Warning: this post is too long, pack a lunch or move along.
Brook
I have worked for years to remove barriers. I’ll tell you what I’ve avoided:
Bowden. we’ve always done direct drive
Plastic, acrylic, printed, wood frames. we now only use metal frame construction.
Plastic parts.while I’ve dabbled in injection molding, and currently offer one model as a low cost kit w some printed parts (mostly non mechanical)… machined Delrin and aluminum are far and away a better way to mass produce printers. Quality! Everything is square and straight.
Cheap print beds. While price pays a part, the best bed is mic 6 (cast alluminum). A second is .25" aluminum. Flat beds cover a multitude of sins
Manual adjustment on print bed. This is a big one. We use metal beds and for years have used them in connection w induction sensors for “auto z leveling” (tramming) in software. Life saver.
Chinese made hotends. One man, Carl Ubis, has made and/or personally inspected every single hotend we have ever shipped. That’s about 60,000 hotends. He is a failure analysis expert by trade (30 years at HP) and continually improves even the slightest inefficiencies in manufacturing and assembly. They are hand assembled and tested thoroughly (no kits). The devil is in the details.
Chinese electronics. Our pcbs are from china, we manufacture in house. While we have made mistakes, we have made enough and have experience to spot a small number of common problems (usually a bad part placement or selective solder joint). So we are in house experts who load the firmware and test the boards. The burn in happens w the power supply we ship with… so QC is the message here.
We don’t buy anything we can make locally. Knowing the guy who made it and him/her being on the hook throughout the whole process brings an amazing amount of accountability.
What we DO:
Admit it and own it the second we are wrong. We fix it or replace it. Sometimes stuff has been out of warrantee but we do it anyways. I have a couple painful instances that cost me a lot of money, but all recoverable, b/c we protect our reputation and brand. You must have trust w customers. Period.
Transparency. Truth. We don’t over-hype. We don’t lie. We don’t hard sell. I’ve even refused to sell to some (big box stores, even potential customers). If I sense 3d printing isnt for you, I’ll tell you and discourage buying. Maybe point to a cheap Kit from another manufacturer to save their wallet. I’ve told more people that “3d printing is hard” than I can shake a stick at. It IS getting easier btw. (Simple Pro, anyone?)
Set expectations realistically. I show prints done by mere mortals. I never show post processed prints. If I do, I’ll show before and after.
The problems that plague us all are:
Set an expectation that light maintenance is needed. You gotta be ok to clean or lube rails/lead screws, tighten belts, troubleshoot mechanical parts, etc. on this point, for a while I was using lock tight on a bunch of parts… but people fiddle and can ruin a part that has lock tite. It’s better to leave the machine ready to be fiddled with.
My machines are workhorses that can run for years. They aren’t throw away toys. They can be fixed. We encourage fixing over replacing.
Set an expectation that tips are consumables. They wear out. Replace them every 3-6 months. Of measure the hole w precision gauges and adjust your slicing. (No one does this).
Repair them at the factory. We repair and tune them very quickly and efficiently. Not everyone wants to learn how. That’s fine. Ship it here and we will. We have seen every conceivable problem. And we have any part needed w/in reach if some mystery problem is found (intermittent) and we just replace stuff, working around even understanding it. Rare, but we are the repository of earthly knowledge on Printrbots. There are some superusers that rise to this level tho.
The stuff that has no easy answer is:
You can’t help people that buy, even though we say “experts only”… they buy anyway and end up frustrated.
You can’t make people read instructions. This one is hilarious, or maybe it just makes you beat your head against a wall. This might be #1.
You can’t make people buy ONLY quality filament. Well, some lick their machines down to only their filament. After 6 years, I actually understand why. I don’t understand gouging customers.
You can’t move power users to a system that is more reliable because it is more controlled (removing power features). Our Simple Pro is for newbies or people who find no pleasure in learning about materials, temperatures, slicing, host software. Most power users feel castrated w/o all the knobs and buttons.
Maybe the biggest need is design software that meets a user at his/her ability level to design or customize things they need. There IS simple design software out there, but some aren’t wired for any of it. Some can’t. And some who can, are paralyzed by the emotional fear of something seemingly complicated or w a learning curve. Our present society of instant gratification has doomed a large portion of our youth.
Last one: it’s difficult to train a newbie to look at s model and sense “that is impossible to print”… or to deduce HOW it must be printed or aligned, etc. newbies have this crazy knack to choose impossible models to print. Yes, education helps, and experience teaches it. I toyed w the idea that I could force customers to step through training levels- like a video game does. Their first print would be a calibration cube. Achievement unlocked! Now they can choose one of two models, demonstrating overhang limits. Achievement unlocked! Now they can move through the achievements until they are allowed to use PETG, then ninjaflex, abs… then infill, support, brim, spiral case mode… eventually, they could print their own design, do a print for a friend, fix something around the house. You get the picture.
At one point, newbies were buying my $2000 Printrbot Go Large: 3 extruders, 1’x2’x1’ build plate that folds up into its own suitcase. Disaster. They would try to print the hardest, biggest thing in abs with no heatbed, or in two colors of ninjaflex with HIPS for support. I stopped selling them.
Protecting customers from themselves is an art.
Good luck! It’s a very complicated goal. It crosses the streams of design, hardware, software and materials. It’s easy to do this business badly. Like a pilot, nothing replaces time in the seat.
If I locked the Simple Pro filament and settings down to only work w the factory approved stuff, and I approved ever model before printing (a database could do this), then I’d have the (almost) perfect printer. I’d have to add a .5 inch thick cast aluminum bed, put it in a temperature controlled case, give it redundant everything, upgrade everything and only let robots use it after reading the instructions. And operate it in space w/o gravity and underwater for cooling… that’s the perfect printer.
Brook
