9 ms·

Low-cost 3D printers and crowdfunding suicide

180 points by dangoldin 12y ago

pravda 12y ago
"I then had detailed talks with an injection molding consultant. I was quoted around 50k for all the molding all up.." I think you can have an injection mold made for a lot less in China. Maybe 5-10K? Anyone have accurate numbers?
- DiThi 12y ago
  I know of two occidental (well, european) hardware projects that failed because of injection mold outsorcing to China: OpenPandora and Vivali (KDE tablet). It seems that the only way you can manufacture such things very cheaply in China is living there.
  - bsder 12y ago
    Exactly. If you are injecting a zillion parts and .1 cent matters, then China is great. If you don't have the volume to amortize all the pieces, screwups, and lost time, then China is a bust. However, one of the things that people miss here is that nobody here is actually talking a real volume (100K+ parts). Even if you can get the mold cheap, any competent injection molder is going to charge you an amount for NRE setup time that is going to make injecting 1,000 parts not particularly price competitive.
- DINKDINK 12y ago
  Mechanical Engineer here: 50k for injection molding complete setup is _very_ reasonable. Dies alone can cost 50k.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Molds are extremely complex objects, amongst the most complex mechanical objects that I've worked with. The precision to which they are fabricated, the thermal management to allow for fast cycles and high numbers of product produced from the same mold are absolutely incredible. The principles are simple but moldmaking is an absolute art form and unless you've seen a moldmaker at work at a reasonably high end facility I don't think you should be throwing out price points and opinions. 50K is actually very much on the low end for mold making, of course everything depends on size, expected # of products, cycle speed. An sizeable edm produced mold of tungsten with copper laminate for heat management is going to be a lot more expensive than a small mold for a protoype run where speed and number of products are not critical.
  - msandford 12y ago
    I agree that you're completely right for the kind of "consumer" scale injection molding. But they're talking about making perhaps only a few thousand parts. The number I saw was 2400 or so. For only 2400 parts (per YEAR!) you could make aluminum molds which are much, much cheaper. 2400 parts a year is 50 per week or one every three hours. Even if your cycle time was 10 minutes (which is an eternity even for old shoddy equipment) you can still make all the parts in 400 hours which is 2.5 weeks straight or 10 weeks of 9-5 production. There is a company in the US which will make simple molds for much less than $50k. For that you could get 5-10 molds and all the parts and possibly have money to spare. http://www.protolabs.com/protomold http://www.protolabs.com/protomold If you're talking about the kinds of molds necessary to do something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHwTHarf8Ck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHwTHarf8Ck then yes I agree $50k is a total joke. But for the batch of parts necessary to build a semi-successful production run for a 3d printer, $50k might be overkill.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Is there a description available of the parts that the quote refers to?
      - msandford 12y ago
        Not that I'm aware of, which makes everything we talk about highly speculative.
      - krschultz 12y ago
        I have used ProtoMold and they are very good. They are aluminum molds and there are fewer options with regards to custom details, but if you are making basic parts it works fine. I would think it would work very well for injection molding parts for a 3D printer because surface finish is probably not critical and the quantity will be relatively low. I generally think of the scaling up process as 3D printing -> ProtoMold -> steel molds. That said, when he said $50k in molds, I pictures $50k in ProtoMold molds, not $50k in steel molds. I imagine steel molds would be more on the order of $250k.
- mfgthrowaway888 12y ago
  yep, I had a very high quality set of molds made in China for $8k, and by allowing the manufacturer to hold onto possession of the molds, I only had to pay half ($4k). However, getting a price this good wasn't easy; my team is passionate about low-cost sourcing, we speak fluent Mandarin, and our parts are small compared to some of the large parts in a 3D printer. We even had to take things one step further and pretend our company was based in China. Due to the principal of Guanxi (Chinese business ethics where you treat family and friends very well but it's OK to cheat foreigners), Chinese companies will often charge 5x the domestic price if they think they're selling to a foreign buyer.
- krschultz 12y ago
  You can get molds in the US for $5k and molds in China for $5k, but that mold is going to be for a very simple part. It all comes down to the complexity of the shape. $50k sounds optimistic to me, and I have been involved in making physical products in the US & China.
droithomme 12y ago
