Replacement Fuse 1 not working - PART 2

Maybe this should be its own thread, but I’m excited to finally see others in real life running this system chiming in here…forgive me for hijacking it but started the thread so here are some questions I have for you all.

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I’m overall seeing “lots of down time and troubleshooting”… from everyone.

As folks that obviously run production parts, I’d really like to hear what kind and size parts (quantity of parts per chamber) you are all running and at what cost per part you are charging to outsiders (vendor/wholesale) versus your own in-house products (direct to consumer)

As someone who manufactures CNC and via other methods, I’m finding it extremely difficult to wrap my head around how you all are handling “cost per part”.

I don’t expect anyone to answer this publicly…but like to possibly get an individual offline discussion going or hear more webinars from Formlabs themselves on this topic.

In regards to production running parts for outside parties (vendor/wholesale)

• What kind of machine run time cost/per hour have you been able to calculate? With all these faulty chambers, lasers, heat bulbs, filters and the overall total cost of the system…assuming it’s life cycle in there as well to “pay it off/break even”, what is your hourly?

We’ve had hundreds of hours troubleshooting ourselves, trying to convince Formlabs there is in fact an issue, before them acknowledging it to fix it in firmware, replacement parts n full machine replacement. Find it extremely hard to believe an hourly run time cost could even be figured out on this system, at least from our experiences.

What is your Hourly figured into your production running of parts?

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• At a material cost, from what we’re seeing in Nylon 12 GF being 60-70% refresh to give us consistent printing and “non brittle” end use parts, how are you justifying the cost per part with larger parts? When just calculating powder in say, a chamber that can hold 50-75 parts, we find it doable but still at that cost point where contemplating bumping it over to injection molding would happen sooner than later. On larger parts where you can only fit 10-20 parts per chamber, it’s NOT even a consideration, as the cost per part in powder alone is too high for manufacturing to outside parties (wholesale) to provide them enough meat on the bone to be cost effective. Manufacturing our own in-house/direct to consumer parts can still be done for these larger parts but at high enough cost where we soon would bump it to injection or even move it over to our CNC into our aluminum lineup.

We’ve also tossed entire chambers of parts in the trash from all these same issues you all mention. So there’s the “failed chamber” cost/percentage that needs to be calculated into this material cost per job/PO.

How are you justifying and pricing material cost per chamber/part?

• Won’t ask your hourly/labor costs per part for post processing as this is generally the only easy thing to figure out in all of this. The exception being when you spend time post processing parts and discover “orange peel” or a failed chamber, which obviously needs accounted for in quotes and future jobs as tossing out dozens of chambers of powder ourselves and wasting our time post processing them to find this out…which then led to the hours of troubleshooting…etc.

Again, as someone who manufactures and who is used to calculating cost per part, I’m just overall finding it an extremely niche use case between machining and injection and even harder to calculate compared to other methods of manufacturing.

While manufacturing our own “in-house” parts that go direct from us to consumer, I find it pricey but doable. I just can’t figure how anyone is manufacturing to outside POs/vendors.

With over two decades of experience “in the field”…I’m also very familiar with “defense and aerospace” where you can pretty much make up any cost per part you like between you and Uncle Sam…and add 100% to that…. So no need to hear from anyone justifying it in that world…I get it.

I’d just like to hear how you all are making use of it and not upside down on cost, offering this as a production option in the real world…with multiple machines. Also, I’d be interested to learn how many of you manufacture via other means as well to include CNC and injection molding or if you are coming into manufacturing strictly via additive manufacturing methods?

Feel free to message direct as I’d honestly like to know.

To me, cost of material MUST go down and/or machine dependability MUST go up to make this a realistic option….then it would be game changing.

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