take apart the AMS and fish out the broken filament. That happened to me maybe 3 times.
In those 50 orders, most of them were for 5-10 actual card stands, and throughput was enough of an issue that I bought a second printer.
As for the clogs, that's really specific to the 0.2mm nozzle, not the 0.4mm nozzle I used after the jam. Unjamming a 0.2mm is much more difficult, since the hole is so much smaller. I did try cold pulls, and several other techniques, but I do think the root cause was one roll of matte PLA filament. Sure, there was more stuff to try, but I didn't want to sink more than one night on the problem.
As for the quality of prints? I stand by the quality of prints as good examples of what can be done on consumer hardware. Consistent matte finish, even layer lines, bold, vivid logos that matched the input pics.I'm happy to design and print something people want, and my problem was never lack of demand.
That's true, but that could be just his choice of printer. I've got a prusa that has done 100 km of filament (ok, it is the oldest one) and 50 bambus, the bambus are insanely reliable.
Agreed that stuff shouldn't be breaking over that kind of runtime. But the article leaves out a lot of detail that would have helped identifying what is going wrong with the printers, but that's not the main reason this did not work, the main reason is a lack of business sense.
Something like 98 to 99% of prints worked out. When I wrote the piece, the moments of failure shaped the process and my approach, and not representative of the average print.
For the most part, my X1C + AMS set up was just plug and play, and I tried to use the Celtics print as an example of pushing that system beyond what it could do, and how struggling through that lead to specific adaptations in the process.
My focus was really getting prints out the door to hit shipping windows, so delays were felt by the customer and the reputation of my partner. Just the overall production pressure, it's a different experience than most prints I do for fun, where a failure is an opportunity to learn, and there's time to try alternatives.
As for the 0.2mm clog, I'm nearly certain it was an issue with the specific roll of filament I was using, Overature Matte PLA in the "forrest" green color they have. Other colors in that print worked. Usually PLA clogs are cooling issues, but optimizing the print profile would have been a big slow down.
I'm going to try to figure out how to make my websites as easy as possible to peruse for humans while making it as hard as possible to do the same for agents. There should be some way make the bots pay a price of admission while keeping it free for people.
Yes, it's absolutely amazing. But I'm intimately familiar with how the Erlang VM works and it would seem to me to be a very bad match for HPC on the number crunching side, though it likely would do quite well on the orchestration side but that would require the people writing the rest of the code to change their way of working completely. And given how much of that is still F77 I highly doubt they would be willing to make that investment without the promise of some massive gain.
Of course it does, that's an ideal usecase. But the topic is a different kettle of fish.
And I'm saying that as a complete fan of Erlang, it is one of the few pieces of software 'done right' that I'm aware of. Unfortunately that comes at the price of being unsuitable for highly optimized number crunching unless you want to break out the C-compiler and write an extension.
Python is similar, but there the extensions have been grafted on so well lots of people forget that they are not part of the language itself. In the Erlang world you'd have a lot of leaks and conversions to make something like that work and it would likely never be as transparent as python, which in many ways is both the new BASIC and the new FORTRAN.
FUD. Every inverter currently on the market immediately drops the connection if the grid isn't present, there is absolutely no way this could happen with these puny inverters.
I absolutely love your project and I hope it will become a breakout success. It has all the right components for a computing environment that is not controlled.
Have you thought about RISC-V implementations of the kernel as well (iirc you're on ARM and on x64)?
Oh, it only gets better. Thank you so much. If you ever get to the point where you have something ready to order please drop me a line (mail in profile) and I'll buy one set to evaluate and if it works well I will get some more people on it.
I second this. Occasionally the head will jam, but it is easy to clean them out. But, the A1 mini is the first device that really just works. It's so much fun.
Do not be an idiot like I was and try to print in an outdoor atrium to avoid fumes. That's really not an issue these days and humidity will kill your filament. For many reasons related to humidity control, it is useful to invest in a humidity monitoring filament holder.
Get an old Prusa MKIII and stick a Revo in there, then learn everything there is to know about 3D printing without spending a fortune or getting locked in. Once you have processed a couple of rolls of filament you'll be much wiser about your needs and that would be the moment to pull the trigger on a 'proper' printer.
Bambu AI is a very good printer (we have 10's of them, and 10's of Prusas as well), but the Bambu eco-system is not ideal and they push really hard to get you to use their cloud connect, the printers have cameras and send footage to servers in China if you get them connected to the point that they are usable. In contrast, there are many open source solutions that will connect a Prusa to your LAN and allow various degrees of remote management (Octoprint, for instance).
Prusa's are extremely hackable, I've adapted them to do all kinds of stuff they were never meant for (1x1x.25 meter for instance, or standard width and height but 65 cm tall). Bambu's are quite closed, though in theory you could hack on their slicer but it's infuriatingly bad compared to the alternatives.
