10 Things I've learned running a print farm
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Which printer to buy? - • The 3D Printer I'd buy...
My (new) Industrial Print Farm - • I Tried Building an In...
My First Print Farm - • I spent $10,000 on 3D ...
The 3D Printer(s) I recommend:
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00:00 Introduction
00:25 1. Not Passive
00:53 2. Energy
02:02 3. Air Quality
03:27 4. Prepare to Grow
04:14 5. Standardize
06:59 6. Maintenance
08:30 7. Production Planning
09:20 8. Print Job Management
10:34 9. Packaging & Fulfillment
11:28 10. Future Technology
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so expensive
lets say i have a oppotunity for a grant and decide i want to get into 3d printing and i also would have the chance to get contract jobs in different filed like petroleum , offices , water supply contracts what printers industrial level should i go for ,..... ive made a plan but i want to see if anything you suggest comes up with what ive planned already
I'm a farmer, I barely know how to use the internet on my phone and I still rock a laptop for my utube watching but I just want you to know that I really enjoy watching your videos. You have the ability to make it all interesting.
It's not much but it's honest work
I have a print farm with 18 creality printers. I can't agree more with you about the fact that good maintenance is one of the key. I have been running the business for almost 2 years now and no major issues with the printers. As a low budget guy I can say you don't need high entry 3d printers to start your business.. it's all about commitment, planning and most of all love what you do. And thank you for your tips
So fascinating. I didn't have 3D printers to test the air quality on my video and went off some research publications. Glad to see 40 of them are not having a huge impact in a contained room. That's encouraging.
I immediately thought of your video, Suman.
I'd imagine the numbers would be different if he used other types of filaments or even lower quality filaments. Nevertheless, the numbers are encouraging.
@@matthysloedolff yea that’s my thought process as well. Maybe good ol American made filament warrants the price of admission due to purity. It could also be the printer itself applying an appropriate amount of heat instead of blasting it too far out, resulting in emissions of compounds that are happy to flee at higher temps. Given the study used 5 types of printer, each with 5 filament types, I do think it’s a good idea to take those findings and other similar studies at heart and use protective measures anyway.
@@WoodcraftBySuman PPE is my middle name. It would be interesting to see what temperature threshold results in significant VOC emissions and if the concentrations of emissions are linearly related to temperature.
Has the study also looked at a resin printer by any chance? I imagine that would be off the scale.
I think it depends on filament because some of the PLA I have smell like pure chemicals similar to ABS so yeah def not safe for every day exposure especially in the same room one sleeps. A purifier and ventilation helps alot
Hey, I got a solution for your SD card problem. What you can do is. Use an SD card virtualization. You plug in a "sd card" which is just a data connector and then you can connect it via wifi to your local drive system. Then you do not have the problem anymore. Just move the file to the local folder to which every sd card transmitter is connected and start printing :). The only thing what you need is to power the SD card to wifi connector via USB.
I work for a very large semiconductor company and we do maintenance on our tools, scheduled Monthly. Bi Monthly, even Mini PM you have to determine where the maintenance schedule for your equipment. Your schedule may differ. Keeping a well supplied stores of spare parts is Key even if you are buying on an annual basis. Instead of having a tool down for weeks "Waiting Part" have spare and install it then reorder the part for when the next tool needs it. You will find your production increases while your down time drops. Don't wait for the tool to fail before you act. Proactive is better then Reactive. Good Luck
I was looking for someone to print my prototype. Got multiple quotes. Ended up being more than the cost of my ender 5+. Instead, learned 3D printing, now I have decided to start a farm myself. The margins are really good if you have capabilities to print multiple materials and understand the marketing aspect behind it. I recently bought a couple bambu printers so your journey was inspirational man.
I can see myself going from 2 printers to 5, then more in the future as well. Here's to dreaming big!
The product / design has the most commanding influence on the price and how much $ the machine makes. Someone that designs custom parts will have different margins than somebody else that prints rocktopus and articulate dragons from thingieverse
@@hd-be7di Who would have known
@@Salad-818 I'm sure someone with your intelligence would have figured it out without any help
@@hd-be7di theres nothing to figure out my friend
@@Salad-818 So why did you reply then?
The future technology is a big one. Seeing all the posts in the groups of people buying 10 printers that are quickly outdated is rough. Currently switched over to a P1S but have the intentions on building some voron tridents for size and upgradability. It all depends on if you want to tinker and would spend the time on upgrades and proper maintenance. The people that think that they can buy these machines and just click and print are in for a rude awakening.
