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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 เม.ย. 2024
- In this video, we discuss how a surprising change of perspective led to the creation of one of the largest 3D print farms in the world. Learn about the breakthroughs that instigated this change, including the "fundamental truth" that supports 3D printings vast potential as a viable alternative to traditional manufacturing. 3D printing has evolved from a niche hobby to a revolutionary tool in product design and mass production. If you are curious about the transformative capabilities of 3D printing and how it can be effectively integrated into modern manufacturing and design processes, then this video is for you. Join us to uncover the pivotal lessons that converted a skeptic into a champion of 3D printing technology.
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About Slant 3D
🏭 High-Volume 3D Printing: Scalability Meets Flexibility
Slant 3D's Large-Scale 3D Print Farms utilize 1000's of FDM 3D printers working 24/7 to offer limitless scalability and unparalleled flexibility. Whether it's 100 or 100,000 parts, our system can handle it reliably, while still allowing for real-time design updates, ensuring products evolve with the times. This adaptability is key in today's fast-paced world.
🌿 Sustainable Manufacturing: Eco-Friendly Efficiency
Embrace a system that drastically reduces carbon emissions by eliminating carbon-intensive steps in the supply chain, such as global shipping and warehousing. Our approach minimizes this footprint, offering a more sustainable manufacturing option.
⚙️ Digital Warehouses: Parts On-Demand
Think of print farms as a "Digital Warehouse", meaning we can store your parts digitally on a server rather than physically on a shelf. parts are available on-demand, reducing the need for extensive physical inventory.
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"People wanted to use 3D printing but for terrible reasons" As a software engineer, I'm experiencing the exact same thing with AI right now
Yeah. Mostly landfill waste.
OMG, so true.. My students are using AI as if they were 3D printing a board with a hole drilled in the middle😢
Given a trinket or toy product, at the end of the day the cost to manufacture a mold is the same with creating your own personal print farm. 3D printing has an advantage because not everyone has access to the gear, engineers, and technicians required to create a mold, but everyone has access to 3D printers.
Then there's the trend. It took >100 years for injection molding to arrive at the current stage. It only took
From a development perspective, the iteration cycle for 3D printing over standard molding isn't even a contest. I can get a dozen iterations out of the printer in the time it takes the first iteration to be ready via a mold.
I think your thesis would have been stronger if you'd included "time" in your inputs. And you've addressed this in other videos, to great effect where you note that injection molding is still the best way to make, say, bottle caps. Things where one needs millions of them and the design is stable.
Time, of course, interacts with scale to skew what the best method is. I'm active in the R2 Builders Club, and the emergence of simple and reliable 3D printers has dramatically changed the way people are building droids. Most folks who turn up thinking they want to 3D print their droid are into 3D printing as a tool anyway, so that's fine. But sometimes, we still get a new builder who doesn't really care about 3d printing, they just want a droid as quickly as practical. At which point, 3D printing (at the hobby level) isn't the best tool, because it will take about 3 months of printing on something like a Prusa mk3 to get a droid done. Using a wooden frame that's been cut on a CNC router will take under a month, including probable shipping time. Whereas if you were producing these for sale, you could have a number of machines running in parallel and pump out a droid's worth of parts every week or so.
My point is mostly that for injection molding there is a large upfront cost in both money and *time* but then the time cost of production plummets, so injection molding has a very non-linear time cost as you make more. 3D printing is a nearly constant time cost per part, but a much lower cost of entry (assuming the printer is built and operable, but we're also assuming the injection molding machine is built and operable so that's fair.) Neglecting that weakens the thesis, a bit.
On the other hand - you've demonstrated that you're quite savvy about this whole TH-cam thing, so I think you did that on purpose to generate comments like this and feed the algorithym. Well done! :D
Agree! Time to 3d print a part THAT IS ABLE TO BE INJECTION MOLDED is higher and may be higher at scale than getting the mold built. Molds are fast! I worked in an injection molding plant and my lord the amount of parts was just phenomenal (I am talking molds that did 96 pieces at once and cycled within 2 minutes). 3d printing is getting there but printing a side panel for the inside of a car door will probably never be a cost effective 3d printable part as it would take too long to print them at scale unless you make your own orange gigastorm (but better) print farm and have a million printers :)
Very interested in seeing more about the Slant Box.
