How I Made Money Running My Automated Ender 3, 3D Printer For Months Non Stop!

[Music] [Music] now let me ask you a question real quick how much would you pay for something like this and what if i told you i was able to make and sell 30 of these in a month for 30 bucks a piece nothing more than my ender 3 3d printer now as you may have guessed there's actually a lot more to it than just pressing print so let's take a deep dive into what it actually takes to make something like this and then go over all of the post process to see just how much money i can retain in the end and let's start with that printer [Music] this is my automated 3d printer it's the og original ender 3 3d printer and i mean it's pretty much stock albeit a little bit massaged right there there here well okay it's not exactly stock but in order to get this thing to print automatically and you know just chew up one part after another there's not a lot to it just this glass surface right here is needed possibly a little paddle on that and then an octopi running a print queue software is about all you need that you got to run the right material this is abs so i print something like this off in abs i let the plate cool down below 50 degrees celsius and then this thing comes down here and just pushes it off like so and because i have a big box down here that's where all the parts collect the real question is can i use something like this to make money spoiler alert i've already made money with it so i know that i can the question is how much and can i come up with enough excuses to fill my house with 3d printers so that's when i came up with this his name's sweepy and sweepy was a new character that was recently introduced in a game called oxygen not included and this little guy runs around and sweeps things up and you can decorate it by storing things on top of its head turning this into a drink poster didn't really stretch the imagination so therefore fans of my channel plus fans of oxygen not included might find it something like this desirable so i made a video about it and asked people how much they would pay and i also got the blessing from clay entertainment and as it turns out it looked like there was going to be enough margin for me to actually make this for profit so now let's dig into the details to see just how long it takes how much money i spend and how much money i get to retain in the end now before we get into all those juicy money details let's talk about the design here real quick because the product i ended up selling these guys over here as compared to the prototypes there were definitely some design improvements over the generations in order to make something that was efficient so let's start from the very beginning prototype number one this is prototype number one it's printed in pla and designed to be printed without any supports to overcome that there's a little overhang right here i put a small fillet there that allows you to support that just enough to get the job done print off a couple of feet and stick them on the bottom and boom there you have it a drink coaster i colored this using some paint markers just like so and these are a great way to get a little bit of color onto a part like this without needing to change your filament a whole bunch of times or split it into different parts i love using paint markers like this however it's not quite a professional finish you know it doesn't work as well as spray paint and it takes a lot of time if i had to make a bunch of these this isn't how i'd want to color my prints [Music] so that's when i came up with this it's split into many different pieces that are bolted together so it actually comes off the printer looking a bit like this you have your base the middle the top and then some feet that you end up fastening onto the bottom as it turns out this works quite well it's fairly easy to put together although it does weigh quite a bit that's tipping in at 168 grams nice although a little bit heavy the reason that this is so much heavier than the first prototype here which only weighs 118 grams is because it's made out of abs therefore it has quite a bit more infill in order to deal with the top layers and bottom layers of which there are quite a few more because these are all separate parts that all adds up to make this print quite a bit heavier plus there's a few fasteners inside of there so to address the weight that's when i came up with this design right here it's the same sort of thing albeit a little bit lighter coming in at 143 grams same sort of design just optimize the printing of this the other thing i did is right down here on the bottom in the previous design i had m3 fasteners that would go down here and then an m5 in the middle for both the top and bottom i switched that to all m5 fasteners for the final release of that product so rather than needing two different types of fasteners to put the whole thing together i only needed one so a few less operations to put the whole thing together in the end i ended up building 30 of these and selling them on my etsy store it worked out good however it could be a little bit better which i'm sure you guys are already commenting down there so one of the things i did is stuff like this it's still the face albeit weighs a little bit less this actually allowed me to print the parts with more walls and a little bit more infill while still saving weight the other big advantage here was that this is no longer bolted on that is just printed in there just like so so that takes away about four fasteners plus all of the tapping and whatnot needed to get all that to happen and i got the magic number down to 106 grams right there that without all of the extra stuff on it is under 100 grams of plastic so this divides into one kilogram increments perfectly which really weighs in on the whole money side of things how many kilograms do you need to buy how many of these are you going to make and how much does that then sell for let's talk about money real quick and in this example if i was to sell one sweepy that would be one complete pie however if i was to sell two of these then i would be selling two slices of that total pie so this is the total amount of money i'm going to bring in versus its value of how much each unit is going to cost what i want to figure out here is at what point does cutting this pizza into more slices mean i'm not making any more money so based on my results ultimately i got two responses saying that they would pay fifty dollars for one of these sweepies so if i only made two sweepies all together and i sold it for fifty dollars each the total pie here would be worth a hundred dollars so when you factor in how much plastic that is and how much time and effort it would take to make that well that would be a lot of profit however the total amount i'm bringing in isn't that much it cost too much the item is too exclusive for me to actually make a decent amount of income so if we were to take that down to forty dollars you see that i might be able to take this and cut it into about four or five pieces so now my pizza is worth a hundred and sixty dollars however i've doubled the amount of work i'm doing here well here i now have eight slices but each slice is only worth thirty dollars so now my pizza is worth two hundred forty dollars but it takes many times as much work in order to make that happen having doubled everything again you can now see that this is hardly even a pizza slice you might pay i don't know let's say ten