Agreed even though I don't neccessarily think being a little behind the current hotness is such a bad thing in all cases. For us going even faster (we run Voron V0.1 and Trident and Prusa Mk3s+) wouldn't make a big difference if any at all and this is probably the case for many operations where print speed is not the production bottleneck. Totally agree on the tinkering and maintenance part... everybody told us how the Vorons weren't good printers because of the time investment in building them and tuning them ... They are incredibly stable and run amazingly well for us on a longer maintenance window and just having them has saved us so much in terms of maintenance cost it's not even funny and well worth it.
@@FNmey what do you use the .1's for isnt the print size on them for the cost not worth it. where im from you can get a decent big printer SV06 plus or SV07 plus for the same price and these two can still print pretty quickly. Also is there a reason you use Tridents over 2.4's
@@ZFGFZDGDFG They are the perfect size for a couple of out products and are throughput-machines. We don't want full plates of parts while we are in the office for these products because they are pretty difficult prints and having a whole plate fail somewhere down the road would be super annoying on a larger printer. The V0s allow us to get closer to our ideal of single piece flow, to keep our throughput high and our risk low and we can have multiple in the same space one trident or v2.4 would take up giving us even more output.
Trident has been the more reliable platform in our experience and not having to service the flying gantry is a pretty decent plus as well. They are also cheaper and faster to build.
Must not have an Anker!
I built 10 vorons and they’ve been particularly unreliable. It might be because I went with the popular LDO kits.
I also built 10 HevORT’s and they have been extremely reliable. I think the suspended Z axis gantry design or the Voron is not great for serviceability, simplicity and reliability for a print farm. It also adds a lot of cost and complexity to the printed assembly parts, seems great for hobbyists but maybe not for a commercial setting.
Not sure if you tested it, but octoprint is far from a hack. Open source using standard 3D printing commands. After swapping SD cards for the past 5 years, I decided to try it and kicked myself for not doing it sooner. Might be a little tricker with a large farm but I'm sure there's a write up out there.
Seriously. Once you ditch the SD cards you'll never go back. Check out our automated print farm timelapses to see the efficiency gains when you can 3D print 24/7 without interruptions.
I found your channel when I first bought my P1S. Since It was my first 3D printer and to be honest I'm grateful for the issues I've had because it's taught me a lot about the printer...but I've replaced the hot end 3 times in a few months and had to figure out some weird z homing issue and realign the heat bed. However when the thing is printing at top notch it's amazing. I'll likely do more of them when I grow my fleet.
I’m constantly mind blown at the progress of tech. When 3D printing first became a thing, home machines were astronomical on pricing. Reminds me of when I saw my first flat screen TV in 1994. It was a whopping 32”, the largest screen size TV one could buy without going to a projector, and it cost…. $25,000!!!! Today you can get a bargain brand 72” flat screen for under a grand lol.
3D printers, CNCs and laser printers/engravers are progressing so fast and becoming so accessible, it’s bananas.
Repetier is a great option for mk3s. You can fit all of your printers on 3 raspberry pis. We used this setup for years before moving on from prusa. We did air quality tests as well and found the same results.
This is an excellent video. The best advice I can give in planning for future technology is to go with open source machines where a companies business model doesnt include you buying new printers everytime an upgrade comes out. Klipper has made it easy to take old tech and make it better. My ender 3 v2 print farm is just as good as any print farm with new machines today. New hotends, motor, firmware, etc can be swapped easily on an open source machine to bring it up to todays standards without having to completely replace the printer.
Basically this. We mostly run Vorons these days and I would never go with something proprietary at this point ... just not worth the hassle.
@@FNmey I feel the same way with a Voron vs a Bambu Labs, but the power of the assembled Prusa's is that you get a box in, and it's up and running in 30min to an hour (probably even less if your experienced). But building a Voron takes time and time=money, in the case of a Voron 2.4 it's a lot of time, thus a lot of money. Building 40 Vorons would take a TON of time, it would take over half a year of fulltime building (single person) to get them all up and running. That doesn't scale very well...
@@Cergorach And that is your right … however you might be off on a few points. For one we don‘t use the v2.4 for a multitude of reasons but even if we did 1/2 a year of a person building full time would be about 1000 hrs … taking 25hrs a printer for assembly and tuning? For us that number is off by a factor of 6-8. The throughput on the Vorons is also much higher than the Prusas (we have both) and dealing with Marlin is a pain. In the end it probably is to each their own.
They recorded using g10 garolyte print plates for self release of the print parts you can also automate the sequence of printer pushing part outside of the plate (the printer itself should stand tilted) . And well yeah using octoprint setup would save you a lot of time .
Wow, that is some farm you've put together~! Happy to see that it's working out so well for you. I've got a Prusa MK3S and love it~! Just have to find more things to keep it busy making things for a woodworking shop. BTW, what is that you're using as a filament spool hanger? Looks like something that would work out well for my setup. Thanks Travis~!