When a 3D printer becomes a full blown replicator from Star Trek, then there will be one in every home.
Bambu Lab invented this right now. 😄
I bought one recently, because I believe that it is soon (5-10yrs) to become a home appliance, like a microwave. Not every home has one, but almost everyone who has one uses it many times a week.
6:34 "Printing is the most efficient and most effective way of making any item, period."
When you restrict the conversation to 3D printing farms, auto-ejection, changing the whole engineering mindset and people moving away from smooth things and getting used to layer lines finishes, then yes, I agree with you.
But that's the same as saying "In a desert, at noon, this is the most import glass of water in the entire world."
It could very well be that some of those conditions never arrive, or take 100 years and by that point new processes overtake the manufacturing world and 3d printing never become the "the most" anything.
Where do these trolls come from lmao
Any chance you will ever release the files for those robot arms? You guys aren't making them or selling them anymore right?
There are a TON of alternatives, a few that are still maintained. You’re probably going ti have better luck with a more recent design.
This is splendid stuff. I too spent probably... half a decade thinking that 3D printing was niche, for prototypes only, and overall remarkably expensive. Then I met printers that could print in engineering materials, and were themselves low cost machines that could be run massively in parallel. And the penny dropped.
i feel lucky that i recently got into 3d printing, after the older users are gone and all the problems have been worked out and its actually as gfood as they used to market it
Like nearly everything in the engineering sector, the sentence “it depends” would make much more sense! To say 3D printing is fundamentally better is just not true. Like you said in your statement early on, you wouldn’t 3D print a board with a hole in it, that just has not changed! You still wouldn’t do it, even though you could. I’m a big supporter of using 3D printing for mass manufacturing, but like I said earlier, not for everything… and that won’t change!
Great video. Loved the part about your custom printers with less parts. Keep up the great work
So what is the part count on a slant box vs something like an ender 3 or bamboo labs printer?
It'd be really cool if you could share more about the printer you designed, even if it's not detailed enough for others to reproduce it. Maybe just some earlier models and what you did to improve over off-the-shelf modela
I'd note that in some ways they have, even though they don't specifically identify those specifically as part of their printer designs. As an example, he did a video about a year and a quarter ago about bracing aluminum extrusion parts, and how to print those to maximize the strength of the part for the purpose it's being put to. If you look at the corner braces of the printers they occasionally show in the background fills of the print farm, you'll see that they are using those brackets in their print farm. One advantage that I can see for that is that if they ever choose to produce a set of larger printers, say 450 mm cube, or 450x450x550, (if such ever became a useful size) they don't need to come up with new brackets. They may have to source new materials for the moving parts, but the frame just gets longer extrusions. Likewise I suspect that a lot of the things like rod holders, or screw bearing holders, end up being snap in components that fit up against those same brackets for repeatable dimensions. Motor mounts can take advantage of consistent dimensions and the flex in the plastic to allow the motor to snap into the mount with minimal or zero play yet can easily be removed and replaced if a motor starts misbehaving. There are likely other examples of learned solutions, such as motors being positioned at the top of any parts that experience wear, both so that the heat of the motor rises away from the parts that the motor is moving, and so that any wear products don't drop into what should be clean spaces and gum up the motors. (Yes, I've run into that myself.)
I'd suspect that a huge amount of the lessons they teach in the 'design for 3d Printing' collection of videos has come not just from the idea of making products printable, but also from the perspective of making their own printers better.
Great Video! I appreciate the full story!
Is your printer design available? Would you share some specs?
How much do they cost per printer?
How do you make a printer print with a reliable stick to the build plate over time?
