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They are making money off it.

I make more money than ever lol some people don't have the time or skill to make something by themselves

I don't know if they're actually doing engineering work or just 3D printing services which probably wouldn't count as actual engineering. Creating CAD models for 3D printing wouldn't actually be engineering work unless they're designing the parts but I think they're just printing parts that customers created. Also the engineering work you're thinking about is probably civil engineering which would require licensing and certification. Mechanical engineering....I don't think so. I worked in Texas for a few years as an engineer designing lawn and forestry equipment. We were not required to be licensed as mechanical engineers nor was the engineering facility required to be registered with the Texas PE board.

Absolutely, here is a link to the relatively low cost devices that we use for continuous monitoring: www.amazon.com/Introducing-Amazon-Smart-Quality-Monitor/dp/B08W8KS8D3 We also use this portable devices for a little more accuracy and specific measurements: www.ato.com/handheld-air-quality-monitor

Thanks for the support! Yeah, the temperature and humidity are a bit of a downside but otherwise Texas is a great place for additive manufacturing - it has all of the industries that can benefit most right here in Houston, Dallas, Austin, etc. Shoot us a message and stop by next time you are in the area!

Hahaha.... well, actually, yeah kind of. I'm not the biggest fan of HP consumer products but they do make a very nice additive production workflow. There is a pricey maintenance agreement with a 24 hours response time - if anything were to go wrong we normally have parts overnighted and a technician on site the next day. With one machine offline it could cost $1000s in downtime per day. With that said - there are a lot more companies taking lessons learned HP to improve their products and increasing competition in the space - we hope this keeps HP honest and drives down the cost over time.

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement!

We try our best to be a subjective as possible while evaluating technologies. In this case, regardless of my personal opinions on the HP consumer side of things, they make the best polymer additive product on the market at this time. As confirmed by the Wohler's report - the majority of the industry tend to agree overall. With that said, technology is rapidly devopling and I think its a matter of time until other companies learn, iterate, and improve.

Thanks, we appreciate the kind words and support!

Thanks! You are welcome anytime. Just shoot us an email at sales@i-solids.com to make sure we have someone available to give a tour.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the support!

~100 KW average with much higher peaks. If you start all FDM printers at once you can get a huge spike in power draw. The Bambo X1C has 135W avg with 850W peak when starting. I think Kason went through the actual amps over in another video on this channel but you will need three-phase power and a bunch of different circuits for sure.

Strangely, this is not a green screen at all so I'm guessing its the lighting. We try to run very lean and keep in mind that our customer pay us to produce parts and not create youtube videos so we are just making these in our spare time without a lot of video editing experience but I think we are getting a little bit better with feedback. I do kind of miss the 80s style ads though - the jingles were a lot more catchy.

I think this is a really good point to bring up. I considered adding some thoughts on this in the video since we are running several projects right now specifically on FDM because of the ability to easily adjust infill - one application where we needed to have a specific mass / density for calibration purposes and another where we used infill as a design function. However, we can in most cases still create an "infill" or lattice structure so generate the same affect to reduce weight or material - its just not as quick and convenient since this would occur on the design side. My only counter argument on infill's ability to increase production using FDM would be that if the infill is sparse then it might not be necessary to the designs strength and could be optimized better. In many cases, we see parts designed for FDM not for functionality but for printability and this can tend to make things bulkier and thicker than needed to avoid support material or layer weakness. Overall, we are big proponents that each 3D printing technology has pros and cons and work better for different situations.

We would definitely agree. Sometimes when we say this people may assume that that means we are downplaying consumer printing - it seems silly because we are obviously fans of consumer grade machines as well with our FDM farm. They are just designed for totally different environments and scale.