Just got the bambu lab P1S and I've very interested in your findings regarding their reliability. I work as a manufacturing engineer so the lean manufacturing concepts make sense when it comes to print farms. I only have 4 printers right now but still struggling to find the niche product I can design.
We seem to be somewhat of an outlier in that regard but we've had nothing but trouble with both of our bambu test printers and parts availability was a huge issue back then. Hope they have fixed that by now... In the end we went back to what we knew (since out Vorons are already plenty fast and produce amazing prints)
Most products you can sell revolve usually about hobbies and a problem it can solve for people (who have that hobbies). So try more stuff
All the printers this guy is using are basically toys. Just like the bambu printers.
@@padel24x7 It's been like that. I design things for my personal needs and find out others need it. I like to CAD so designing unique models is nice.
@@FNmey The parts issues look to be mostly solved now, theres a ton of spares on their shop now, at least on the UK one. Theres also been a lot of 3rd party parts showing up on aliexpress recently, I think its got to the point where theres now enough customers using them for 3rd parties to justify making parts for it.
Have you ever looked into the 3D printer mods you can do to add a conveyor belt system to auto eject finished prints into a bin? I think there may be a few production 3D printers out there that have it, too. I can see it causing problems with bed adhesion but I think its a really cool concept and could speed up workflow tremendously.
I appreciate your videos. I’ve been printing for 4 plus years but I am working on starting a print farm. These videos are a great reference. I have a mix of printers but I’d like to standardize. Prusas and Bamboo seem to be gold standard but may be out side my budget to start. Videos like this are swaying me one way though. Thanks!
"That'd be like building fine furniture with Home Depot 2x4's" .... this really drove the point home, great analogy
The white stuff is antimony trioxide, not caprolactam. Wikipedia has plenty of mention of this compound in PETG, whereas no mention of caprolactam can be found whatsoever.
Well thank god Wikipedia knows!
Did I miss what fire suppression/extinguishing you use.
Also filament drying and storage for hydrophobic polymers (PC, Nylon, etc)
And what about using OctoPrint on each printer and OctoFarm centrally to manage all the OctoPrint servers? That's how I manage my smaller farm of 15 and its great control, efficiency reporting, print file mgt, etc
Great video man, a bit of your insight into filament and the preferences/ applications that factor in on when and where to use what would be great! Have been loving your insight into printing!
I’ll be investing in one to assist jig and prototyping for my fabrication workshop :)
I love the pace of your videos. They are informative, to the point, and they help to take decisions. 😊
Running 10 printers you hit every point we ran into. The high speed printers is really the next question I think for print farms. How fast ? Quality ? Maintenance all something to look at. We ran a "test" print last week on a high speed printer VS our Toyotas and it was better than expected, but the last question will be, can these handle the long haul ? Guess only time will tell.
Push Plastic is a fantastic supplier. I got a roll a couple years ago just to try out and they almost immediately became my sole supplier. Almost every issue I might have during a print went away immediately.
Very keen to watch your Bambu video. I have a P1S and it's superb for hobby level printing. Always wondered how it would go in a busy print farm. Those SD cards must drive you crazy!!! Wifi is the way to go
I have 25 P1Ss in my print farm and loving them. Plan on switching everything over to Bambu
Kudos to a very well produced video. Yes, I agree as I sell on eBay and shipping is my bane! Shipping supplies take up so much room and because I have different size products I have to have many different size shipping supplies. I have to say also when I finally broke down and got a Rollo shipping label printer it made a massive difference in my shipping time.
First video of you I've seen- that "... feeding your 3d printer a balanced meal..." line- yep, you got me. Subscribed immediately.
I’m at 4 printers after 2 months, and I installed an extra circuit early. I got an air purifier and dehumidifier in 100aq foot. This room is was custom built in my garage with HVAC installed. I have a hard time keeping it below 40% humidity and less than 85 degrees.
Thanks for the video. I'm a 6 Bambu Lab printers right now and needing more and everything you said was SOOOOO true!
I'm upgrading my MK3+ to a Mk4 I didn't realize i had to print 40 hours worth of parts to do so. Love your channel! keep the vids coming
Buy the Mk4 kit, sell the Mk3. The upgrade makes no financial sense whatsoever.
One of the best things I added to my printers is a controller (octoprint) so I can upload jobs instead of copying to a SD card. Adding a tiny bit of automation could improve productivity in a print farm, especially a large print farm. Not really sure why you consider it a hack.