I think I'd largely disagree with your recommendation, unless they specifically wanted to get into 3D printing (the hobby) rather than 3D Printing (the tool). I got my printer wanting to make things, and didn't enjoy the tinkering with my mk3 at all. It was a great printer for the time! But I swapped to a P2S and never looked back. I hear Prusa is competitive these days, though not perhaps in price at the low end.
I print a couple of tons every year and I would not be able to do that without the knowledge required to operate a farm reliably and productively. Yes, they're tools, but like all tools it helps to know what you're doing. If I hand you a machining center you won't be able to learn much without a lot of breakage and expense. If you get a lathe to learn and play with, to build up an intuition for feeds & speeds and how materials handle and chip then you will be able to use that machining center to the maximum of its abilities.
Tools require knowledge. 3D printers are no different in that respect and to toss $100 on a printer just to learn is money very well spent. And those old Prusa's excel at precision work, we can do stuff on those that we can not touch with any of the others.
Most people don't intend to print tons every year nor desire to manage a print farm. Most people interested in creating object rather than managing printers will have an infinitely better experience getting a Bambu that is ready to crank out amazing prints right out of the box.
Other than basic troubleshooting (which they have documentation on) there isn't really a need to take a deep dive into how exactly each piece works.
I say this as someone who started printing many years ago with an i3 clone and has replaced nearly every piece of multiple printers (control board, bearings, hotend, extruder, etc!) over the years for better performance. I moved away from wanting to tinker with the printers and haven't touched them since getting a P1S years ago.
I mean, it's kind of like comparing a tuner car with a new EV. Both will take you from A to B but one requires a lot more work to take you from A to B in a very specific manner while the other just turns on and goes. The tuner car has a tremendous amount of power and is really good at driving fast and accurately but it also requires a lot of work and custom parts to get it to perform like that. The most amount of work in maintaining the EV is that it may need new tires eventually, otherwise it just works.
Most people just want something that just works out of the box using models they downloaded from the internet. It's great that you want to have a 3D printer that performs at the absolute limit of the hardware but that requires work.
Not the MK3. I love that printer to death, but asking somebody new to 3D printing to do Z leveling manually is a tall order unless they're in it for the hobby.
The MK4, with its load cell, eliminates this requirement and is therefore a way better choice for someone new to 3D printing.
The MK3 does have auto Z leveling, but it does it with a PINDA sensor, and you're still going to need to do a Z calibration plus maybe some fine tuning, and that's not the hardest thing in the world, but it's not the easiest.
The loadcell on the MK4 completely eliminates that whole mess.
I've put 10's of thousands of hours on MK3s and the PINDA works fine as long as it is mounted well (which isn't always the case) and set to the right height relative to the nozzle. The automatic calibration routine - on a well built printer, which also isn't always the case, runs exactly once after you've built the printer. Fine tuning is possible, and can be quite useful if you want to play around with the degree to which your prints stick to the bed, for instance for automatic print release tricks (and bed temp as well).
The fact that you have all this control comes at a price compared to say a Bambu A1: you need to know a bit more about how a printer works. But that knowledge will come in very handy when sooner or later you want to do something that isn't in the manual.
The MK4 loadcell is a solution for some problems and a the cause of some others, it is not the best implementation of a loadcell either but it is smarter than the way for instance the Creality K1 and variations are set up (they have four, underneath the bed).
I would recommend against the Creality series printers by the way, they're dirt cheap and wicked fast but they break all the time and the stock extruder is complete junk.
Finally, the best investment you can probably make alongside any printer is a multi-roll filament dryer with a heating element and a fan. That more than anything else will affect your print quality.
We do the bulk of our work on Bambu's now, but for really high precision stuff we will use the MK3s and it's amazing what those old printers can churn out. Nozzle wear is a bit higher on the MK3s than on the Bambu's. The oldest MK3 we have has done > 100 Km of filament...
And just as dangerous: 50 employees. Because quite frequently these 50 employee companies have responsibilities that they can not begin to assume on the budgets that they have. Some business can really only be operated responsibly above a certain scale.
A law firm with 50 employees who use nothing but Microsoft Word, Outlook and a SaaS practice management application is really easy to button up tight, though they probably don’t have any inhouse IT and the quality of MSPs varies wildly.
A company of 50 software developers is an enormous headache.
- $3666 total revenue
- $3352 in expenses
- ~50 orders fulfilled
- ~3000 hours of logged print time.
This tells the whole story... these numbers are so far off from what they should be that this is not a business, but a charity cosplaying as a business. It's a pity you are going to drop this, I think if you adjust your pricing and become a bit more efficient you can easily make it work. But great you're sharing your numbers, you really just need better customers.
Rules of thumb: 10x on materials, base fee of $3 / hour of print time, $100 / hour design time if < 1000 parts, above that you can start pricing it into the job total.
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