Something I've noticed at Makers Faires and Expos is there's a lot of people with 3D Printers, but they tend to fall into two groups. One one side you have college teachers wearing suits sitting at a table with pamphlets advertising their school's fabrication lab. These guys all have commercial 3D printers they bought from a company, and examples of fairly boring objects they printed. On the other side you have the hackers from the maker spaces. These guys all have 3D printers they have made themselves which favor extreme colors, and bizarre and interesting features that commercial units don't have and can't support. These guys will have mohawks, crazy clothes, piercings, tattoos, and be showing off amazing objects they designed themselves, often to solve actual real life problems. Currently the market is bifurcated into suits vs artists. The suits try to sell their printers to other suits and to soccer moms. The artists are doing the cool stuff. The problem is that suits and soccer moms don't want 3D printers. It's like when the industry tried to sell early 8 bit computers to women using a marketing message "You can manage your recipes." Sure, but the reality is a card file works even better for that purpose. The startups are marketing their printer kits to the freaks, rebels, punks, artists and mad scientists. And that's the people that are able to actually use 3D printers right now. Not suits and suburbanites. Things will change later, but right now this is an early market that appeals a lot to early adopters, who are non conformists by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be early adopters. It's not about cost either. The author of the article talks about a $299 printer. The custom kit printers tend to cost a lot more than that including all the various costs. Users can save money by buying a commercial fully assembled printer. But that doesn't give you street cred and it's not hot roddable.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  These guys will have mohawks, crazy clothes, piercings, tattoos, and be showing off amazing objects they designed themselves, often to solve actual real life problems. I don't agree. A small number of the items are useful, most often replacement parts for things that would either require replacement with much larger parts (custom patches for damaged plastic shell) or which are difficult to replace (item no longer manufactured or firm no longer in business or part so obscure as to hinder repair). I've also seen some novel items that are good prototypes for industrial production. However, the majority of stuff I see at the 'freak' tables is junk, and samey junk at that. Expansible plastic jewelry, dodecahedral plastic hats (admittedly intended to draw attention to the large print area, but couldn't you find something more interesting?), and a lot of kitchenware, which strikes me as a particularly poor sector; ABS filament is non-toxic but I wouldn't use it where it's likely to encounter heat or alcohol, as would many examples on this page: http://www.pinterest.com/mekitso/3d-printed-kitchen/ http://www.pinterest.com/mekitso/3d-printed-kitchen/ Toys are a more obvious application, but most kids are not so into a monochromatic toy, and cheaper printers don't have the resolution to make good multi-part toys. An awful lot of printer offerings I see appear to be motivated by an 'if you build it they will come' approach, but are being offered for sale more on novelty than utility. The problem is that suits and soccer moms don't want 3D printers. Suits love 3d printers for industrial design/prototyping, architectural models, anything related to physical products where you might want to go into volume production later. And I do think there's a market for soccer moms: the most commercially interesting offerings I've seen at the lower end of the market in the last year or two is chocolate printing. It turns out that sugar works well enough for extrusion, low resolution is not that big of a deal when you're going to be eating it, and quite a lot of people are into doing really elaborate things with food. OK, such people tend to be artistically inclined too, but since everyone eats that translates into a huge number of people. Martha Stewart is already there: http://www.marthastewart.com/1065207/3d-printing-101 http://www.marthastewart.com/1065207/3d-printing-101 ...although note the bias towards services like Shapeways that can do one-offs in high quality materials, vs home printers. But I bet you'll see a Martha Stewart-branded 3d printer within a few years that's optimized for confectionary use. Now I'm not into baking or sweets, but I'm willing to bet that confectionery printers become by far the most widespread, while most people will go to a local print shop for quality 3d fabrication, whether that's sintered metal, multicolor paper, or very high resolution multifeed plastic. Makerbot-type printers have about as much future as dot matrix paper printers. The boring presenters at Maker Faires tend to be offering actual utility, if you can get past the eye candy. If you doubt this, go to a large hardware store; they have quantitites of boring-looking things with very high utility.
snori74 12y ago
Well worth reading to the end of this article, some very good lessons regarding the realities of scaling, applicable for many startups. I'm planning to see "Print the Legend" later this week, so this was very interesting. I see the Variety review of the film says "Because Lopez and Tweel are tracking the rise but not the fall, “Print the Legend” doesn’t have the falling-apart-before-your-eyes immediacy of “Startup.com” - but is seems pretty clear from this article that there will be a lot of falling apart happening.
tmuir 12y ago
Another big problem that makes it hard to raise this kind of money is that none of these FDM printers have anything that differentiates them from every other printer. There are only a handful of different gcode interpreter/motor driver boards. Almost all of those boards use the same Marlin firmware. They all use Repetier Host has the PC software. They all have roughly the same printing resolution. They all use the same hotends. They all require too much tinkering, maintenance, and learning curve to ever be a mass market product. On top of that, ask any hobbyist who owns one how often they use it after the initial wow factor wears off. Most people run out of stuff to print pretty quickly. Besides Makerbot, who has the advantages of 5 years of experience and VC money, none of the low end FDM printers have any sort of moat to make new customers want their printer over the newest kickstarter project. And Makerbot isn't even competing on price anymore. Without some major innovation in ease of use, print resolution, print time, print material, or reliability, I don't see how a startup FDM printer can raise the kind of money outlined in the article.
