New York City’s first independent 3D printing store.
http://ei8htohms.tinyparts.net/?p=969
Sweet. The future comes to my old neighborhood.
This would take 20 years to get to England because we are behind you. But we can see what works
Was there already a dependent 3D printing store in NYC ?
@Shachar_Weis , I’m wondering if that’s what the Makerbot store is considered
I can see this working because you could rebuild parts around the home and repair them
The Makerbot store is just a retail extension of the Makerbot company. 3D Heights is independently owned and operated. Jerry calls 3D Heights a megastore because he carries multiple brands, but that sounds a little grandiose to me.
@Eddie_Palmer The expensive part of that would be the time required to design the replacement parts. I designed and fabricated a replacement part for a machine at work and it probably took me two to three hours of design time, not including the actual time to print the part. I had to print it once, test fit it and then tweak the design and reprint it in fact. But anyway, if I’d been charging for my time it would’ve been a very expensive part even though doing it that way meant we had the replacement in two days rather than waiting six to eight weeks to have one shipped from overseas.
@Eddie_Palmer I waited a very long time for something to break around the house so I can 3D print a replacement. When finally something did, it was such a complex object that it would have taken me many hours to design it and probably at least two prints to get it right. I ended up fixing it with metal wires and epoxy in about 5 minutes.
why design the part, when you can get the design from the company. Because this would save them money.
And you would look for a machine, that you could print the parts out when you like. And better start a place for all the new design
Would 3D heights keep all the new design
@Eddie_Palmer I can see the manufacturers licensing their design files for single print use for a fee (streaming them perhaps), but I don’t see an upside for them to simply release them into the wild unless their whole hardware philosophy is opensource and they intend to embrace the improvements offered by the community as well. If the manufacturer is streaming the files for a fee, I can see them wanting to only use licensed or certified fabricators that could insure a certain level of quality as well or perhaps offering them with an “absolutely no warrantee” type license for folks who wanted to make the parts for themselves or using an uncertified independent fabricator.
For a local shop to design and fabricate replacement parts for consumers in sufficient volume that the prices could be reduced dramatically (to amortize the initial design/prototyping costs) they would have to be able to reach a very large consumer base and they’d have to develop an enormous repository of commonly needed items. I could see this working better for a mass market like Thingiverse perhaps, but it will take a long time to reach critical mass of the number of replacement parts available to download and use.
I imagine 3D Heights would want to retain some rights to the files they design (even if only for advertising purposes), but maybe would negotiate different deals if none of the work they’re investing can ever be reused by them later. I haven’t asked them of course.
I could see 3D Heights turning people away because of copyright law.
When someone comes in to fixes is washing machines or something in the home