Here we go again, another round of “can you sustain a business with that price” game!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1056329519/tiko-the-unibody-3d-printer
The design looks great. Why would they kill it with all the bad press they’ll get for not being able to ship at this price?
Also, wouldn’t people buy this thing for $250? $500? Why drop sooo low?
Unibody - one solid piece… of thin plastic shell.
“Fits a standard 1kg roll” - which standard? It looks like a Taulman 1lb roll. There’s so many shapes of spools that it looks like they locked themselves and their customers into an odd one.
I don’t see how they can afford to mass produce the machine. I suspect they’ll spend the entire budget on just the injection molds. They don’t mention the costs of regulatory testing & certification, which is needed given the target market and the fact that it’s a finished product. The writing style of the team biography reminds me more of a band than a business. We don’t see just yet that they’ve clearly dotted their 'i’s and crossed all their 't’s.
I think it’s nifty looking. It shows some interesting promise. It’s just there are way too many question marks here.
I like it. Looks like they did a lot of work getting to this point. I don’t know if $179 is a sustainable price point, but only they would know what the margin really is based on their claim of not using any high precision components.
Cute design.
I think that can be sustainable price.
Many components dropped in price for last 2 years because of 3d reprap boom we had.
If you look at form factor and matching components it isn’t that expensive to supply it.
for example:
motors - looks like nema 14 can cost $3-5 each with bulk order
electronics can also be much cheaper then RaspPi+Mega+RAMPs
hard guess total of material costs would be $40-60 (depends on price of molds, which I have no idea of charges that could be)
In fairness, it looks like it may very well have a lower cost of parts than any other printer, even the $200 oneUp or $300 M3D (not that that’s necessarily a good thing). Assembly also looks simple and optimized for contract manufacturing. I assume they’ve costed that all out, but it’s hard to believe they could get all that and pay themselves anything with the price point, let alone prepare for the inevitable, unpredicted delays and hidden costs.
Absolutely not sustainable. Period. Probably a case of introductory pricing. If they don’t know it now, they will learn quickly that the price must go up at some point. Micro3d is the poster child of fake kickstarter pricing.
One other point- you will never sell a $200 printer to channels… Only through your online store. They cut their legs off on selling through channels.
My opinion- get it while you can but its a risk to assume they can even deliver the kickstarter printers successfully or in the time frame promised. Too much to learn and execute at this scale in too short of time.
The gap between a “kickstarter product/price” and a viable business model is huge when you come in this aggressive on price like this. Often, in the end, you do a disservice to yourself and your potential business AND to the whole product category at large by creating unrealistic expectations about where the market is going. This market is NOT going to quality sub-$200 printers anytime soon. It’s just not. I think we are years off for that goal. First, we will have to admit to ourselves that the sub $200 market will be cheap, non-durable, poor quality toys. Perhaps worth it for a bit of fun and to satisfy curiosity but that model doesn’t scale and leads nowhere. Who wants to be the cheap, crappy printer company?
Brook
Sustainablity: spare parts. like: - proprietary direct drive system, custom electronics, inexpensive (to manufacture) hotend, maybe more. Will it work? Only time will tell.
@ThantiK look, they’re planning on using an accelerometer for autocalibration 8)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
It’s a triangle Buccaneer… Using the same secret tech too. A little spooky how much they look alike. Seriously, weird.
I met the buccaneer guys at CES last year and asked if I could look in the top. They said “no”… Proprietary stuff they had to protect. Or something.
That same year, MakerBot had security remove some lookie-loos from their booth after they caught them looking inside their new 5th gen bot and taking pictures. The sneaky photographers were rude, for sure, but all the secrecy seems a bit over the top.
Looking at the new $179 delta on kickstarter, in the “how did we do it?” section… There is some seriously vague language. Buyer beware.
If the Tako guys are listening… Drop the intrigue, your backers will appreciate it. Post actual pictures and actual video and actual prints… It will save you trouble in the end.
This is the buccaneer all over again.
They do not understand thermal design. The electronics are at the top of a sealed unit, with the heat sources underneath them. That’s bad for the electronics.
It’s much worse if they try to include a heated bed for ABS prints. The electronics will get very hot very quickly as it bakes in the trapped heat at the top. There is nowhere for all that the heat to go - the shell just acts as an insulator and the chamber temperature will rise until the electronics eventually fail.
This is exactly the same mistake that the Buccaneer people made. They ordered a heap of their very pretty exterior shell, and assumed that because all the mechanical bits fit snugly inside it, that everything will be just fine.
When they finally realise that they need to force-vent all that heat, any profit margin they have is gone simply because they must pay for reworking a warehouse full of shells to include thermal venting, or just throw them away and start again with a better design.
This 3D printer does look nice, and it might be cheap, but it will certainly not be reliable.
@Brook_Drumm Re: pirate3d, you can see the extruder here: http://pirate3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Flock-of-Extruders-01-1280x560.jpg
and everything else here: http://blog.pirate3d.com/testing-certification-and-manufacturing-update/
H-bot, nothing terribly interesting.
Tiko is even simpler. All the kickstarter page doesn’t show is the extruder drive mechanism, and how it and the controller are stashed (presumably both in corners of the triangle, next to the spool). Only the outer shells of these two printers are really similar.
@Whosa_whatsis . Exactly. My point is that’s it all obvious stuff. Why would anyone ever act like there is magic inside or be secretive about it? It’s a printer.
The bed is obviously not heated. How could they print ABS without warping?
Anyway they want to make at least 100 printerts for 99 bucks each. Is this even possible?
No. You can’t make a printer for $99.
You also can’t make a printer for $179. At least you can’t do so with enough margin to run a business.
My Printrbot simple makers kit cost is around $200
They saved a lot on rods and bearings - that’s true, but that’s not enough.
Revolutionary hot end, accelerometer driven calibration, completely new mechanics and super cheap…
That’s too good to be true. I’ll be glad they prove me wrong 
/subscribe
They don’t show previous experience for the team. 3D printers are very complicated electronic, mechanical and thermal machines. Their example of $179 appliances don’t compare well when there’s different economies of scale.
There’s a huge gulf in scaling up from a handful of prototypes that are babied to building thousands or tens of thousands that are in the hands of consumers. There are so many gotcha points in that transition. Maybe they have it down and just don’t want to worry or bore people with minutia. Maybe they can’t say what they’ve done before, but we’ve seen some failures, I think because of naiveté and inexperience. Have these been in any beta tester’s hands yet?
I wish them luck, maybe they do have something. I just see a pattern in Kickstarters that’s hard to ignore, so it’s worth extra homework. Hopefully the backers will get functioning, reliable machines, and before 2017.
They are doing an AMA on reddit right now. Honestly, it’s not looking good. They seem very closed-source minded, talking about suing competitors, refuse to release even pictures of their mechanisms and claim that the printer runs on 28BYJ-48 steppers (very low torque $1 motors)