Mk4 has Connect and wifi. Perfect for farm. Queues, telemetry, cameras…
Wow that's some great insights! My BambuLab X1C is running fine after 2000 hours of commercial use. Sending print jobs over WiFi is a time saver for sure.
Great to hear!
@@ShopNation Yeah, given the availability and decent pricing of spare parts I'm confident to start a small print farm with those :)
I have a prusa print farm, each one has a raspberry pi with octoprint, and its all managed by a windows PC running octofarm. It works fine, but I wish there was a better option for print farm management software.
But it sure as hell beats the days when i was loading in files by SD card 😂
This was basically me a couple of years ago… by now we run a custom interface implementation on top of moonraker (most of our printers run Klipper) that fully integrates our farm with all our other systems. Out of curiosity what are you missing with octofarm?
Awesome video!!! I have two printers, a CR-10 and Prusa Mini, both supporting my scale RC habit. Some of my designs have gone a little viral in the scale remote control community, and I have put a good amount of thought to doing a small-scale hustle with these parts. One large thing that keeps me from taking that step is the software I design in, Fusion 360. It is free for hobbyist, but as soon as I cross that etherical plain between hobbyist and merchant, the company that makes Fusion 360 will want their pound of flesh. This might be Tip #11, Design Costs.
I got two Bambu printers and I’m extremely impressed. They just run right out the box, they are a bit pricey but what you pay for in price you save in headaches.
Thanks for the video 👍
I feel the post processing of the parts are always a small task that must eat so much time on the long run
I have no desire to get into this but I was curious so I watched the video. I have to say, this is a well thought out and put together video. Good luck to you.
I would have thought that using something like Octoprint to manage your printers would have been much better than printing off SD card.
It would have. This guy is a beginner who pretends to be an expert. :D
On the last topic with replacing old printers, now (or last year) would be the time to do it to take advantage of bonus depreciation while you can.
Really informative video. Quite a few of those points prompted some forward thinking on my end.
Would really like to hear your thoughts on the ongoing battle between the Prusa and Bambu flagship models.
It’s quite evident that Bambu is gaining traction amongst quite a few people.
Keep it up!
Excellent video! I've worked with quite a few print farms such as your own and the most succesful ones tend to end up adding powder based 3D printing technologies to compliment their FDM farm. Adding MJF eventually would be my advise to help handle the parts with very complex geometry.
Got any recommendation on a specific printer here?
Good insights not only on 3D printing logistics but small biz startup in general. What are you starting to conclude about when the appropriate volume point is to switch from the flexibility of 3D printing to injection molding techniques?
This is a good question. I would like to say the 3d print thing license has advantages. There are some disadvantages.
.A 3d print thing license maybe and are worded to vover all 3d printers, private, commercial and otherwise.
So sites protect us from piracy, espisally if we supply our non commercial thing license link to a host of piracy, bam they almost always gone bam.
Tho currently piracy levels are high.
My last testing showed thing under 909 pirates and files we are not allowed to use.
Plus or minus 13 years on sort by oldest to find if what i drew is original or wether im allowed to upload or sell a print of my design.
The manual combining of search results is a pain for all farm users and comunity alike.
Injection molded parts would need a different license or set of protections again.
Do you know whats involved in that?
I know about non commercial 3d print thing licenses.
A thing license is an ownership of sorts. A thing license ownership can be Migrated to more than one website. You can tell because the upload date matches the original.
A Semi Migrate the upload date does not match so be careful not to be tricked into deleting the original.
Did you see a sharks fin go past.
Transfer of a thing ownership is to move the thing into another uers account on a site.
The upload dates match original is the main proof.
Transfer can be used to move a sold thing from you to me.
Examples.
People sell copies of the stl print files $1.
Pysical prints $100.
Thing ownership $100,000.
If i keep ownership i can write in terms of use.
Who may use it. Sell it. Exclusive use can be sort after.
What the royalties are.
How many may be sold.
All printers are the license holders outlets if selling that thing.
Even my personal printer in my private room.
You have many outlets, chain stores, vending machines, farms types all making and adding more outlets daily.
There are benifits and draw backs.
Drawbacks.
Weak search engines costing us all we must improve them.
909 pirates and wrong answers showed above the actual owner.
Thats far from good enought.
Yes we are working on it.
Ai is also helping tho it showed me it does not want the job itself but its likly to make us TOOLS to USE that may not get bord and not just give wrong answers but through in the towel and utterly make up fake answers. I went to the trouble of checking all its work.
That was a new gpt type.
So Ai art cant be used for commercial gain because its unable to perform a thing check.
I have a life size android Mr Data for a decade or so. I kknow Ai enough to make a comment so.
So i cant comment on injection.
Im near an expert on non commercial licensed 3d print things as there maybe.
