6 ms·

$120k for the prototype printer, $360k for the production printer... still about two orders of magnitude away from being practical for me to set up a microfacto

$120k for the prototype printer, $360k for the production printer... still about two orders of magnitude away from being practical for me to set up a microfactory in my garage. Maybe by the time my car is self-driving and earning me money instead of sitting in my garage, I can get that microfactory set up affordably.

georgeecollins 9y ago
But not two orders of magnitude too expensive for a high end machine shop with a small warehouse. You can see this as something that you may dream about as a 'maker', but more importantly this could be something that allows small companies to make parts locally rather than overseas.
- yarg 9y ago
  Even if only the price of the prototyper comes down a bit more, it'll improve things significantly. The ability to rapidly prototype in low cost, low latency iterations will be a boon across many industries - regardless of whether or not you end up outsourcing production. And of course, you may just end up outsourcing down the road.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  I'd say the two go hand-in-hand. The holy grail of the maker movement is microfactories where individuals or small teams can produce local-scale consumer products out of their garages/basements to sell to their communities. That by definition is a small business with a small warehouse. :) From a marketing standpoint alone the ability to rapidly produce metal cases for things would give products an air of quality that you could never match with a plastic 3D printer and might cost too much to CNC. Between this and the costs of pick-and-place machines coming down I'd love the ability to design/build my own consumer electronics products and sell them out of my garage.
  - lostapathy 9y ago
    You can already get into a small-scale CNC mill for under $10k to make parts, look at the Tormach offering. For better or worse it's a long ways from "machining/printing a part" to having something ready to sell. Even just dealing with aluminum (easy to machine), you have deburring, polishing and/or tumbling, and (probably) anodizing standing in the way of selling your new consumer part. Some of that is fairly easy to get going with - small scale anodize is problematic.
- tcas 9y ago
  Other 3D printing technologies is already well into this territory. I've used companies like Sculpteo and Xometry numerous times for professional 3D printed parts in various technologies (mostly SLS nylon). The per unit cost is more than having a Makerbot running in an office, but the quality is way better. Even for FDM sometimes I prefer to have someone else make the part. I can imagine those companies buying these machines and passing on the cost savings -- I would definitely start to think about using it instead of CNC.
kerkeslager 9y ago
Yeah, but at <$500k, they can rent it out for $60/hour and recoup expenses in a year. Even if we bump it up to $100/hour to cover administrative costs, that's cheap enough to be accessible for a lot of average citizens to use. I can think of a few things where printing 50 of them in an hour would be adequate to recoup a $100 equipment rental.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Hm, like what? I'm trying to think of some applications for metal printing.
  - anon_342njlkesr 9y ago
    Spare parts. Hope that someone scanned in whatever broke and print a replacement. Or more realistically: allow enterprising college students, most likely chinese ones, to print these spare parts and sell them on ebay, circumventing the manufacturer-imposed fantasy prices.
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    Hard to source parts for old cars? Those cost a lot more than $2 each.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Car parts, computer cases (built-in heatsinks), rock climbing gear (not sure printed metal is strong enough for this one), sculptures, gun receivers (again, there are strength problems), matching door knobs and faucets for houses, prosthetic frames (to be later encased in silicone)... I'm sure there's more.
  - tcas 9y ago
    I would consider using it anywhere I would be looking at CNC-ed metal, especially for one off parts/prototypes. A lot of the cost of CNC is programming and fixturing, which 3D printing technologies save.
yellowapple 9y ago
Yeah, apparently even "10x cheaper" would still require me to take out a mortgage for a printer. Still, doing so and offering "3D metal printing as a service" (3DMPaaS) might actually be a useful investment.
batbomb 9y ago
That's the cost of two quality CNC machines, it's definitely within the realm of access for smaller machine shops everywhere.
- civilitty 9y ago
  That's if you get used or cheap CNCs - the kind that are largely sold to Chinese factories or mom and pop shops for low value add manufacturing. A good (brand new) horizontal machining center with zero point fixtures, tooling, and training costs a minimum of 200-300k if you want to make high value add parts for aerospace/medical, not to mention the costs of metrology scanners and other quality assurance gear which easily adds another 100-200k. At 360k, most machine shops can easily afford it if they can justify the purchase with demand. Also, almost no one buys these outright because they can easily finance it with a loan secured by the machine itself. We're talking a midlevel machinist's salary and overhead for five years. Since the majority of domestic metal manufacturing is for high margin industries with poor turn around times, these machines would pay for themselves very fast.
  - mhb 9y ago
    And then you're making parts with tolerances less than 0.001". This technology is unlikely to be doing that.
Nokinside 9y ago
By the time you can afford that printer, there are others that cost $100k that do better job. For most tinkerers it will be better investment to place order in local metal workshop with has good printer than have your own cheap lathes, CNC mills and 3d printers in the garage. >Maybe by the time my car is self-driving and earning me money instead of sitting in my garage, I can get that microfactory set up affordably. Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists)
- noir_lord 9y ago
  > Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists) Pretty much for the reason you covered in paragraph one to be honest. If I can achieve good with 10k and someone else can achieve awesome with 100k then the person with 100k will win (assuming they can handle demand). It's pretty obvious (if you look at..well every economic system ever really) that capital begets capital. It's not a huge thing, the US had this issue at the turn of the 20th century.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Well, the other obvious reason is if everyone can achieve "good" for 1k, everyone will make the investment, leverage the asset, and the ROI will disappear because it was easy & accessible to everyone and becomes highly competitive. Bitcoin mining was a good example. Everyone has a graphics card, and mining was pretty trivial. Great example of a cheap capital asset with low effort to monetize. Quickly, the ROI slimmed until only large scale operations with low costs and good economies of scale were profitable.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      Yep but even there the people with the large amounts of capital won once GPU's stopped been effective since they could afford ASIC's. I think on some level society has always known this, having access to large amounts of capital doesn't guarantee you'd win but if someone offered me the choice between starting a game of monopoly with $100 or $100,000 I know which I'd pick. Fun trivia aside, Monopoly was created to demonstrate that activities that promote wealth creation are more beneficial than ones that allow monopolists to run amock.
pasta 9y ago
For that price its more fun to buy a cheap 3d printer and use printed models as cast model. I even think you can use printed pla for 'lost-pla casting'.
travbrack 9y ago
Would be nice to have a video of the process
civilitty 9y ago
That's an order of magnitude cheaper than they were 5-10 years ago (at least for the prototype printer). Noncommercial pilots can easily spend that much money on a plane + training whereas seven figures is far rarer unless you're getting a supersonic military jet (like an F5) or planning on flying clients around to finance a small corporate jet. The rate at which the price of this technology is falling is fantastic.
newman8r 9y ago
yeah, this isn't for the hacker. The thing that pulled me into 3d printing was a 400 dollar machine that opened up amazing possibilities.