- batbomb 12y ago
  Makerbot is owned by Stratasys for over a year now. They don't have 5 years experience, they have 25 years available experience to tap into.
- baddox 12y ago
  I agree with your general premise, and I still think it's great to have so many different designs and manufacturers. Like you said, reliability and ease of use are big problems, and it think continuous tweaking is necessary, even if most designs are more or less the same. Given time, it will become clear that certain designs are strictly better than other. There is also some genuine innovation happening, even if it is only on the very edges of the space. Things like auto bed leveling, dual extruders, different print bed materials and features, etc. > On top of that, ask any hobbyist who owns one how often they use it after the initial wow factor wears off. Most people run out of stuff to print pretty quickly. I definitely agree with this, but I'm not convinced it's that big of a problem. I bought a Printrbot Simple already assembled, used it fairly constantly for a couple of weeks, then my usage definitely tapered off. But I'm not too upset about that. Whenever I want to print something, or a friend wants to be introduced to 3D printing, I have one readily available.
spyder 12y ago
Yes there are a lot of yet-another-3D printer project that are trying to do what others are doing and the only real difference is that they are promising to be cheaper. But then there is for example the Peachy Printer that is trying to be cheaper ($100) by innovating and reducing the components: no motors, no big rigid frame, no external power besides what comes from the computer. Sure it will not be the most accurate printer and it's still in development, but it looks feasible and shows that with innovation you can reduce the costs. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-printer-the-first-100-3d-printer-and-sc https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-pr...
- eatmyshorts 12y ago
  I love the Peachy Printer guys...I really do. They're taking a unique and interesting approach towards 3d printing. The only problem is they are about a year behind schedule in shipping. Furthermore, without advanced and expensive optics (like an F-Theta Lens, at >$300), they never will be able to print much larger than 2"x2" footprint objects. It's a problem inherent to galvanometers. Furthermore, they've only shipped a handhold of units--most of their kickstarter supporters (myself included) have not yet received their units. Honestly, after backing Peachy and researching SLA printers considerably, I'm more intrigued by SeeMeCNC's DropLit when looking at the future of 3D consumer printers.
  - Gormo 12y ago
    Adding a $300 lens to the Peachy Printer would still bring the total cost to less than half of the price of the typical extrusion-based 3D printer, most of which have a fixed build area of no more than about 8"x8". One of their milestone goals is to use the Peachy Printer to build a usable sixteen-foot single-piece canoe, and actually test it out on a lake. If they can manage that, even if they have to install some specialized optics to make it work, it will be extremely impressive, and demonstrate capabilities that far exceed those of more expensive 3D printers. I think the biggest weakness of the Peachy Printer is the specialized consumables it requires. The resin solution it uses as a build material is going to be considerably more expensive, harder to obtain, and more difficult to store in volume than the spools of cheap ABS or PLA used by more conventional 3D printers.
gregpilling 12y ago
Most new manufacturers price things too cheaply (source: own manufacturing company). I did so myself 10 years ago, but luckily some industry people convinced me to raise the pricing before it was public. I changed the pricing from $89 to $150 and that was not quite enough, and I raised it a few months later. Cost to produce the product at the time was $50. Now with some automation we can make the same thing for $18, and we can wholesale it for $59. That is after 10 years and thousands of units, so we learned a little on the way. I think this article is a little simplistic about manufacturing costs, but the point is true - raise the price. Sounds like what patio11 says about SaaS products.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
So this man is spending 50K in molds alone and four people before he proves the viability of his business?. You don't need to make molds, printrbot started without those, and you don't need four people for starting. Another whining article: http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/can-we-get-wrench-crowdfunding-spigot http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/can-we-get-wrench-crow... A gem from it:"A suicidal price war has ensued, but unlike most price wars, this one does not necessarily benefit the consumer." Of course it benefits the consumer, but does not for those selling cheap, like in any price war. Companies already established have an advantage over new comers like in anything else. If you get late to the party, the party is gone. I am engineer and entrepreneur, and I have designed my own 3D aluminum-steel printer from scratch in my spare time!! in less than a year. Most of the hard work is already done, a Prusa i3 structure is already designed and open. So are the extruder, hot ends, electronics. If you create a new company, you need to provide value. Something unique that does not exist. If you can't, just crying on Internet is useless. You are not entitled to have a business.
- DrewAllyn 12y ago
  The price war doesn't benefit the consumer if too-low prices cause the company to go under before shipping any product.
- krschultz 12y ago