Tea earl grey hot.
Have you heard of that?
There is a value to the license ownership. To me thats an entire ecosystem. There is a value to manufaxturing beyond the plastic part on the bench.
How it got there.
What machine made it.
What terms of use that maxhine has. Can i get this to 1000 farms within an hour and have that part available and completed in two hours globally. Injection do that?
I know how to sell a stl copy.
I know how to sell a print.
I know how to sell a 3d licensed thing ownership.
I dont know how to sell a injection part ownership. Do you?
The atom printing was enabled a few years ago but its not in wide use but theres plenty tek to come.
I used to work in a injection factory.
Pegs and spray can tops were big.
Now im in 3d print.
Mostly in non commercial thing licenses.
So i can find out if a thing is original.
Just because i drew it does not prove its original.
I can license a thing.
I can sell that thing ownership.
Most newbs focus on the prints at first then stl then eventually maybe they might sell the ownership.
Most dont know how.
When to go injection is a great question. How to?
Whats the comparison of selling a 3d print thing license and selling a injection whatever?
I'm curious about that swell. Considering small machines only cost 3-5k and modles can be 3D printed this would make for an interesting business case/calculation.
You have arrived at a ratio of out of service printers to operational printers that is fairly constant. At that point is it worth have x spare printers to swap out when one goes down to keep your 40 constant? Then you work on the broken ones as needed. Or, potentially is the power of an unused printer to strong and you’d end up putting all 44? In service and be right back to where you are? Maybe you already have spares and I missed it.
What do you suggest to start learning the software? I know CNC and laser software and figured the software for 3D printers would be similar, but certainly doesn’t seem so. I have a Prusa and the software seems very foreign to where I haven’t even used the thing after several months of owning it.
That depends on what software we are talking about. Most designers use a regular CAD software like Fusion360. Other than that you need a slicer. Either PrusaSlicer (which is a fork of slic3r) that has a good amount of history or super slicer for something unbranded ... There are a million different versions. Stick to the paths well traveled and learn a bit about kinematics/the way 3d printing works as well as general settings for material kinds and you will be well underway. In the end there is a lot of trial and error involved with hobby 3d printing and you will gain experience as you work through things yourself.
One question I have is what do you do with bad prints. Do you trash them or can they be recycled.
3d printing filament is normally made with materials that can easily be recycled. For some larger farms they even recycle failed prints inhouse into testfilament or raw material for injection moulding. Just keep your plastics seperate.
Great and informative video, well presented and easy to follow! Thank you! There are other print farm channels that aren't nearly as helpful or realistic in their videos.
My best month on Etsy was 11k. It was a lot of work though not just popping prints off and putting them in a box and shipping. Had to clean them up and constantly check them and start the prints.
seriously, if you print one object over and over again, think about modifying the gcode in a way that the printer knocks the object carefully of the plate, and restarts, or get some raspberry pi and use octoprint, you can connect 4 printers to one pi
I'm surprised by the VOC levels. I know with my own single printer, when I walk into the room and it's been printing for a few hours there's a very obvious smell and I say that as someone who's been around chemical manufacturing for decades and doesn't easily notice such things.
What do you typically print with?
@@ShopNation PETG 95% of the time, PLA occasionally. PETG has the more obvious smell.
I find petg to not have much smell, but pla has that sweet smell that fills a room.
Good thing prusa just came out with official firmware update supporting remote management
There was a youtube channel testing air pollution from 3d printing and his conclusion was that 3D printing mostly produces PM1.0 sized particulate and not much of the larger sizes (PM2.5 and PM10). It sounds like PM1.0 is not good for you but it's not apparent that you're exposed to it (no smell, etc).
I saw you have a lot of leftover filament in the spools, do you merge all those together? If you have any industrial oriented solution to that, please make a video about it. Stacking filament leftovers has become a nightmare for me, and I am too lazy to solder it into single spools.
Have you checked out the Qidi models? Specifically the Tech X-Plus 3. It is only $700, looks fast, has a xy gantry and a heated chamber...A lot of youtubers seem to like it...I thinking about making it be my first 3D printer.
I've had family members suggest I start selling stuff, but I'm not sure I'd really want to, I don't really have the space and I really don't have the time either. That said, there are print services out there so maybe I could use one of them rather than run my own farm.
That's a great video. The biggest problem with Bambulab printers is that they are pretty difficult to maintain. Not only it's difficult to acquire spare parts for replacement, the printers themselves are quite difficult to fix (exception made to the A1 but only due to the fact it was literally released last week and we don't have enough info about it); you can't go wrong with Prusa on this aspect, specially that now they have official representation in the US through Printed Solid.
