Closed Poll: Let's Talk about buying new 3D printers!

3D Fabrication
#1

Our membership has doubled in the past year, which is AWESOME! To keep up with the high demand for time on the 3D printers, and better enable us to offer hands-on classes in 3D Fab, I plan on adding an item on the agenda for the upcoming Board of Directors’ Meeting to request additional 3D printers be purchased.

Please take a moment to answer this poll to help us discuss & document what we feel will benefit our members (and Dallas Makerspace as a whole) the most.

NOTE: The next board meeting will be on Sunday, November 16th at 4:00 PM. New items must be posted at least 48 hours prior to the meeting. I will close this poll on November 12th. That will give us a full two weeks to discuss which options will suit our needs the best, while also allowing time for me to add our request to the consent agenda. Thank you!

Please select one option below.

  • Buy one (1) 508 PolyPrinter (aka: "Double Wide) for 3D Fab
  • Buy two (2) 229 PolyPrinters (like the ones we have now) for 3D Fab
  • Buy one (1) 229 PolyPrinter, and one (1) 508 PolyPrinter for 3D Fab
  • Buy a different type of 3D printer (resin, powder, etc) for 3D Fab (please add your ‘other’ as a reply)

0 voters

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Poll to vote on which 3D printer(s) to purchase next is closed now
#2

What are the prices? How are we dealing with (paying for) consumables on these? How about consumables on the resin printer?

#3

What are the prices?

The PolyPrinter 229 will be $2395 net (after discounts).
The PolyPrinter 508 will be $3995 net (after discounts).

$4495 PP508
$ -500 Beta discount.
$  240 warranty extension to 1 yr
$  480 On-site service 1yr
$ -720 Makerspace discount
$3995 Net Total

$2395 PP229
$  175 warranty extension to 1 yr
$  360 On-site service 1yr
$ -535 Makerspace discount
$2395 Net Total

How are we dealing with (paying for) consumables on these?

Members will continue to have an option to provide their own filament or pay for filament used - just as we have been doing. Currently it’s $0.10 per gram if members use the ABS filament purchased by the 3D Fabrication Committee.

How about consumables on the resin printer?

We will handle materials in a similar manner as we currently do with ABS plastic - regardless of the medium (whether it’s ABS plastic, resin, powder, etc…).

Other 3D printer related consumables (such as replacement nozzles, tape for the beds, etc…) are purchased through the funds we receive when members pay for the filament (and/or other materials used) that was purchased by the 3D Fabrication Committee.

#4

How does this mesh with the plan for a class to build another printer for the Space?

Do you have a way of tracking usage on the printers?

I can see how more of the same would help with classes and if the workload is getting backed up on what we have, but if the current printers aren’t booked all the time, it would be nice to have a different type of printer at the space. For example, it would be really nice to have a stereolithographic printer, or a metal printer or a ceramic printer.

It seems warm in that room now. It probably won’t be too bad during the Winter, but I expect it will be getting really warm in there by next Summer, especially with more equipment.

#5

Lulzbot Taz4, because its open source, can handle lots of different materials, has big print volume, can be configured with dual printheads.

#6

This is for us to be able to have enough printers available to meet the needs of the membership at Dallas Makerspace. The PolyPrinters have excellent support, so we do not have to worry about excessive ‘down time’ if a printer has to have maintenance or an occasional repair. Other options we will consider to meet these needs will also be commercial printers for the same reasons.

@themitch22’s plan to have a class to build a printer is as much to allow members an opportunity to not only learn the ins and outs of building a printer; but, also will serve to allow us to have an alternate type of printer available in the 3D Fab Room.

We often have a list of members waiting to be able to use the printers we currently have. Their popularity has grown to the point where the waiting list goes well into the night / early morning hours.

We are working on a solution for using the webcams and a scheduling system to allow members to quickly see if the printers are in use; and, how long the wait to use one will be. This will also help us to justify the need for additional 3D printers.

By next spring, we will have a fan in the room to help circulate the air better. I would like to look into a solution to automate the blinds so the slats will close during the heat of the day, then open again once the sun goes down. Other than that, members will be able to monitor their prints via the webcams, which will allow more flexibility to sit in a different room at the 'Space.

