5 ms·

You can get on-demand metal printing from Shapeways. Somewhat expensive compared to sendcutsend, but still far below aerospace.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
Sure, there is a huge gamut of prices from aerospace to just above material costs. On the expensive side I would use it judiciously, on the economical side I would use it for just about everything and so would many others. I do a bit of DIY and a large amount of the design work is to work around limitations of cheaper materials and cheaper processes. Most of what I make is onesie-twosie where the design costs dominate so I can afford to spend more on a more expensive materials and processes to cut back on the design. But it would be extra amazing if there was an economical high quality process that is suitable for prototyping and would also be amenable to cost competitive mass manufacturing. That would be absolutely world changing. If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it. Instead of needing a whole factory to support the low cost manufacturing of a single part it could just be a design document sitting on a server somewhere. I understand that it is not in Fabric8s interest to do this though, expensive machines are high margin and exclusivity is required to maintain a bit of a monopoly for their customers so that their customers can justify purchasing the expensive machines in the first place. If Fabric8 were to start out with expensive machines and then subsequently release cheaper machines they would burn their previous customers. That would make this one of the many cool things that I can't use until the patents expire which would be a damn shame and would also make the technology completely uninteresting to me as I would have to focus on alternatives in the interim. It took a long time to go from Rep-Rap to Bambu Labs for FDM but with increased interest in the space that process is speeding up. Hopefully Micronics will manage a consumer Nylon SLS printer. A ton of small scale manufacturing technology is being made cheaply enough for home use and services like PCBWay and Send-Cut-Send have really democratized high quality manufacturing. I can make many things production quality with near zero overheads and I can buy things from others who have done the same at similarly low costs. Something like send-cut-send for ECAM seems inevitable and it would be up to Fabric8 to decide if they want to cannibalize themselves instead of having someone else undercut them. I don't know how defendable their patents are, there does seem to be a fair amount of prior art. There is probably a bunch of trade secrets though. For them one of the downsides of having such a promising solution is that there is an even greater incentive for competitors to enter the market. I would posit that long term there is more money to be made with a scale-out low margin mass market solution where they could better leverage trade secrets gleaned from process experience than than selling individual high margin machines. If they kept overheads low enough it would never be in anyone else's interest to enter the market and they could leverage their trade secrets for above average returns ad infinitum.
- Tossrock 2y ago
  > If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it. This is literally what Shapeways does: https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    What I meant with 'amenable to mass manufacturing' is that it would be low cost, shapeways metal printing is too expensive to be used for most things. I specifically called out that ECAM should be amenable to low cost mass manufacturing in a way that metal SLS is not.
- john_minsk 2y ago
  Very detailed description. Would it be a bad idea for your customers to take your design document and test it in virtual environment and once tests are passed - you would go to production right away?
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    Not sure on the question. I'm primarily a software guy so I'd prefer to not interact with customers at all so it could be a commission type set up. It's unlikely that I could make as much money from hardware as I do from software so while being a hardware designer sounds like fun it will likely just be in support of my software work. I do ML and water cool my GPUs to get an extra 30% perf out of them but getting water cooling blocks can be a pain with slow and unreliable supply. EKWB is currently having issues because they buy in bulk from wholesalers and push product on to vendors who then try to sell to customers so when the market dips there are cashflow problems. I would prefer to be able to buy a GPU, measure the geometry, whip up some CAD and send it off for production. It really simplifies things.
    - john_minsk 2y ago

cjbgkagh 2y ago

Sure, there is a huge gamut of prices from aerospace to just above material costs. On the expensive side I would use it judiciously, on the economical side I would use it for just about everything and so would many others. I do a bit of DIY and a large amount of the design work is to work around limitations of cheaper materials and cheaper processes. Most of what I make is onesie-twosie where the design costs dominate so I can afford to spend more on a more expensive materials and processes to cut back on the design. But it would be extra amazing if there was an economical high quality process that is suitable for prototyping and would also be amenable to cost competitive mass manufacturing. That would be absolutely world changing. If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it. Instead of needing a whole factory to support the low cost manufacturing of a single part it could just be a design document sitting on a server somewhere. I understand that it is not in Fabric8s interest to do this though, expensive machines are high margin and exclusivity is required to maintain a bit of a monopoly for their customers so that their customers can justify purchasing the expensive machines in the first place. If Fabric8 were to start out with expensive machines and then subsequently release cheaper machines they would burn their previous customers. That would make this one of the many cool things that I can't use until the patents expire which would be a damn shame and would also make the technology completely uninteresting to me as I would have to focus on alternatives in the interim. It took a long time to go from Rep-Rap to Bambu Labs for FDM but with increased interest in the space that process is speeding up. Hopefully Micronics will manage a consumer Nylon SLS printer. A ton of small scale manufacturing technology is being made cheaply enough for home use and services like PCBWay and Send-Cut-Send have really democratized high quality manufacturing. I can make many things production quality with near zero overheads and I can buy things from others who have done the same at similarly low costs. Something like send-cut-send for ECAM seems inevitable and it would be up to Fabric8 to decide if they want to cannibalize themselves instead of having someone else undercut them. I don't know how defendable their patents are, there does seem to be a fair amount of prior art. There is probably a bunch of trade secrets though. For them one of the downsides of having such a promising solution is that there is an even greater incentive for competitors to enter the market. I would posit that long term there is more money to be made with a scale-out low margin mass market solution where they could better leverage trade secrets gleaned from process experience than than selling individual high margin machines. If they kept overheads low enough it would never be in anyone else's interest to enter the market and they could leverage their trade secrets for above average returns ad infinitum.

Tossrock 2y ago
> If I could just list designs somewhere and customers have them printed on demand, either via Amazon or some drop-ship, I could recoup a lot of the design costs so I could spend more time designing things - maybe even make a career out of it. This is literally what Shapeways does: https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  What I meant with 'amenable to mass manufacturing' is that it would be low cost, shapeways metal printing is too expensive to be used for most things. I specifically called out that ECAM should be amenable to low cost mass manufacturing in a way that metal SLS is not.
john_minsk 2y ago
Very detailed description. Would it be a bad idea for your customers to take your design document and test it in virtual environment and once tests are passed - you would go to production right away?
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Not sure on the question. I'm primarily a software guy so I'd prefer to not interact with customers at all so it could be a commission type set up. It's unlikely that I could make as much money from hardware as I do from software so while being a hardware designer sounds like fun it will likely just be in support of my software work. I do ML and water cool my GPUs to get an extra 30% perf out of them but getting water cooling blocks can be a pain with slow and unreliable supply. EKWB is currently having issues because they buy in bulk from wholesalers and push product on to vendors who then try to sell to customers so when the market dips there are cashflow problems. I would prefer to be able to buy a GPU, measure the geometry, whip up some CAD and send it off for production. It really simplifies things.
  - john_minsk 2y ago