Reply To: "This technology will DISRUPT miniature companies." says Maker's Muse

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

I saw this over Xmas and it got me musing over 3d printing (to the point I just got an AnyCubic Photon and it’s just flipping awesome!). His time calculations are a bit “suspect” – but then again, it depends what the point of them is.

If you’re going into manufacturing and are looking to add a charge for the time the machine is in use (the same way people with laser cutters charge per hour for usage, say) then a time-cost-per-mini makes sense: a four-hour printing time split over 16 minis would give you a charge-for-time-per-mini of 15 minutes: you’ll still be being charged (or costing for, if you’re the one printing) for four hours of use.

I’ve currently got three minis per build plate on the go – I reckon I could probably push it to five or six (if they didn’t have flailing limbs all over the place) but I’m manually placing supports and multiple minis makes manual support placement a pain! That said, should I want exactly the same five minis again some time in the future, just load up the file and hit print; call it five hours later, five minis pop out (as an end user, it matters not whether it’s five hours for five or “one hour per mini” – that’s just semantics).

 

I’m not convinced that a large-format printer is *that* disruptive – it still pushes the idea that end users go to a store (physical or virtual) and buys a finished product, which is then shipped to them; the only “disruptive” part of this is that it allows suppliers to print on demand, instead of holding stock of thousands of different units.

 

I *do believe* however, that large-scale take up of the smaller, desktop machines for home use *could* be very disruptive to the industry. I hope they are! I’ve already about a year’s worth of minis to print at a steady rate of two or three every few days (is that one mini a day, a few minis a week, a couple of dozen a month? Does it really matter?)

Resin printing deserves to be disruptive. The quality you can get at home far exceeds the quality shown in the video. I’m now buying minis from Patreon, supporting creators who work at home, who can respond directly to requests from customers and can quickly meet clients needs and demands. With a bit of technical know-how you can even tweak the models yourself to create derivative works from a single source.

Being able to print your own minis also means you can be very “granular” in supply and demand – no more need to buy a box of ten troops for the two you want or for the spare parts for a bit of kit-bashing: choose and print just what you need.

On every level, I reckon printing at home is a “better” option – on a “high-up” abstract level (fewer lorries shipping boxes of plastic around the world) to the tiniest end user level (select a single head from a website and have it in your hands a couple of hours later). I’ve long been an advocate of “cottage industry” as the next big thing in commerce – resin 3d printers bring this to us tabletop fans years ahead of the rest of the muggles.