  I have a friend who has built a bunch of 3D printers from scratch (of his own design) as a hobby. Hobby != business. And it's not a price war unless you can buy the printers, what we have is a crowd funding war. I know a couple people that work at MakerBot. They're not dumb. The reason the printer keeps getting more expensive over time is because that's what it takes to make a nice one.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
This was an interesting article. Primarily about the inexperience in people building printers (and some evil people) who through Kickstarter or Indiegogo are making promises that it is mathematically impossible for them to keep. People have been doing this since forever but the Internet makes it easier than ever. That said, the 3D printer "market", if you will, is remarkable. It is being created in exactly the same way that the microcomputer market was created, and from that we can potentially predict its path and some opportunities there. For those of you too young to remember, IBM was not a participant in the microcomputer market, which was called microcomputers (as opposed to minicomputers from the likes of DEC or Data General). Between 1972 (introduction of the 8008 microprocessor from Intel) and 1981 (introduction of the IBM PC from IBM), the market consisted of lots of documentation (datasheets) from manufacturers, re-using 100 pin edge connectors for wiring busses, and lots of source code published in "magazines" which were no more than photocopied pages stapled together. And then, as with 3D printers today, the nerdiest of the nerds all had to have one but they didn't know why, and the rest of the world felt that owning your own computer was a ridiculous idea. Why pay all that money so that you could play 'hunt the wumpus' in a painfully slow loading stripped down version of the BASIC programming language? Stepping back though, the excitement, the nerd fests, the people going nuts over these things, like a spinning top in a maze randomly bouncing off the walls, eventually found a solution, or a use, for this technology that non-nerds could relate too. Initially that was spreadsheets, then small databases, and data collection and analysis that the 'big' computers had been doing since the start. There is a lot of capital trying to figure out which company is the next Microsoft. When I was at Google, a relative of one of the Makerbot founders worked at Google as well, and sought out volunteers to help build their first 'Cupcake' printer kit and give feedback. It was an amazing little box which, when the stars and planets aligned, would actually print reliably for the 3 hours or so needed to make a print of any decent size. It was a marvel, and sometimes it worked reliably. I ended up buying a Makerbot Replicator 1 at a weak moment at Makerfair when they were 15% off list (they were clearing out old stock to make room for the Replicator 2) I printed a few test prints and then it sat on the shelf for nearly two years. I recently fired it up again because my daughter wanted me to print her a measuring spoon for chai. Diving back into it I realized that there are a lot of people "building" 3D printers but not nearly so many "engineering" 3D printers. Circuit design for example on the RAMPS 1.4 board has little to no self protection circuitry and so it is prone to being damaged by things like moving the steppers when the power isn't applied. Extruders of all types with varying levels of material feed, feedback, and consistency. Machines that require amazing amounts of calibration to print correctly assembled with fasteners without any locking capability at all. It is so much like early S-100 microcomputers it is practically a deja-vu experience. 3D printing is a 'thing', and its going to be a huge thing. While I get that there may not be anything today you want to print, I can also imagine a day where all your currently disposable plastic goods (cups, utensils, clips, etc) would be printed on demand and disposed in a hopper that would recycle them as raw material for the next round. Because of the amount of investment going on, I don't worry about novices who go bankrupt trying to build a printer after a successful crowd funding campaign. I feel feel badly for them sure, but I don't think it will derail this particular technology bloom.
grogenaut 12y ago
Initially I thought, other than some toy stuff I wont have anything to make with that. Then I broke down and got one. Now everything like a nail that needs a 3d printed hammer. Built test replacement parts for my wife's antique knitting machine, for the antique spinning wheel, fixed my waterproof mp3 player, and can easily make custom enclosures for my electronics project. I cad something up and then play dota while it prints which is perfect as I can check it every 30 minutes to am hour which is the right interval for these things
jwatte 12y ago
I think we got to this point over a year ago. 3D printers are the new "I can build you a home page on the web." Printrbot has had a good $300 FDM solution for a long time; to get significantly better, you really need SLS or Resin lithography solutions. And even there, the competition is hearing up as old patents expire.
orionblastar 12y ago
Actually this is true of any Crowdfunded project. Always crunch the numbers and do a feasibility report before you decide to crowdfund it. This is why 90% of Startups fail as well, they focus on making the product but they fail to plan ahead and make sure that the costs aren't higher than the investment money and figure in salaries, taxes, fees, etc.
jglauche 12y ago
The link has been taken down for some reason. The Internet Archive to the rescue! https://web.archive.org/web/20140810205859/http://3dprototypesandmodels.com.au/blog-2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140810205859/http://3dprototyp...
sharemywin 12y ago
Wonder how much this would affect the pricing model? http://www.injectionmolder.net/ http://www.injectionmolder.net/