I’m curious where you went to college? I believe we purchased a Stratasys printer at the University of Idaho in 2007 as part of an advanced CAD lab we were creating. One of my fellow grad students used it for some of his research but it was limited to ABS and it took so long back then.
Perfect presentation of the progression of 3d printing (almost perfect alliteration).
Hey man, don’t listen to the wikipedia whisperers in the comments. The people who talk bad about you or your processes probably won’t accomplish half the things you’ve done.
An interesting and key perspective - the focus on inputs to a process as key to scale efficiently. I've often thought printing large elements of a structure (e.g. beams, plates) from plastic is daft as it's slow and weaker than wood, aluminium extrusion, etc. I made a spool holder for large (8.5kg) spools where I 3d-print the corner pieces of the structure and use cheap strip wood for the main structural beams, as making the whole thing from 3d-printed plastic seems daft (and certainly is for a one-off make). That said, however, for production at scale there's something to be said for the ability to print the thing whole and eject without needing manual intervention on each and every print. Labour costs of building my spool holder would be quite noticeable in kitting and assembly.
i LOVE how bambulab JUST now added auto eject upgrade to their firmware, ive always been interested in it since i independently came up with the idea, well after it had already been built by you lol i always knew it was possible, was happy to find out it was. im excited to get to auto eject stuff from my a1 or a1 mini or psusa mk4 soon.
Tis was the most interesting clip from and over you 😊
Love this backstory. Thanks.
Great episode, cheers
I generally agree with your points on this and it has shifted my perspective on the scale where 3d printing is viable. With 2 objections currently. 1. 3d printing for mass production is not better than injection molding. It is also not worse. It is an alternative. There are some features that are easy in a mold and extremely difficult in a print. And there are some features that are easy to print and impossible to mold. 2. For it to meet parity like you envision 3d printing will have to find a way to achieve high precision without a precision feed stock. As long as the feed plastic requires high precision it will always cost more than the one that does not. I do agree that is an engineering problem, but it is a serious hurdle to be addressed to bring the cost to parity between the 2 manufacturing tools. Great videos as always.
That's so cool. have you considered selling your printers or at least publishing the plans for them?
Interesting take on this. Scale up and simplify is what I got out of it. Imagine what the gear will do in even 20 years from now? 👍🏻
I'd be quite interested in your take on the filament versus resin. Which is better? When to use each? And so on. I understand that filament doesn't require as much treatment as resin, but the latter seems way more scalable for small parts and stronger.
Also about heat treatment, which I've only recently heard about. But there seems to be some benefits from thermal treatments which result in stronger parts...?
Dunno, I may be just rambling here 😅
Thinking about making 3d printing more efficient, what are your thoughts on printing directly from pellets instead of filament. It seems like this would potentially eliminate a step in the process. I know you are working on bringing the cost of filament down, but as Elon says "the best process is no process".
It's a video they've already made
Look up Greenboy3D man
Thats completely fair, pellet priting would be way cheaper and would give interesting benefits such as making custom blends for color and physical properties. You could even mix pla with tpu so you get a part that is stiff but when it snaps is still held together. I'm not sure if pla sticks to tpu but it's just an example.
The issue is that normal injection moulding pellets are quite course to be printing with, the consistency is not there yet. Greenboy3D has some very interesting videos on the topic.
Pellets don't work
@@SquintyGears Can you point me to it?
Wouldn’t the 3d printer be a consumable just like the mold?
It is. He says they last 3 years.
Do you have any idea what "hard tooling" costs today for injection moulding? You obviously do not. Unless you are making tens of thousands of parts, the amortized costs are very high.
Then again... wouldn't be the machine where you put the mold... a consumable?
@@SenyorDonGatoo - Sort of, after it is no longer usable, after at least 500,000 to 1,000,000 impressions or more. Tooling is a fixed asset that is amortized over its life, vs written off within a year or so. A single printer might be less than $1,000; while a mold going into an injection moulding press might be $20,00 - $100,000 or more. If you have to ask what an injection moulding press costs, they are way more than the cost of the molds to replace and require expensive maintenance and labor costs.