#7

I saw a Taz when I visited the GJMakerspace in Colorado this past summer. Very nice and solid machine! The downside would be lack of support (they have a 'standard 30 day warranty). The rest of your points are great points! I feel that at a minimum, we need at least one more PolyPrinter - that we can count on having a solid record of up-time. This poll is to give us a chance to discuss all the options members are interested in, so thank you for providing a specific option you would like us to consider! :slight_smile:

#8

This has nothing to do with the class to build a printer. A project printer is a different use case than a PolyPrinter or other professionally made and serviced printer. The class itself would fund the class printer and be expected to maintain it.

In my observation people are mostly using the PolyPrinters to print parts for their own project printers, parts for sale, high-precision parts, and other “working” parts that require a high-quality, reliable printer.

As for the PolyPrinters, we do have a severe workload issue. While we don’t have exact usage stats, over the past month there is nearly always a queue to print during evening hours. Frequently people wait all night for a turn. Many more people give up and go home empty-handed - printing has become a game of last-man standing Thursday thru Sunday in particular. Recently the printers were running round the clock for several days straight.

#9

Do any of the poly printers offer the dual head? Is it possible to get a dual head on the double wide? Anything that can print the ninjafelx material?

#10

The precision of a resin printer would be welcome, any advanced alternative to fdm. But the alluregof a regularly fixed and constantly up doublewide is more realistic an option. We should aim for that, then wait for some of the resin or dmls technology to become more affordable.

#11

I think it is time for some new tech. I like the polyprinters and the service they give. but with the proven use of the printers, I think it is time we step up in technology to a stratasys printer and charge more for the prints off of it. If a print would cost you $1 to $2 dollars for a polyprinter print, try charging $10 to $20 for a print off of the stratasys printer. I believe currently we are easily printing 5-10 prints a day average in the hours of 5pm - 12am. If we pulled 1/3 over to a new printer that had to be paid to use that would be 2-4 a night if we put a fixed cost of $5 plus material use per print that is a minimum of $300 a month with a 30 day month. This may be enough to cover a lease on a 40k stratsys printer. Also, this would be a printer that no one at DMS would usually own, or have access to by other means. Also, this would be a a jewel at any or all makerspaces setting us out from the crowd. PolyPinters are nice, but the technology is neither new or unattainable by our membership. A stratasys machine would be the unattainable gem.

Side note, I’ve never used a stratasys printer and do not know the maintenance or other requirements needed to run the machine. There are also a lot of assumptions in my statement that feel right to me, but may be inaccurate. If you have data that challenges my assumptions please share it as I feel it will help the discussion.

#12

Good discussion re printers and consumables.

3d printing really needs to to handled effectively. This seems to be the most popular resource that DMS provides. It spans many disciplines from techies like myself to totally non tech persons (designing costumes, etc the other day).

Just from seeing it in action and discussing with others on Tuesday, I already have a couple of projects that see the need for 3D printing. I am starting to watch tutorials on Blender 3D software.

I guess we have a committee for it (?). I would be in favor of strict logging of its use including consumables so we can justify and keep up with present and future needs and expand to bigger machines. We do pay for membership, but if we have a backlog for the printer and have upkeep and need for expansion, perhaps we should charge a bit its use to at least keep up with these expenses. We also might consider a differential payment scheme for premium vs off-hours of use and early vs last-minute booking, etc. I’m sure there is some formula that would incentivize a well distributed use of the machines.

Once again, I’m speaking as someone who hopes to use it! Might even have to start DMS South branch to accommodate me and others.

BTW, what printers do we have up there right now? Are those Polyprinters?

#13

Take a look at this re resin printers. I had no idea what they can do. Amazing photos of the detail.

#14

People print when they can. ‘Incentivizing’ based on peak v off-peak hours is essentially discriminating against people with day jobs. If we were a for-profit business it would make sense, but I think this kind of model undermines the spirit of DMS.

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#15

Hi David,

I agree with Suzanne, but I’ll try and better explain her point from my POV. We don’t book times for the printers, because we don’t want them to be booked and not used because a member decides to not show up. I know you can put in reasons not to miss your time, but that often involves punishment and we don’t often punish members at the DMS because it makes people want to leave the group. There are other reasons as well, but I think that point is the hardest one to currently solve for booking.

