7 GIGANTIC 3D Printer Farms Making Millions of Parts

So today we're going to show you seven of the biggest 3D printer farms in the entire world so starting with number one we have Gantry Gantry is located down in the Bay Area Gantry is a premium lamp producer who works with industrial designers and independent creators to create very high quality very unique table lamps and house lamps that they then produce in their print Farm of over 1300 machines these machines have been manufactured by Gantry and Gantry almost released a design right before covid hit but it seems that those plans have been put aside the factory is controlled by their own software and they're working continuously to try to increase the Automation and the scale of the farm right now each one of their lamps once it is printed it is sanded down and then painted and has actually the lamp components put into it then they ship it out to their consumers at the moment on their site they say it's a weightlit time of about one month or so but it seems like that is getting shorter as more people have started ordering them and they've been able to catch up with orders from the covid spike number two prusa almost everybody knows of the proofs of printf it's located over in Prague but prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer and they use 3D printers to make their 3D printers in the same vein as the old reprap projects which prusa kind of came out from but Bruce's print Farm has over 600 3D printers which are helping them to produce hundreds of thousands of machines to sell to customers each year the materials they run are pet G and historically they have been running these machines on an SD card ethernet hybrid system but in 2022 prusa released a new version of software called printer connect which allows them to connect and create prusa Farms Bruce has also released the automated print farm system which they are planning to sell as soon as Supply chains clear up so they're moving in the direction of expanding and improving the system so that they can produce Parts even more effectively right now since they are producing machines all the machines print the parts and then technicians go around and collect the trays and swap them out in order to start up new parts number three you have custom Moon lamps there are several companies in China who are producing this but the largest one actually has 400 machines and they use them to print custom Moon lamps so if you upload a photo they will imprint that photo on the side of one of those glow or Moon lamps and 3D print it and then ship it to you so you have actual true customizability and this is really cool because it's the only print farm so far in this list who's actually making custom and unique items rather than simply printing a set inventory of items over and over again and it shows the flexibility the manufacturability and the competitive advantage of what print Farms can do since they're not limited by molds or really restrictive types of processes you can change the geometry on the fly as you're producing large quantities of items number four lull spot lull's bot is a 3D printer manufacturer that has a similar backstory to prusa they came out of kind of the reprap movement and the open source design little spot makes premium engineering uh grade machines that produce Parts with like ASA and abs and nylon they have their own custom extruders but they are partially 3D printed machines and lull's Bot has 300 machines in their factories here in the US that allows them to produce their machines lull spot uses a version of octo Farm in order to control all their machines and in order to collect Parts technicians go around and remove beds and remove the parts from the individual machines they have a mix of both their large format and their smaller little spot mini machines throughout the farm but they continue to expand it as the demand for 3D printers continues to grow number five out of darts Luke has a great YouTube channel I highly recommend that you go over and take a look at it out of darts out of darts produces uh Nerf gun mod kits and Nerf guns themselves several guns like the Jupiter and other variations that are just really premium and really cool nerfed guns in order to produce all of these Luke has set up a print form of about a hundred or more prusa 3D printers over the last several years in their Seattle office they work with protopassa in order to make all of their materials so it's consistent and right down the road from where their Factory is and the farm itself is controlled exclusively through SD cards but all of those machines are able to be operated by about one technician with that technician and another half a person helping with maintenance and upkeep of the machines but they've decided to use the prusa because of the reliability over time and you can actually check Luke's Channel where he does a review of issues that they've encountered with building a print farm and how to kind of pursue it we're actually flipping the video a little bit now all the previous companies that we've talked about are printing basically singular items there's many different parts and several different skus but they are basically printing the same Parts over and over they don't let any random thing come through the door they have very engineered very prepared very optimized parts that are able to go into these print farms and work effectively and efficiently which vastly improves how well these Farms operate print services have a much more difficult challenge because they have to take whatever the customer gives them and try to make that work in a timely manner and with high quality so it's very challenging as compared to producing the same Parts over and over again number six I saw it eye solids is a print service in Texas and they do this they have about a Honda 120 fdm machines that both include creality machines and a version of maker body it appears but they work with mainly uh performance materials ABS pet G nylon uh carbon fiber variants and they do this because fdm is the only process that can do it they have multi-jet Fusion in-house as well but it it has a limitation in what types of materials can be used whereas fdm print Farms can basically use any material that injection molding has historically used so it's very powerful in that regard isolage uses also what appears to be a custom version of software in order to control and monitor their machines but again since they're a standard off-the-shelf fdm machine technicians are required to go around and pull the parts off the plates number seven so that's ready now we're a little bit biased because take a look at the channel but a slant 3D operates hundreds of machines producing parts for industries from the industrial sector to Etsy stores we currently have hundreds of machines inside of our Mega Farm which is spec to be expanded to 3 000 machines all of those machines are manufactured by us because we firmly believe that there is no machine off the shelf that can be used reliably inside of a print farm at this scale so we make our machines we make our software we even make a lot of our material while at the same time partnering with as many people within the industry as we possibly can our goal is to make manufacturing completely unlimited so that anyone can upload a model and get it made and delivered to as many people as they need without having to buy molds without having to buy any sort of infrastructure warehousing shipping at all so those are the seven biggest print farms in the world that we're aware of guys comment down below if you know of any others that we should take a look at and maybe we can do a sequel to this video if nothing else at least subscribe to this channel will have a lot more print farm and 3D printer content coming out and let us know what you think have a great day everybody

Channel: Slant 3D

Views: 59,489

Keywords: 3d printer farm, 3d printing farm, 3d print farm, additive manufacturing process, manufacturing with 3d printer, 3d printing for beginners, 3d printing 2022, prusa i3 mk3s+, ender 3, 3d printer design, what 3d printer should i buy 2022, 3d printers 2022, 3d printer, 3d print, prusa research, gantri lamp, texas print farm, i-solids 3d printing and engineering, lulzbot taz pro, lulzbot mini 2, cj dropshipping, out of darts jupiter, best printer farms 2022, custom moon lamp

Id: XF_zGIUzYaI

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Henrik-Powers]

Pretty cool, never really looked into print farms. Will definitely be the future in a lot of ways.