180 points by dangoldin 12y ago

"I then had detailed talks with an injection molding consultant. I was quoted around 50k for all the molding all up.." I think you can have an injection mold made for a lot less in China. Maybe 5-10K? Anyone have accurate numbers?

DiThi 12y ago
I know of two occidental (well, european) hardware projects that failed because of injection mold outsorcing to China: OpenPandora and Vivali (KDE tablet). It seems that the only way you can manufacture such things very cheaply in China is living there.
- bsder 12y ago
  Exactly. If you are injecting a zillion parts and .1 cent matters, then China is great. If you don't have the volume to amortize all the pieces, screwups, and lost time, then China is a bust. However, one of the things that people miss here is that nobody here is actually talking a real volume (100K+ parts). Even if you can get the mold cheap, any competent injection molder is going to charge you an amount for NRE setup time that is going to make injecting 1,000 parts not particularly price competitive.
DINKDINK 12y ago
Mechanical Engineer here: 50k for injection molding complete setup is _very_ reasonable. Dies alone can cost 50k.
jacquesm 12y ago
Molds are extremely complex objects, amongst the most complex mechanical objects that I've worked with. The precision to which they are fabricated, the thermal management to allow for fast cycles and high numbers of product produced from the same mold are absolutely incredible. The principles are simple but moldmaking is an absolute art form and unless you've seen a moldmaker at work at a reasonably high end facility I don't think you should be throwing out price points and opinions. 50K is actually very much on the low end for mold making, of course everything depends on size, expected # of products, cycle speed. An sizeable edm produced mold of tungsten with copper laminate for heat management is going to be a lot more expensive than a small mold for a protoype run where speed and number of products are not critical.
- msandford 12y ago
  I agree that you're completely right for the kind of "consumer" scale injection molding. But they're talking about making perhaps only a few thousand parts. The number I saw was 2400 or so. For only 2400 parts (per YEAR!) you could make aluminum molds which are much, much cheaper. 2400 parts a year is 50 per week or one every three hours. Even if your cycle time was 10 minutes (which is an eternity even for old shoddy equipment) you can still make all the parts in 400 hours which is 2.5 weeks straight or 10 weeks of 9-5 production. There is a company in the US which will make simple molds for much less than $50k. For that you could get 5-10 molds and all the parts and possibly have money to spare. http://www.protolabs.com/protomold http://www.protolabs.com/protomold If you're talking about the kinds of molds necessary to do something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHwTHarf8Ck http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHwTHarf8Ck then yes I agree $50k is a total joke. But for the batch of parts necessary to build a semi-successful production run for a 3d printer, $50k might be overkill.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Is there a description available of the parts that the quote refers to?
    - msandford 12y ago
      Not that I'm aware of, which makes everything we talk about highly speculative.
    - krschultz 12y ago
      I have used ProtoMold and they are very good. They are aluminum molds and there are fewer options with regards to custom details, but if you are making basic parts it works fine. I would think it would work very well for injection molding parts for a 3D printer because surface finish is probably not critical and the quantity will be relatively low. I generally think of the scaling up process as 3D printing -> ProtoMold -> steel molds. That said, when he said $50k in molds, I pictures $50k in ProtoMold molds, not $50k in steel molds. I imagine steel molds would be more on the order of $250k.
mfgthrowaway888 12y ago
yep, I had a very high quality set of molds made in China for $8k, and by allowing the manufacturer to hold onto possession of the molds, I only had to pay half ($4k). However, getting a price this good wasn't easy; my team is passionate about low-cost sourcing, we speak fluent Mandarin, and our parts are small compared to some of the large parts in a 3D printer. We even had to take things one step further and pretend our company was based in China. Due to the principal of Guanxi (Chinese business ethics where you treat family and friends very well but it's OK to cheat foreigners), Chinese companies will often charge 5x the domestic price if they think they're selling to a foreign buyer.
krschultz 12y ago
You can get molds in the US for $5k and molds in China for $5k, but that mold is going to be for a very simple part. It all comes down to the complexity of the shape. $50k sounds optimistic to me, and I have been involved in making physical products in the US & China.