As for incentives for off hour printing, the incentive are that the printer is often open. :wink:

This is a big decision as to asking for money from the board for a new 3D Printer. If we get another printer, how long should we wait to ask to expand again? A year? Longer? If you compare 3D Fab to wood shop, 3D fab is much more conservative in expenditures. The wood shop has a ton of maintenance cost in the neighborhood of $200 - $400 a month, and they don’t currently charge for consumables like sand paper. 3D Fab charges for consumables and make a profit on them, allowing it to expand to more options. 3D Fab is a low cost to run part of DMS and if we got the capitol to make a larger purchase than a polyprinter. We could figure out a conservative way to cover costs and maintenance if we got the capital from the board. But we have to show this to the board in order to get it. They pour $6000 into the wood shop with less info, could we make a rational argument for more than that being poured into 3D Fab? I think it would take the support of the 3D Fab group as a whole if we wanted it.

Lisa, please tell me what you think? If your in support, I’m sure it would sway some of the others on the fence. If not, the easier solution is getting another polyprinter, but does that keep 3D Fab as a huge draw to the space? We are trying to keep up with not only technology, but the HAAS group, Wood Shop, and the other committees as a central draw to the space. The more our draw value the more future funding from the board we would be entitled to.

#16

We have a Stratasys Object30 Pro here at Dialexa. One of my duties here is to operate and maintain it. I have a love / hate relationship for it. I love the prints out of the machine and love having access to it, but this thing bleeds money like a stuck pig. Paying to keep it alive is expensive and I’m very happy my company is the one paying for it.

Our cost run about $600-700 per 2kg pack of material and $250 for the support. Between every print it has to run a cleaning cycle that throws away $5 worth of material into a waste bucket (The cleaning between prints takes maybe 10-15 minutes to run the cycle / wipe down the heads and roller with Isopropyl). Every time we need to change the material or the color we have to burn 20-30 bucks in material to flush the system (you get to choose one color + the support at a time). The reliability has been pretty Ok, I think we have lost 2-3 prints over the last year to various nonsense. Once a year (or when it breaks) it has a required visits from the Stratus man, who has to put it into a special service mode (that i know nothing about :slight_smile: ) to run a bunch of checks and balances and uses a fancy meter to check the UV output.

We average 30 cents for material/15 cents for support per part gram during prints (the machine mixs material into the support to aid in rigidity) when it all works out. A print the size of a hollow deck of cards you run about $12-14 bucks but $300 for a full bed print is nothing. The support is a little annoying, its like yellow gritty jello that we have to pressure wash off (the printer comes with a very nice sealed washing station) or soak in lye (2-4%) to completely remove the support. Anything the support touches has a matte finish, anywhere else is very nice and glossy.

Print time is all about the number layers the machine has to lay-down in Z. (Most prints average about 2 hours for flat/short items and 6+ for tall) The printer lays down material in 16 to 28 micron layers (depends on material) so it is very very accurate in the Z axis (but also explains why it takes so long) . X & Y it has a resolution of about 800 dpi (It has a oversize inkjet head)

Our build area is 11.57" X ; 7.55 " Y; and 5.85" Z (about the size of a piece of letter paper). I have all the materials and manuals so I don’t mind teaching people how to maintain and operate the printer. The software is no more complex than retina engrave.

I do not think the Stratasys would be a good fit for the DMS unless a VERY robust system for paying for material is established and we have enough demand (if not used for a week you need to flush the system with cleaner…another 30 bucks and 100g of material/support gone). While I am not allowed to comment on the exact purchase price you will need about $55-60k to get started. If we are going to get a Stratasys I recommend the Connex 500 series…only $400k+ for it and it prints in full RGB!

TL/DR: Love the printer, but you need $55k to start and need to feed it a fillet minion every time you want it to do something.

p.s. Forgive the typos, at work and I needed to shoot this off quickly :slight_smile: …

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#17

While I would like to see a different technology for 3D fabrication, I believe that we would be better suited to go with the 1 Polyprinter 229 and 1 508 option. When we get the 3d printer class completed, we can utilize it as well if we feel that it would be a dependable resource.

edit: for spelling.

