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Steve, Will there be much discrepancy between the manufactured parts if they actually get fabricated in two separate machine shops? How precise is the equipme

Steve, Will there be much discrepancy between the manufactured parts if they actually get fabricated in two separate machine shops? How precise is the equipment used in most of your participating shops? I see you're working on the "How it Works" section and I'd love it if you had some pointers to books or frequently used applications (hopefully low cost??) for this industry. The premise seems solid and I'm looking forward to using CloudFab!

steveklabnik 17y ago
Currently, parts will only be manufactured in one shop. We're big proponents of the 'release early, release often' mentality. So we're starting small, getting feedback, and improving. Getting bigger jobs done across shops is one of those things that is on the to do list. For that to be efficient, we'd have to be producing a fairly large batch of parts, and so we'll tackle that problem once it happens. Well, we're accepting sellers, as well, so we'll have a pretty wide range of equipment. As of right now, we have equipment of average precision. I'm not sure if that helps, so I just grabbed an average printer from Dimension to give you a ballpark figure, and it has a .010" layer thickness. We're trying to encourage those with MakerBots to sign up, and they have a .1mm resolution. One of the greatest blessings of 3D printers is also the greatest weakness, right? You can basically make anything. So the problem with examples is that one can make total sense to someone, and be totally foreign to someone else. To give you some ideas, I'd say check out Thingaverse, or this interview with Bram Cohen, inventor of Bittorrent: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/268-Shapeways-Member-Interviews-Bram-Cohen.html http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/268-Shapeways-Member-... Thanks for the questions. We have some bigger things in the works as well. More on those later.

steveklabnik 17y ago

Currently, parts will only be manufactured in one shop. We're big proponents of the 'release early, release often' mentality. So we're starting small, getting feedback, and improving. Getting bigger jobs done across shops is one of those things that is on the to do list. For that to be efficient, we'd have to be producing a fairly large batch of parts, and so we'll tackle that problem once it happens. Well, we're accepting sellers, as well, so we'll have a pretty wide range of equipment. As of right now, we have equipment of average precision. I'm not sure if that helps, so I just grabbed an average printer from Dimension to give you a ballpark figure, and it has a .010" layer thickness. We're trying to encourage those with MakerBots to sign up, and they have a .1mm resolution. One of the greatest blessings of 3D printers is also the greatest weakness, right? You can basically make anything. So the problem with examples is that one can make total sense to someone, and be totally foreign to someone else. To give you some ideas, I'd say check out Thingaverse, or this interview with Bram Cohen, inventor of Bittorrent: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/268-Shapeways-Member-Interviews-Bram-Cohen.html http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/268-Shapeways-Member-... Thanks for the questions. We have some bigger things in the works as well. More on those later.