I remember once when a person asked if anyone on the Voron Discord server would be willing to build a farm with 24 V2.4 printers (while being compensated for that, obviously). I answered asking about who would provide the maintenance of them, while giving my price for building them (I could even maintain if they were really interested). The person never answered back. 😅
I run a bambu farm and previously ran a Prusa farm (and an ender farm before that). Bambus are by far the better farm printers. Hotend swaps are faster and all repairs are documented on the website. Spare parts are cheap and readily available.
We actually have a Voron Farm. V0.1s and Tridents. Invesiting the time upfront to build them and tune them has payed huge dividend and we really haven't had any major issues with them. Maintenance is relatively straight forward and parts are readily available or easily printed. Which is just about the polar opposite from the experience we've had with bambulabs...
@@ArcaneZorrowhat printer do you use from bambu? The carbon of the p1s?
Just bought the air sensor you recommended. It’s important to remember that manufacturing requires considerations regarding health. Thanks for covering that.
Really great insights! I've also been a long time Push Plastics user - love their stuff.
Just to dispel some misconceptions:
1:24 All of it. Litteraly all of the power turns into heat(eventually). So does all of the electricity consumed by any other appliance. Except for maybe tiny bit of power when cooking goes into breaking complex carbohydrates.
1:38 No, the don't. The power consumption isn't everything. How much heat is escaping the printers is more important. During heatup, the heatbed is cold(er) = less heat energy gets transvered into the surrounding air. The extra power during heatup goes into heating up the heatbed, not surrounding air.
I have a lot of knowledge about 3D printing since I'm an avid hobbyist with 10 different printers. I feel the need to concentrate on developing a product and use my skills to make money by printing. It's an exciting opportunity for me!
I own 2 companies that produce 3d printed products, my retail company (1/3 owner) is imperium outfitters. I designed and built our original fleet. All machines run klipper and are network managed. the shift to klipper was a game changer. I no longer run the print farm for that company, however for my other company I am making the shift to Bambu I look forward to your conclusions so far the x1 I’m running has taken much less down time, and has about 95% quality rate (previous quality rate was in the 80s) if your interested in some quick collaboration reach out, our product lines do not compete with each other.
Great, thank you!
Are you running all the beds at 50 degrees to produce less heat for the room and save electricity?
No
5:37 you got me, and now i will gladly watch every second if that sponsor ad.
Thanks for name dropping your filament company. I checked them out today and within mins they called me and they seem like an awesome company to work with. The new metal spool holders i saw in your video where did those come from?
So, ever since I've finished my graduate studies I've wanted to start up my own 3D print farm, and I have finally!
My question for you is this, how would you recommend a starting business owner find potential clients? At the moment I've registered to sell fun toys and decor at in-person maker events, but ideally I'd like to have a few B2B sales to have more consistent income as this would be my full-time job. Do you recommend going door to door to find a problem, setting up meetings with business owners who may or may not have any idea about 3D printing, or some other method?
Love seeing your insights and your journey! Consider me inspired! 😁
I did my several few gigs for my uni industrial engineering and several unis similar departments, i actually came to cafes around and listened in to convos about engineering
My advice is to collaborate with someone that is making products already out of some other medium, or a manufacturer that could benefit from having parts made on demand. There are lots of print farms across the country, but honestly you can seperate yourself from the rest by offering QUALITY parts, QUALITY service. Maybe contact machine shops/fabrication companies in your area and let them know you can provide quality parts on demand.
@@collect3d , thanks for the advice! That is something I had not considered and I will plan for accordingly.
I really appreciate your content and can't wait to see more!
@@josephboen178, since I am from an academic background, this would make sense! I'll be following up with my old department chair soon. Thanks for taking the time to respond!
9:22 if your printers have an ethernet port, use that, or if you have USB you could try usb to ethernet adapter, or you could probably get raspberry pies and use octoprint and connect it to a lan network. or put klipper on raspberry pie and create a local LAN file sharing server. These are just ideas man i dont know if it would work but maybe it can help you!
This is why I'm starting up only a small time, small scale printing business that only gets me a fractional income, in exchange for avoiding to become a _printer slave._ I don't try to out-prints costs, instead I'm printing custom designs. Value is not added by printing but by the design. I anticipate 2 days worth of (my engineerring) salary as profit for a print produced. The prints I make are not urgent, printer goes nice and slow and I only check it once an hour. I project having one job per week at most, this could give me around 1/2 to 1/3 of my monthly consts, for a worst case of 4 days of work per month. Of course this is not my main focus area and I'm aming for having multiple legs to stand on, working like a semi-passive income.
I just grew my print farm from 15 to 40 printers with 25 Bambu P1Ss.😊
Nice!