This is a great question! In many cases it does - especially for complex parts with thin walls or a lot of support material. However, the economics are just very different. With FDM the machines and materials are relatively low cost so the labor because the biggest cost factor. With MJF it is normally the opposite - material and machines are expensive but we can produce A LOT more parts relative to the amount of labor required. This yields a situation where really big bulky parts will typically be cheaper with FDM because the material costs will be too high with MJF. FDM also has a lot more flexibility when it comes to material and color options that can be important in a lot of application. Finally, FDM can often provide some creatives solution when you are able to manipulate the slicing for a specific function. For instance, we are currently running a project where parts have to be within a specific mass +/- a few grams. Being able to adjust the infill allows us to do this easily.

@@i-solids Very interesting, thank you! We run a farm of 60x Creality Ender 3 and 10x Bambu Lab P1P and have been looking at the more advanced and larger options. It is easy to find cost breakdowns between FDM and resin because they are similar enough, but finding real numbers for MJF is not quite as easy. Would love to see a video taking a few random projects from small, medium, and large and doing a cost breakdown between the three types of printers. The numbers would be very estimated since costs will vary depending on suppliers, that the materials are not exactly the same, and many other factors; but it would still be quite interesting.

Hey glennstar2121! First off, thanks for taking the time to watch the videos and we appreciate the support! There is a lot we could unpack on this question but there are essentially four primary drivers as to why we haven't upgraded the FDM machines.... yet: 1) Firmware / software integration - we have a lot of custom software that has been developed and refined over the years and it integrates directly with our MES. Bambu has some solutions here as well but ours is specific to our workflow and it also meshes with Formlabs, Nexa, and HP equipment so we have a single production ecosystem regardless of the OEM. I think with time we could also get Bambu's to work in this same way - its just a good amount of development time we would have to factor into an ROI. 2) The peak power is actually quite a bit higher for a an X1 versus what we have. For example, our 130+ machines have between 300 and 350 watt power supplies so we can fit 6 to 8 printers on a single 20 amp circuit. The X1 on the other hand is a monster 1000 watt supply - this is great for heating times but it also means there we can only fit 2 on a 20 amp circuit. This is over 3 times the number of circuits we would need for the same capacity. Of course, at steady state the machines wouldn't draw anywhere near 1000 watts so we could theoretically run a lot more but we would have to intentionally delay or stagger prints which can complicated things but more importantly, it would be a safety concern to overload a circuit. 3) We currently average just 1.5 people per day dedicated to actually maintaining and running the FDM print farm portion of our business. This does not include a lot of shared support roles like application engineering and quality control which may use portions of their time but these contributions are relative to the number of parts produced and not the number of machines so we don't anticipate any major changes in the manpower requirements. 4) The main factor in my opinion will always be based on economics. Everything we have now is operational and fully paid off - if we were to instantly switch over the entire fleet it would be $120,000+ investment not including additional manpower costs and even potential lost revenue from downtime. Although there would be improvements in speed and efficiency, I think it would still take around 3+ years just to make make a return on that investment. With all of that being said - these opinions are based on using our current operations with a lot of harsh lessons learned over time as the benchmark. If we were building a print farm today from a clean slate I think think our opinions would be much different.

You're also assuming that the Bambu printers would be equally easy to maintain as their existing fleet. Nothing could be further from the truth. When a Bambu goes down, it is down for a while due to the way Bambu handles their support and parts distribution. They do not use nearly as many off the shelf parts, and they are kind of a pain to repair. When a Flash Forge Creator Pro (what it looks like they have there) goes down, EVERY part on it is a very cheap off the shelf part that can be fixed... The exception would be the main board, which it sounds like they have changed when they converted to Klipper. I have 7 of the FFCP clones, and they're really good workhorses. They can log thousands of hours between needing maintenance, meanwhile Bambu users have had their warranties voided for not lubing the carbon rails EVERY WEEK. I know people who run Bambu farms, and it's not all roses and rainbows. Like any other printer, they have their upsides and downsides.

@@meikgeik ive got a farm of bambu labs and this is simply untrue.

Thanks @ErikBlack! These machines have a lot more capacity than most people realize but I can see how it might be like comparing a shovel to an excavator.