georgeecollins 9y ago

But not two orders of magnitude too expensive for a high end machine shop with a small warehouse. You can see this as something that you may dream about as a 'maker', but more importantly this could be something that allows small companies to make parts locally rather than overseas.

yarg 9y ago
Even if only the price of the prototyper comes down a bit more, it'll improve things significantly. The ability to rapidly prototype in low cost, low latency iterations will be a boon across many industries - regardless of whether or not you end up outsourcing production. And of course, you may just end up outsourcing down the road.
scottLobster 9y ago
I'd say the two go hand-in-hand. The holy grail of the maker movement is microfactories where individuals or small teams can produce local-scale consumer products out of their garages/basements to sell to their communities. That by definition is a small business with a small warehouse. :) From a marketing standpoint alone the ability to rapidly produce metal cases for things would give products an air of quality that you could never match with a plastic 3D printer and might cost too much to CNC. Between this and the costs of pick-and-place machines coming down I'd love the ability to design/build my own consumer electronics products and sell them out of my garage.
- lostapathy 9y ago
  You can already get into a small-scale CNC mill for under $10k to make parts, look at the Tormach offering. For better or worse it's a long ways from "machining/printing a part" to having something ready to sell. Even just dealing with aluminum (easy to machine), you have deburring, polishing and/or tumbling, and (probably) anodizing standing in the way of selling your new consumer part. Some of that is fairly easy to get going with - small scale anodize is problematic.
tcas 9y ago
Other 3D printing technologies is already well into this territory. I've used companies like Sculpteo and Xometry numerous times for professional 3D printed parts in various technologies (mostly SLS nylon). The per unit cost is more than having a Makerbot running in an office, but the quality is way better. Even for FDM sometimes I prefer to have someone else make the part. I can imagine those companies buying these machines and passing on the cost savings -- I would definitely start to think about using it instead of CNC.