Why not x1?
Big investment! Can I ask, how do you deal with your designs security, all bambu system beind on the cloud?
I'm building a small 3D resin print farm for minis and sculptures. Thanks for the info.
Oh how I hated dealing with duplicating and with SD cards. Went so far as to build a duplicator myself because I had time but not money :D by now we run everything with either octoprint (for our few leftover marlin machines) or a custom implementation ontop of Moonraker (for our klipper machines). As a DevOps engineer I am terrible about scope creep but this was really worth it, especially since we can now start integrating our farm into our business management software.
have you ever used the sonic pad/anything similar for a print farm and if not is there a reason not to?
@@ZFGFZDGDFG We generally don't use any of those as we have our own Klipperinterface and I am a DevOps engineer by trade so setting up systems and maintaining them isn't scary or difficult for me. They aren't bad probably but generally quite expensive and not really that great in out specific context.
It's definitely worth it to run this way. The scalability of SD cards is so low with this amount of 3d printers 😂
Do you not have concerns for the data you're giving to Bambu Labs? Their privacy policy is pretty invasive.
You can run it in local mode
@@nilspa6187 Doesn't matter. They still collect what data they can on you. You can't even update the FW on them without being connected to the cloud. At which point they took your data already. EU users have caught bambu lab selling their data to as many as 20 different companies.
@@nilspa6187 if you talk about "lan only" mode - that is a button, not a guarantee. :)
Can you hook bambu to a wifi of a separate router that has access only to local network? Can you use bambu software completely offline? Can you do firmware updates completely offline, via sd card?
This might be something you’ve answered before, but is 3D printing your only, primary, and just supplementary income? As someone who aspires to have a shop like yours (I currently have 6) I hope to one day leave my job and spend all my time maintaining and watching my machines dance, but I’m in that awkward phase where I don’t make enough to quit my job, but have just enough machine work to keep up with that it keeps me from doing my main job well.
Seems like you need to hire a kid. You got a local uni with an engineering program? Hire a senior for 3hrs/day, 3x weekly. They get experience, you get output.
Hi! Is it possible to make a printed part look more original? I mean with out the lines that they are made.
Yes it is
if you have a handful of printers (less then about 10) you might want to not to "print to order" since you don't have a lot of mass producion capacity yet and you don't want to be surprised by a sudden big bulk order. So start out with just a "stock" number of parts/objects. That way if something gets hot fast and "sells out" quickly, you know what item to print more of, and fast. Having 10 or 30 of a thing on hand can help see what sells faster then others. This also helps in finding if said thing is worth investing more printers into, or changing to making something else.
Also KEEP IT SIMPLE, print only a handful of items, and have dedicated printers (rotate what ones do what) doing just that part.
So which filament brands do you recommend ?
Many of the new features are useless if they are not reliable. Something to note about CAD type machines. The dumber computer wise, the less upsets the machines seem to have. Using SD cards is a great idea towards this. The only real upgrade for Prusa style printers is making them faster reliably and lowering the first layer headaches.
Hi. I am really looking forward to your video about the Bambu Lab machines. I have a couple of printers going and have been considering getting the Bambu Lab machines instead the higher print speeds is what intrigues me.
Great and informative video. Thanks for sharing. Any idea on theestimated time for the DWS715 dust boot?? Anticipation is killin' me!
@8:18 Wow. You're working on the F35? That's awesome! 😁
😂
this is awesome! at the 5 minute mark ive noticed a high frequency sound in your video, most ppl might not notice it but it was driving me and my dog nuts lol
Out of curiosity: have you considered putting the printers in enclosures? Should make them more reliable, and help with heating / cooling / VOCs issues. Prusa sells an enclosure for the mk3 but they also have a free design.
I’ve been wanting to add 3d printing to my laser engraving business for promotional products.
If you see a market for that I can't recommend it enough ... if you don't underestimate the learning curve. But if you are already doing laser-engraving you probably know all about the learning curve :D
@@FNmey I do have a good market for it in my area. Just trying to see if I have the man power for it.
the whole sd card thing is a bit strange, for 40 printers the sd duplicator is going to start to show its downsides. thats a fair bit of manual work to setup print jobs and faf about with a handful of small sd cards. all the printers can be sent jobs over USB/UART its trivial to have an old pc setup on the network with just octoprint. going down the route of klipper you can also get some pretty good features like exclude objects, so you can disable objects that have print faliures without killing the whole job.
Can a single Octoprint instance run 40 printers? I've only had one printer at a time, so I haven't tried it. Cool if it does.