#18

Wow Romeo,
Thanks for the run down. It sounds like the Stratasys has many of the same issues that my DTG printer has. With those concerns brought to light, this may not be a good fit. I wouldn’t want to take ownership of that much maintenance. I’m sure we could build the number of prints to 2 - 5 per day, would that be enough to keep from having to do the big clean out?

Figuring costs:

  • $5 per print clean out cost
  • $12 to $50 cost of print (average $31)
  • $3 Color change out fee ( taking the $30 and dividing it across 10 jobs)
  • $5.50 Maintenance (taking a guess of 2k a year in maintenance divided by 1 job a day)
    Total Cost = $44.50 per print
    Add a 15% margin for loss bring cost to $52.35 per print

Yeah I’m no longer pushing the Stratasys Printer. That is more than double the cost that I would of guessed it to be plus all the personal maintenance. Also, in the $52.35 we are missing the price of the machine. over 5 year estimating a print every day, we would need to add another $30.14 to our print cost to pay back the machine for the 55k option. The 400k option would add $220 per print at one print a day. That shit is CRAZY!

Sorry I even suggested it. :blush: Thanks for all the real world information Romeo, that was awesome. Did any of those figures include margin at all? Just wondering as it may be an additional issue with my math, other than my math just sucking. :smile:

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#19

Here’s my thoughts (since I’m kind a contributor to 3D fab in one way or another):

The class I want to teach is a separate issue. As with the Rostock Prisma, my personal delta build, and the 3D printer I would like to build with the class - RepRaps (self-replicating rapid prototyping) printer are 1.) open source, so it’s like having a linux distrobution that a group has root access to, you kind of have to know what you’re doing to not screw it up for everyone. 2.) Repraps are still experimental, there’s no support, the idea of the class is to go through the entire build and calibration process so we have multiple people that should know how to operate and fix it 3.) It would have to be member sources and maintainted. Thus, this RepRap we build it class won’t be to the same level as the PolyPrinters.

Polyprinters - This is honestly the main selling point of 3D fab and our membership for a lot of people. We probably the most accessible and easy to use 3D printers I’ve seen at a makerspace. The 508 is a cool, but I think you have a problem with the time it takes long prints to take, but you can still print smaller parts, which I think will happen more often.

UV Resin - I think this is a great idea but it’s also a problem with handling expensive resins. We would need to keep these things separated and have more training involved than the polyprinters. These would cost more per gram, and while you get more detail, you have a longer print time and a smaller build area. I would like this for jewelry design or action figures, but for most of the stuff I want, I compromise resolution for having the strength and speed and cost of ABS.

Stratasys printers - I highly recommend we don’t get a commercial printer. This isn’t a techshop, paying that much for material and a lease just to have slightly better FDM quality with dissoluble support material is not worth the cost. My old school had a uPrint and the quality of prints out of that $20k printer weren’t that much better than the art settings on a polyprinter. I would love to have a full color 3D printer, but honestly if you want one of those, just go to shapeways.com they do a much better job and cost way less.

Conclusion, We should probably look at getting either two PolyPrinter 208’s or one standard and one doublewide. This would fill most of our needs.

Another thing is Ninjaflex, from what Polyprinter has said it does not work yet with their hotends but it can get there. I’m really looking forward to it, but exotic materials and dual heads really aren’t practical for day-to-day printing.

I recently sold a Pip-boy 3000 model, it would have been so much easier and faster if I could have printed all the parts in one day, instead of waiting for a free printer. I want to thank Suzanne and Lisa for stepping up about the printer backup issue and confronting the board about it, I hope to show my support at the town hall meeting.

#20

I’m probably the only one representing delta printers at the makerspace but I’d like us to look at the Kossel clear, or SeeMeCNC Orion or Rostock Max V2.

The Rostock Prisma is on track to be test printing hopefully by the November 8th 3D printer expo at the NRH library. But like I said before I think we’ll have a hard time finding people that want to continually work on it after we get it initially setup, I think if we get another delta printer we would have some diversity, we could also make it the dedicated PLA printer so we can have PLA for people that want it.

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