kerkeslager 9y ago

Yeah, but at <$500k, they can rent it out for $60/hour and recoup expenses in a year. Even if we bump it up to $100/hour to cover administrative costs, that's cheap enough to be accessible for a lot of average citizens to use. I can think of a few things where printing 50 of them in an hour would be adequate to recoup a $100 equipment rental.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Hm, like what? I'm trying to think of some applications for metal printing.
- anon_342njlkesr 9y ago
  Spare parts. Hope that someone scanned in whatever broke and print a replacement. Or more realistically: allow enterprising college students, most likely chinese ones, to print these spare parts and sell them on ebay, circumventing the manufacturer-imposed fantasy prices.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  Hard to source parts for old cars? Those cost a lot more than $2 each.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  Car parts, computer cases (built-in heatsinks), rock climbing gear (not sure printed metal is strong enough for this one), sculptures, gun receivers (again, there are strength problems), matching door knobs and faucets for houses, prosthetic frames (to be later encased in silicone)... I'm sure there's more.
- tcas 9y ago
  I would consider using it anywhere I would be looking at CNC-ed metal, especially for one off parts/prototypes. A lot of the cost of CNC is programming and fixturing, which 3D printing technologies save.

yellowapple 9y ago

Yeah, apparently even "10x cheaper" would still require me to take out a mortgage for a printer. Still, doing so and offering "3D metal printing as a service" (3DMPaaS) might actually be a useful investment.

batbomb 9y ago

That's the cost of two quality CNC machines, it's definitely within the realm of access for smaller machine shops everywhere.

civilitty 9y ago
That's if you get used or cheap CNCs - the kind that are largely sold to Chinese factories or mom and pop shops for low value add manufacturing. A good (brand new) horizontal machining center with zero point fixtures, tooling, and training costs a minimum of 200-300k if you want to make high value add parts for aerospace/medical, not to mention the costs of metrology scanners and other quality assurance gear which easily adds another 100-200k. At 360k, most machine shops can easily afford it if they can justify the purchase with demand. Also, almost no one buys these outright because they can easily finance it with a loan secured by the machine itself. We're talking a midlevel machinist's salary and overhead for five years. Since the majority of domestic metal manufacturing is for high margin industries with poor turn around times, these machines would pay for themselves very fast.
- mhb 9y ago
  And then you're making parts with tolerances less than 0.001". This technology is unlikely to be doing that.

Nokinside 9y ago

By the time you can afford that printer, there are others that cost $100k that do better job. For most tinkerers it will be better investment to place order in local metal workshop with has good printer than have your own cheap lathes, CNC mills and 3d printers in the garage. >Maybe by the time my car is self-driving and earning me money instead of sitting in my garage, I can get that microfactory set up affordably. Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists)

noir_lord 9y ago
> Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists) Pretty much for the reason you covered in paragraph one to be honest. If I can achieve good with 10k and someone else can achieve awesome with 100k then the person with 100k will win (assuming they can handle demand). It's pretty obvious (if you look at..well every economic system ever really) that capital begets capital. It's not a huge thing, the US had this issue at the turn of the 20th century.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Well, the other obvious reason is if everyone can achieve "good" for 1k, everyone will make the investment, leverage the asset, and the ROI will disappear because it was easy & accessible to everyone and becomes highly competitive. Bitcoin mining was a good example. Everyone has a graphics card, and mining was pretty trivial. Great example of a cheap capital asset with low effort to monetize. Quickly, the ROI slimmed until only large scale operations with low costs and good economies of scale were profitable.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Yep but even there the people with the large amounts of capital won once GPU's stopped been effective since they could afford ASIC's. I think on some level society has always known this, having access to large amounts of capital doesn't guarantee you'd win but if someone offered me the choice between starting a game of monopoly with $100 or $100,000 I know which I'd pick. Fun trivia aside, Monopoly was created to demonstrate that activities that promote wealth creation are more beneficial than ones that allow monopolists to run amock.

pasta 9y ago

For that price its more fun to buy a cheap 3d printer and use printed models as cast model. I even think you can use printed pla for 'lost-pla casting'.

travbrack 9y ago

Would be nice to have a video of the process

civilitty 9y ago

That's an order of magnitude cheaper than they were 5-10 years ago (at least for the prototype printer). Noncommercial pilots can easily spend that much money on a plane + training whereas seven figures is far rarer unless you're getting a supersonic military jet (like an F5) or planning on flying clients around to finance a small corporate jet. The rate at which the price of this technology is falling is fantastic.

newman8r 9y ago

yeah, this isn't for the hacker. The thing that pulled me into 3d printing was a 400 dollar machine that opened up amazing possibilities.