droithomme 12y ago

Something I've noticed at Makers Faires and Expos is there's a lot of people with 3D Printers, but they tend to fall into two groups. One one side you have college teachers wearing suits sitting at a table with pamphlets advertising their school's fabrication lab. These guys all have commercial 3D printers they bought from a company, and examples of fairly boring objects they printed. On the other side you have the hackers from the maker spaces. These guys all have 3D printers they have made themselves which favor extreme colors, and bizarre and interesting features that commercial units don't have and can't support. These guys will have mohawks, crazy clothes, piercings, tattoos, and be showing off amazing objects they designed themselves, often to solve actual real life problems. Currently the market is bifurcated into suits vs artists. The suits try to sell their printers to other suits and to soccer moms. The artists are doing the cool stuff. The problem is that suits and soccer moms don't want 3D printers. It's like when the industry tried to sell early 8 bit computers to women using a marketing message "You can manage your recipes." Sure, but the reality is a card file works even better for that purpose. The startups are marketing their printer kits to the freaks, rebels, punks, artists and mad scientists. And that's the people that are able to actually use 3D printers right now. Not suits and suburbanites. Things will change later, but right now this is an early market that appeals a lot to early adopters, who are non conformists by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be early adopters. It's not about cost either. The author of the article talks about a $299 printer. The custom kit printers tend to cost a lot more than that including all the various costs. Users can save money by buying a commercial fully assembled printer. But that doesn't give you street cred and it's not hot roddable.

anigbrowl 12y ago
These guys will have mohawks, crazy clothes, piercings, tattoos, and be showing off amazing objects they designed themselves, often to solve actual real life problems. I don't agree. A small number of the items are useful, most often replacement parts for things that would either require replacement with much larger parts (custom patches for damaged plastic shell) or which are difficult to replace (item no longer manufactured or firm no longer in business or part so obscure as to hinder repair). I've also seen some novel items that are good prototypes for industrial production. However, the majority of stuff I see at the 'freak' tables is junk, and samey junk at that. Expansible plastic jewelry, dodecahedral plastic hats (admittedly intended to draw attention to the large print area, but couldn't you find something more interesting?), and a lot of kitchenware, which strikes me as a particularly poor sector; ABS filament is non-toxic but I wouldn't use it where it's likely to encounter heat or alcohol, as would many examples on this page: http://www.pinterest.com/mekitso/3d-printed-kitchen/ http://www.pinterest.com/mekitso/3d-printed-kitchen/ Toys are a more obvious application, but most kids are not so into a monochromatic toy, and cheaper printers don't have the resolution to make good multi-part toys. An awful lot of printer offerings I see appear to be motivated by an 'if you build it they will come' approach, but are being offered for sale more on novelty than utility. The problem is that suits and soccer moms don't want 3D printers. Suits love 3d printers for industrial design/prototyping, architectural models, anything related to physical products where you might want to go into volume production later. And I do think there's a market for soccer moms: the most commercially interesting offerings I've seen at the lower end of the market in the last year or two is chocolate printing. It turns out that sugar works well enough for extrusion, low resolution is not that big of a deal when you're going to be eating it, and quite a lot of people are into doing really elaborate things with food. OK, such people tend to be artistically inclined too, but since everyone eats that translates into a huge number of people. Martha Stewart is already there: http://www.marthastewart.com/1065207/3d-printing-101 http://www.marthastewart.com/1065207/3d-printing-101 ...although note the bias towards services like Shapeways that can do one-offs in high quality materials, vs home printers. But I bet you'll see a Martha Stewart-branded 3d printer within a few years that's optimized for confectionary use. Now I'm not into baking or sweets, but I'm willing to bet that confectionery printers become by far the most widespread, while most people will go to a local print shop for quality 3d fabrication, whether that's sintered metal, multicolor paper, or very high resolution multifeed plastic. Makerbot-type printers have about as much future as dot matrix paper printers. The boring presenters at Maker Faires tend to be offering actual utility, if you can get past the eye candy. If you doubt this, go to a large hardware store; they have quantitites of boring-looking things with very high utility.

snori74 12y ago

Well worth reading to the end of this article, some very good lessons regarding the realities of scaling, applicable for many startups. I'm planning to see "Print the Legend" later this week, so this was very interesting. I see the Variety review of the film says "Because Lopez and Tweel are tracking the rise but not the fall, “Print the Legend” doesn’t have the falling-apart-before-your-eyes immediacy of “Startup.com” - but is seems pretty clear from this article that there will be a lot of falling apart happening.

tmuir 12y ago

Another big problem that makes it hard to raise this kind of money is that none of these FDM printers have anything that differentiates them from every other printer. There are only a handful of different gcode interpreter/motor driver boards. Almost all of those boards use the same Marlin firmware. They all use Repetier Host has the PC software. They all have roughly the same printing resolution. They all use the same hotends. They all require too much tinkering, maintenance, and learning curve to ever be a mass market product. On top of that, ask any hobbyist who owns one how often they use it after the initial wow factor wears off. Most people run out of stuff to print pretty quickly. Besides Makerbot, who has the advantages of 5 years of experience and VC money, none of the low end FDM printers have any sort of moat to make new customers want their printer over the newest kickstarter project. And Makerbot isn't even competing on price anymore. Without some major innovation in ease of use, print resolution, print time, print material, or reliability, I don't see how a startup FDM printer can raise the kind of money outlined in the article.