@@jeromefeig4209 That's the thing I was trying to make Samian understand. You need to compare the 3D printer to the injection mold press, not the mold itself. 3D printing is great but it has it's applications and injection molding it's great too for it's applications.
i see you also started with "the Fire Hazard Pro" (aka the anet a8)
Most efficient? I think that depends on how you're measuring efficiency. Because it sure isn't the fastest, and it's probably only the cheapest or easiest up to a certain scale, and I doubt that will ever change, so there is a point where the upfront cost of tooling starts to make sense when you are manufacturing larger volumes. 3D printing has its pros and cons, claiming it's the best way to make everything is just as wrong as claiming it's never the best way to make anything. But, where it definitely has machining and injection molding beat is in its versatility, which makes it possible to create things that would not even be possible to manufacture with other methods, allows more freedom in the design, and makes it a great, low cost option for just about anything (with certain limitations, for example the strength of a 3D print can never match an injection molded part), where the cost scales linearly with the scale. We are already seeing almost a third industrial revolution where many new low volume or niche products are appearing on the market thanks to 3D printing that would not have been viable to manufacture in the past because they would have simply cost too much, creating new markets that just did not exist before, and I think that's amazing.
I agree with Slant3D. The way Slant3D is doing it's manufacturing process, thy just made injection molding irrelevant.
Exactly
What happened to tangled testing?
Videos posting on the channel. Formal testing machine in transit
Time is a resource too. You need to account for this one in the manufacturing process. Some people don't have hours to produce a handful of parts.
You're going to spend hours to produce a handful of parts no matter what. Given a complex part, a 3D printer will do it with the least material and least labour. If it's a sheet with a hole in it, then of course you might as well take a sheet and drill a hole in it, as mentioned in the video.
@@celeron55 Or if you need to do a lot of sheets with holes in them, and perhaps a bend or two, a punch press may be the way to go. There are good reasons to go with a lot of different processes. I'm in the process of printing pieces for a ham radio hex beam. I'm not going to 3d print the shafts that make up the poles, I can pick up 6' long 1/4" fiberglass poles at Home Depot for under $3 each. On their own they are not long enough, but I can easily design and 3d print the pieces that allow me to put 2 of them end to end for the 12' long pieces that I do need.
Cool story dude. Thanks.
Hello
please make detailed overview of your 3d printer model.
It still depends on the part. A part that you need here and now for quick iteration or opportunistic product can make sense to be printed, but for a very high volume part with a design that's already settled, or for larger parts, injection molding is still king. Lego is not switching to printing their sets anytime soon, neither does Tupperware.
Also, they aren't melting the plastic twice to first turn it into filament and then turn it into a part, molding uses pellets directly and leaves you with a bit of sprue that gets recycled (just like supports except removed automagically), and once they get running they need minimal human input.
Tupperware is going out of business. Lego nearly did.
@@slant3d not because they use injection molding, that's for sure. In fact, they both struggle because there is competition that set up their own injection molding production and makes similar stuff but at better price to quality ratio. Not just in China, but worldwide, like NZ's Sistema Plastics. That goes a bit contary to the video's message.
When filament was like wet stretchy noodle, and moisture was only a problem for the wooden printer itself..
BambuLabs just turned the cumbersome 3D Printer into a home appliance.
Not in the sense that anyone can use it. If anything Bambulab is more akin to Festool than an Apple.
3:29 It's funny you say that because a band saw is simpler to use than a 3D printer, and more people would probably be able to use that then a 3D printer SuperVinlin (tho 3D printers are definitely more versatile; not that I disagree with your point)
Unfortunately for me 3D printers are still just too slow, if I was to make a viral product today there's no amount of printers that could do it fast enough to keep up with demand. A simple coaster for example, 1hr-2hr depending on printer to make, people usually buy them in a pack of 4, at best that's a dozen products per printer per day, just not fast enough :(.