@@LiqdPT Well youd run octoprint in a container like docker, easiest way to scale it and manage it. but im just using it as an example as its well known, and should be a good enough starting point and tooling can be built ontop of the web ui that octoprint exposes. but theres likely better alternatives that are built to support a print farm, tho these are usually paid, so itll be upto the print farm to work out what works well
Why not use OctoFarm to manage and record the printer files, filament and get advance notice of completion?
I definitely would like to have multiple machines at some point; not sure if I'll go to the point you are, but who knows, I've determined to base it off demand so we'll see. Definitely lots of good tips here either way though, things I'll try to keep in mind as I go
Former reliability engineer? This video makes much more sense. I'm a product engineer. I feel your pain.
Hey, this isn't a common topic spoken about on TH-cam when it comes to 3D print farming, but could you share with us some of your tips and tricks with bookkeeping? It would be very beneficial to hear how you keep track of taxes and total profits in your farming business since 3D print farm books especially with Etsy are rarely spoken of.
Lot of the answers here are going to depend on exactly what you're doing and how you're doing it. The basic answers are that the acquisition of printers will be a capital cost that gets depreciated over the expected life of the printer, consumables (filament, spare parts, electricity) are expenses (more specifically, Cost Of Goods Sold), whatever customers pay you is your income. That gets you your basic P&L which will show income or loss for tax purposes. At small scale (10s of thousands) cash accounting is usually fine, as the numbers get larger using accrual accounting becomes more important and eventually largely mandatory.
Sales tax is its own issue. If you are retailing direct to consumer you will definitely need to collect and pay. Not doing so or worse collecting the tax and then not paying it to the state is probably one of the most common ways small businesses get into deep $#@!. This is one place where getting pro advice is worthwhile.
Also how detailed you get depends on whether you're making one product that you sell or running a service bureau where you want to understand profit/loss per job or product.
I'm wondering what would happen to the voc levels if you ran the purifier overnight? Some of the initial use in the morning has to be pulling out the VOCs from the night before. I know it can do the whole room in 12 minutes so it's not likely to make a difference but wondered if you tested that.
I know with ACs if you don't get ahead of the heat it takes a lot longer to cool.
Hello, very good video! I see that they use 1 UPS for every 3 printers, how many watts are they? Greetings from Uruguay
I like your insight. Was looking at getting a Stratysys F350CR, but in looking at your shop it might be better for me to spend less and get more. I guess my worry is accuracy and repeatability with your printers. What have you found, or are your prints not critical on tolerances? Enjoyed your video!
Instead of the aircon and the purifier I'd run one or two greenhouse fans. These need a hole in the wall or the window, but they energy efficient, cheap, and fairly quiet, but most importantly they can replace all the air (and any breathable contaminants within, and most of the heat generated by the machines) in less than a minute. Look for the ones that look a bit like an airplane turbine.
You could use the warm air to run a heat pump producing warm water more efficient.
Dude how are you not running octoprint?? Dealing with SD cards sounds like a nightmare.
Hooking up 40 octoprint connections sounds equally as terrible IMO. It’s the devil I know…
@@ShopNation true ...but it's something you only need to do once (in theory). After the initial pain it becomes super convenient.
Congratulations on the farms success. That is awesome. Great info. Very well thought out
I'm super curious to see how Bamboo printers hold up as a print farm printer. I don't like the closed ecosystem but I want to see them succeed all the same for some reason.
Exactly what i was talking about a couple of days ago in a local 3D pronting group. One of the thing i found kinda suspicious how all the small companies are jumping on a possible order/request like flies on dropped poop. If this kind of business would be so succesfull, this would never happen. Do not misunderstand me, i think 3D printing is the future, i do use 3D printing and not as a hobby but making practical.parts, tools, jigs, templates, prototypes you name it. But! I realized ots only affordable because i do the design, modelling, and printing on my own.
Is octoprint out of the question for 3d printer managment?
You can run it with marlin if you don't want to mess with klipper so I don't understand why the sd card thing?
What's the reference for the shred insert shows at the beginning of the video ? 🤔
What do you mean? It’s a threaded insert I use in some of my products, just an example of hardware that can be added post-print
Throw out the Prusa and get Bambu...speed and power consumption are much more effective, you can calculate it yourself, take the power consumption and the number of parts printed in a time and you won't look bad.
Just an idea. Since you're growing, you should find an old extruder and extrude your own filament, brand it yourself and sell the high-quality filament. Or, contract manufacture it to an extrusion company and have them brand it with your name. Why sell your suppliers product on your channel, when you can sell your own.
Might ask your CPA about doing this under a separate LLC. Buy it from yourself and sell under that LLC. Likely have tax benefits if you can get it to show a loss.
I like the way this guy thinks!