batbomb 12y ago
Makerbot is owned by Stratasys for over a year now. They don't have 5 years experience, they have 25 years available experience to tap into.
baddox 12y ago
I agree with your general premise, and I still think it's great to have so many different designs and manufacturers. Like you said, reliability and ease of use are big problems, and it think continuous tweaking is necessary, even if most designs are more or less the same. Given time, it will become clear that certain designs are strictly better than other. There is also some genuine innovation happening, even if it is only on the very edges of the space. Things like auto bed leveling, dual extruders, different print bed materials and features, etc. > On top of that, ask any hobbyist who owns one how often they use it after the initial wow factor wears off. Most people run out of stuff to print pretty quickly. I definitely agree with this, but I'm not convinced it's that big of a problem. I bought a Printrbot Simple already assembled, used it fairly constantly for a couple of weeks, then my usage definitely tapered off. But I'm not too upset about that. Whenever I want to print something, or a friend wants to be introduced to 3D printing, I have one readily available.

spyder 12y ago

Yes there are a lot of yet-another-3D printer project that are trying to do what others are doing and the only real difference is that they are promising to be cheaper. But then there is for example the Peachy Printer that is trying to be cheaper ($100) by innovating and reducing the components: no motors, no big rigid frame, no external power besides what comes from the computer. Sure it will not be the most accurate printer and it's still in development, but it looks feasible and shows that with innovation you can reduce the costs. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-printer-the-first-100-3d-printer-and-sc https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-pr...

eatmyshorts 12y ago
I love the Peachy Printer guys...I really do. They're taking a unique and interesting approach towards 3d printing. The only problem is they are about a year behind schedule in shipping. Furthermore, without advanced and expensive optics (like an F-Theta Lens, at >$300), they never will be able to print much larger than 2"x2" footprint objects. It's a problem inherent to galvanometers. Furthermore, they've only shipped a handhold of units--most of their kickstarter supporters (myself included) have not yet received their units. Honestly, after backing Peachy and researching SLA printers considerably, I'm more intrigued by SeeMeCNC's DropLit when looking at the future of 3D consumer printers.
- Gormo 12y ago
  Adding a $300 lens to the Peachy Printer would still bring the total cost to less than half of the price of the typical extrusion-based 3D printer, most of which have a fixed build area of no more than about 8"x8". One of their milestone goals is to use the Peachy Printer to build a usable sixteen-foot single-piece canoe, and actually test it out on a lake. If they can manage that, even if they have to install some specialized optics to make it work, it will be extremely impressive, and demonstrate capabilities that far exceed those of more expensive 3D printers. I think the biggest weakness of the Peachy Printer is the specialized consumables it requires. The resin solution it uses as a build material is going to be considerably more expensive, harder to obtain, and more difficult to store in volume than the spools of cheap ABS or PLA used by more conventional 3D printers.

gregpilling 12y ago

Most new manufacturers price things too cheaply (source: own manufacturing company). I did so myself 10 years ago, but luckily some industry people convinced me to raise the pricing before it was public. I changed the pricing from $89 to $150 and that was not quite enough, and I raised it a few months later. Cost to produce the product at the time was $50. Now with some automation we can make the same thing for $18, and we can wholesale it for $59. That is after 10 years and thousands of units, so we learned a little on the way. I think this article is a little simplistic about manufacturing costs, but the point is true - raise the price. Sounds like what patio11 says about SaaS products.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

So this man is spending 50K in molds alone and four people before he proves the viability of his business?. You don't need to make molds, printrbot started without those, and you don't need four people for starting. Another whining article: http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/can-we-get-wrench-crowdfunding-spigot http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/can-we-get-wrench-crow... A gem from it:"A suicidal price war has ensued, but unlike most price wars, this one does not necessarily benefit the consumer." Of course it benefits the consumer, but does not for those selling cheap, like in any price war. Companies already established have an advantage over new comers like in anything else. If you get late to the party, the party is gone. I am engineer and entrepreneur, and I have designed my own 3D aluminum-steel printer from scratch in my spare time!! in less than a year. Most of the hard work is already done, a Prusa i3 structure is already designed and open. So are the extruder, hot ends, electronics. If you create a new company, you need to provide value. Something unique that does not exist. If you can't, just crying on Internet is useless. You are not entitled to have a business.