That is why we build the largest print farma on the planet. And give folks free access to them. You would not run TH-cam on a laptop. Why would you launch a viral product on a single printer?
@@slant3d You missed my point I didn't say 1 3D printer I said NO amount of 3D printers would be able to meet the demand, it's simply too slow. On your TH-cam on a laptop analogy yes you could say 3D printing would be like running TH-cam on several thousand slow laptops, each request to view a video would take 5mins to buffer.. Come back when FDM 3D printers scale the same as computers and networks, they don't, if you add another $500 printer to a print farm that's few dozen 1hr prints extra a day, it's not enough.
@@wafflecartI think you're comparing different things here. To get a mold for injection molded parts, you have to play at minimum $10,000 just for the mold. For that kind of money you could have alot of printers
Even if you contracted the work out to a company, the initial cost would be very high in comparison to 3D printing.
@@sounghungi this $10,000 crap for a mold is A MYTH! You can design and prototype molds with your 3D printer, cast a resin or silicone mold heck even a forged carbon one. Then get the final mold machined out of metal by PCBWAY for a fraction of that cost and get it in a matter of days..
wasn't this video already uploaded?
It's not a better process. It's a better process for niche use cases. 3d printing will never produce injection molding quality. Injection molding will never produce the low volume economics of 3d printing. 3d printing can produce geometries injection molding can't. Injection molding can produce the necessary strength in geometrically constrained parts, that 3d printing cannot. It absolutely isn't a better process, it's another process. It just happens to be far more accessible.
I had a similar experience with 3D printing: I wasn't interested. Didn't know what I'd print. Once I got a printer for Christmas more than a year ago, that changed, as I've basically been printing ever since.
What I will disagree with is home printing not being a thing. Bambu made printers into appliances and Prusa is selling the Mk4 faster than any of their previous printers. Home printing is probably here to stay, and I think saying it's not a thing is just protecting your business model.
... and to be fair, people may not have band saws in their houses, but plenty of people have tools in their garage or a shed. I have seen people with a band saw in their garage. Maybe not for everyone, maybe not "in every house," but that doesn't mean it's merely a fad either.
It's more efficient - by what measure of effiency?
He has no measurements. Just emotions. See how everything is "in the world" and he's SO insistent? All ego...
None. It is partially self-delusion and partially advertisement for his company.
lol, I guess so. 3d printing can be more money-efficient for small runs, that's for sure.
Measure or money
Less shippedng, less warehousing, less wasted material, less lost inventory, and also not making the mold. ( Lost inventory alone saves 15-25 percent of landfilled parts)
Nice
The magic that gives 3D printing its true value is " complexity is free ". There is no tool cost and that's the science fiction part of the story. When I showcase my 3D printers in events people are quick to compare 3D printing to other ways of manufacturing by saying 3D printing is take a lot of time and they forget about the preparation time. You can pass from design to manufacturing in 5min with 3D printing while you need weeks to months using any other way of manufacturing.
Isn't CNC the same? Although there are obviosly things that can't be CNCed but 3D printed just fine, one would need to design parts to be CNCed (in opposed to designing parts to be 3D printed).
@@vuongnh0607l CNC requires setup time, raw material prep time, tool changes, supervision because if anything goes wrong it can destroy the machine beyond repair.
I never cared and built myself a 3D printer at earliest opportunity. Because I'm not gonna have a machine shop and a wood workshop at home. And often times I have it make me absolutely trivial parts that I could do any other way because I just draw something up at the speed of imagination and the machine makes it for me I don't need to expend any extra effort. I mean I have specialised tools of some types but mostly if something isn't done with my favourite #2 screwdriver or a Jimmy knife, I'm grabbing a multi tool or bit kit. The more specialised higher quality tools are all... somewhere, I need to retrieve them and that's effort.
People telling me that I'm using 3D printing wrong or my tools wrong? I plain don't care. Because it's absurd to have a 3D printer at home?
