How It’s Made had a segment about building a 3D printer. Looks like it’s a Lulzbot Taz 5 and shows Lulzbot’s printer farm.
http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/how-its-made/videos/3d-printers/
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Who would print parts for production like that? You print the prototype, then get the parts mass produced…much cheaper and quicker…instead of printing printer parts with all those printers, they could be selling them!
Not sure what that company was doing…
I can think of a couple of reasons. One, the obvious marketing gimmick “our printers are so good they can make themselves.” Two, trying to get in on the reprap craze. Three, I don’t know anything about their sales volume, but if it’s sufficiently low then getting molds tooled would be prohibitively expensive. Four, it serves as an excellent stress test of their machines to help find faults and failure modes. Five, it could (can’t tell if they were implying this from the video) serve as a final QA burn-in step for the printers they’re shipping.
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Yep, I agree they are such low volume this makes sense. DaVinci, Robo 3D, and Makerbot all use injection molded parts so I’m sure it’s probably just easier for them to have a print farm cranking out parts. PolyPrinter prints out way more of it’s own chassis parts than most reprap’s I’ve seen, the entire enclosure is 3D printed.