DrewAllyn 12y ago
The price war doesn't benefit the consumer if too-low prices cause the company to go under before shipping any product.
krschultz 12y ago
I have a friend who has built a bunch of 3D printers from scratch (of his own design) as a hobby. Hobby != business. And it's not a price war unless you can buy the printers, what we have is a crowd funding war. I know a couple people that work at MakerBot. They're not dumb. The reason the printer keeps getting more expensive over time is because that's what it takes to make a nice one.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

This was an interesting article. Primarily about the inexperience in people building printers (and some evil people) who through Kickstarter or Indiegogo are making promises that it is mathematically impossible for them to keep. People have been doing this since forever but the Internet makes it easier than ever. That said, the 3D printer "market", if you will, is remarkable. It is being created in exactly the same way that the microcomputer market was created, and from that we can potentially predict its path and some opportunities there. For those of you too young to remember, IBM was not a participant in the microcomputer market, which was called microcomputers (as opposed to minicomputers from the likes of DEC or Data General). Between 1972 (introduction of the 8008 microprocessor from Intel) and 1981 (introduction of the IBM PC from IBM), the market consisted of lots of documentation (datasheets) from manufacturers, re-using 100 pin edge connectors for wiring busses, and lots of source code published in "magazines" which were no more than photocopied pages stapled together. And then, as with 3D printers today, the nerdiest of the nerds all had to have one but they didn't know why, and the rest of the world felt that owning your own computer was a ridiculous idea. Why pay all that money so that you could play 'hunt the wumpus' in a painfully slow loading stripped down version of the BASIC programming language? Stepping back though, the excitement, the nerd fests, the people going nuts over these things, like a spinning top in a maze randomly bouncing off the walls, eventually found a solution, or a use, for this technology that non-nerds could relate too. Initially that was spreadsheets, then small databases, and data collection and analysis that the 'big' computers had been doing since the start. There is a lot of capital trying to figure out which company is the next Microsoft. When I was at Google, a relative of one of the Makerbot founders worked at Google as well, and sought out volunteers to help build their first 'Cupcake' printer kit and give feedback. It was an amazing little box which, when the stars and planets aligned, would actually print reliably for the 3 hours or so needed to make a print of any decent size. It was a marvel, and sometimes it worked reliably. I ended up buying a Makerbot Replicator 1 at a weak moment at Makerfair when they were 15% off list (they were clearing out old stock to make room for the Replicator 2) I printed a few test prints and then it sat on the shelf for nearly two years. I recently fired it up again because my daughter wanted me to print her a measuring spoon for chai. Diving back into it I realized that there are a lot of people "building" 3D printers but not nearly so many "engineering" 3D printers. Circuit design for example on the RAMPS 1.4 board has little to no self protection circuitry and so it is prone to being damaged by things like moving the steppers when the power isn't applied. Extruders of all types with varying levels of material feed, feedback, and consistency. Machines that require amazing amounts of calibration to print correctly assembled with fasteners without any locking capability at all. It is so much like early S-100 microcomputers it is practically a deja-vu experience. 3D printing is a 'thing', and its going to be a huge thing. While I get that there may not be anything today you want to print, I can also imagine a day where all your currently disposable plastic goods (cups, utensils, clips, etc) would be printed on demand and disposed in a hopper that would recycle them as raw material for the next round. Because of the amount of investment going on, I don't worry about novices who go bankrupt trying to build a printer after a successful crowd funding campaign. I feel feel badly for them sure, but I don't think it will derail this particular technology bloom.

grogenaut 12y ago

Initially I thought, other than some toy stuff I wont have anything to make with that. Then I broke down and got one. Now everything like a nail that needs a 3d printed hammer. Built test replacement parts for my wife's antique knitting machine, for the antique spinning wheel, fixed my waterproof mp3 player, and can easily make custom enclosures for my electronics project. I cad something up and then play dota while it prints which is perfect as I can check it every 30 minutes to am hour which is the right interval for these things

jwatte 12y ago

I think we got to this point over a year ago. 3D printers are the new "I can build you a home page on the web." Printrbot has had a good $300 FDM solution for a long time; to get significantly better, you really need SLS or Resin lithography solutions. And even there, the competition is hearing up as old patents expire.

orionblastar 12y ago

Actually this is true of any Crowdfunded project. Always crunch the numbers and do a feasibility report before you decide to crowdfund it. This is why 90% of Startups fail as well, they focus on making the product but they fail to plan ahead and make sure that the costs aren't higher than the investment money and figure in salaries, taxes, fees, etc.

jglauche 12y ago

The link has been taken down for some reason. The Internet Archive to the rescue! https://web.archive.org/web/20140810205859/http://3dprototypesandmodels.com.au/blog-2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140810205859/http://3dprototyp...

sharemywin 12y ago

Wonder how much this would affect the pricing model? http://www.injectionmolder.net/ http://www.injectionmolder.net/