I do love 3d printing. And think it has it's place. As a former automation technician at a large injection molding facility. There are just some parts you cannot reproduce with printing. We made alot of medical field single use items. You cannot reproduce the volume of those parts. For example. Ear tip mold. Shot out 72 tips that the doctors stick in your ear. 12 second cycle time. 72 tips were produced. Shot out. And bagged on the fly.
Just like a print farm
@@slant3d exactly like print farm. Except. It would take you hours to do what that mold could do in seconds.
Thats 1 million parts a day. And bagged.
It would take years for you to do what that mold could do in a day.
I know the price per part. And bagging and shipping. You cannot produce that at a competitive price.
75% of phone calls to us can be done better and faster and often cheaper by laser cutting, CNC, vac forming, casting…
Some weeks its largely kindhearted industrial design consultancy 😅
If you have such a great, reliable printer then why don’t you sell it or publish the plans so others can make it?
nice
"There is nothing hard, just things you haven't learned yet"
me
Youre still too pessimistic: there WILL 100% a 3d printer in every home, after a few more iterations from bambulab, they will for sure have a kitchen 3d printer
3:25 I'd say "wait a while" on that one. Feels like a Bill Gates moment here. Just because we're not there /yet/ doesn't mean we'll never.
Microwaves wheren't in every home either at one point. These days you're weird if you don't have one.
The more accessible those things become, the more they turn from a "tool" to an appliance.
All those printers, but we never see them all running.
Do you think Amazon has 100% of their AWS servers running 24/7? They don’t. You build out your infrastructure based on peaks of demand. If your facility is constantly running at max capacity, you don’t have enough capacity.
Would you rather we violate our privacy policy and post an Instagram image of your proprietary part?
People still use 3D printers as a catch all tool, to make crap things. I don't think much has changed there tbh. Love 3D printing, but so many people use it when it's not appropriate because it's easy.
Walmart wants 100,000 3D printed cups, who you gonna call?
Jokes aside, for what it is capable of, I love 3D printing, but there is a reason why your sunglasses weren't 3D printed. When something needs to be as strong and as thin as possible, we have better technology.
We can do that. Faster than overseas molding
I have a FFF machine at home and I am satisfied with it. FFF definitely has a place, but it is not mass production. Apart from initial costs of mould, it is fundamentally more efficient to inject plastic into a mould at once than to gradually extrude the same amount of plastic through a tiny nozzle.
We do mass production every day
@@slant3dpeople drive cars everyday instead of taking mass transit that does not make cars more efficient.
Lol did you even watch the video?
It's fundamentally inefficient to try to get millions of people to buy a thing only tens of thousands need because the only way you could make it affordable to manufacture was by amortizing cost over millions of pieces.
@@daliasprints9798 Plus it locks you into a design with a high cost to adjust and iterate.
"It's a duck. It walks. It swims. It flies. It doesn't do any of them well."
It does all of them better
Sorry but 3d printing will never be as fast nor strong as injection moulding.
We do it everyday. Faster
@@slant3d faster at scale? I believe a per part time is faster with injection moulding with a machine-machine compared to printing but scaling a print farm would be more versatile and cost effective
@@R3DPrints01 yeah but only after you already have the mold. The mold takes a long time to make, it's really expensive and, it wears out so you need to remake it every X number of parts.
So faster at scale? If you can start pumping out prints at day 0 after having designed the stl. How much headstart does your scale have compared to waiting 2 weeks? 6 weeks? For your mold? What if the mold has an error?
So sure afterwards you can make a part every 20s instead of every hour. But you don't catch up instantly. That's simply not true.
And as the end of the video clearly states, strength is an engineering design challenge. Not something inherently impossible to work with. Printed parts are really strong, but they do have an optimal orientation.
It's both faster and stronger.
Latency to get an injection molded part: weeks. 3D printed? About 25-90 minutes.
Injection molded parts are limited to being flimsy brittle junk because you have to limit thickness to avoid shrinkage/warping. Printed parts can be as chonky as you like.
Why?
Can you please show less of you and more of actual content, thanks