dollars for it ultimately the pizza as a whole is going to be worth less and the amount of work it's taken to make all of that has cost me quite a bit more so while i'm not an expert at this the trick to the whole survey as far as i can tell is finding the tipping point so that i can optimize how much work i'm doing versus how much the value of the item is with that stuff in mind let's take a look at the survey results over here are the responses the amount that people are willing to pay versus the amount of people i can sell that to at that price versus the total amount of income from selling all of those when we put that on the chart down here there's a clear top so everything to the right of here is more work for less total income so the two peaks right here are thirty dollars and twenty five dollars so from the looks of it somewhere in that range seems ideal now when we compare this to what it costs to actually make the thing as far as the physical material at a school price of seventeen dollars per kilogram and each unit consumes 130 grams of that that comes out to two dollars and 21 cents if i want to make a batch size of 30 units here that's just under 4 kilograms of material so that's how i came up with 30 so that means in plastic alone i'm spending about 68 not bad the total print time is 24 hours and that divides out like this now if we add in the machine cost here it runs at 130 watts on average at the cost of seven cents per kilowatt hour and then after every 730 hours or so i have a maintenance cost of an average of 22 dollars i change out a nozzle every now and then and you know some other parts might wear out meaning that the total out-of-pocket cost for just 3d printing the item is 3.15 which doesn't sound like a whole lot when you compare it to how much i'm selling it for however that's far from the only thing i need to do in order to make this a finished product that gets shipped out the door so now let's shift gears and talk about the post process everything after the print [Music] so a part like this is fresh off the printer however it's not yet ready for use or paint because we have this brim that i used right down here in order to get it to stick to the platform so the first thing i need to do is remove that now some of this you can peel by hand just like so but in order to get it really clean what i'm going to use is this deburring tool so this is the first operation and all of the steps that i need to do after we've completed printing the part after deburring the part the next thing i would do normally in my original design here was to come in and tap all of these holes i found that i could use this in a drill and go quite quickly so tapping all of these holes actually takes quite a bit of time and the other thing that happens here is it actually makes for a lot of debris i'm dealing with a lot of little chips here that would end up on these parts as they kind of build up static electricity and it would just cling to them so i'd have to clean the parts before it goes off to the next step which is paint so that's why the redesign of this part here to get rid of all tapping was so important i don't need to tap these four holes anymore and also the hole in the middle i've sized it just right for it to be self-threading but now let's talk about paint it's the single most labor-intensive series of operations that i have to go through in order to make this thing its final shape so being efficient when it comes to painting the parts is really really important to try to make printing this efficient one of the things i did here is try to take a little bit of a dowel and then i would put the parts on here like this and the idea was to kind of suspend this inside of the printing box and then rotate it a bit like a shush kebab as i was printing however that didn't really work out all that well because the weight caused this thing to sag and it just didn't work as well however the second time around what i did is i stacked these up vertically just like so used the rod to keep everything in place sprayed one side rotated it 180 degrees and sprayed the other side after spraying the sides i would just unstack the whole thing spray the top wait for it to dry flip it over and spray the bottom easy however the most difficult part and where all the time was spent is right here in the middle trying to get these face just right in an effort to make this efficient and even work one of the things i did here was make a stencil out of painters tape and this was cut out using my laser engraver [Music] now how this works is what you'd end up doing is taking this little piece right here and then placing it on the face so that it revealed the eyes but covered up the back however placing this down exactly right took a couple of tries per part and in the end actually took quite a bit of time roughly about three minutes per part so then once all of this is in place you can paint this brown and because i was using black abs all i'd have to do is reveal the eyes just like so and paint those green and to do that i was using a paint marker just like this but as it turns out the paint marker doesn't really like to stick to the plastic all that well so it would take several passes in order to get a nice even color that's where a lot of the time was spent just dabbing on the little green bits that ultimately became the eyes on average it took me about six minutes per part in order to get these eyes perfect so the most important thing that i could do here to make this whole operation more effective is to streamline this process so the second go around that's where i came up with this right here this is basically a stencil and it sits on this base which unfortunately didn't work out all that well it broke coming off the printer but the idea here is that the stencil clips into place and only shows the spot that i need to paint right here i'd actually parented all of these out of white abs so everything would get painted brown to begin with and then i would paint it black and then i'd add the green on top of that using yet another stencil like this so the hope was that this was going to be more efficient question is did it work well yeah i think it actually did work once you kind of get this process figured out here and you kind of figure out where to put your hands and make it work i was able to spray this part right here in about one minute so that's actually a couple of minutes faster than putting the stencil on here plus i don't have to cut this thing out in the first place it's far from perfect but the idea is pretty good and it actually is more efficient however one thing that didn't work out here was doing the same sort of thing but with the eyes as it turns out this feature is just too small a bit too much paint builds up or not enough paint builds up at best a result like this is about all i could hope for out of that stencil process the eyes are a bit hazy and there might be a little bit of overspray even then the eyes are not that kind of green when you compare this side by side with what i can get out of the paint pen well you can see that the paint pen is just a whole lot better but here's the cool thing i discovered here now that i have a little bit of paint on here this paint pen that i'm using to put the green on actually sticks a whole lot better so rather than needing to make four or so passes in order to get just enough paint to be you know to get a nice even color this here goes on a lot faster and it sticks well to the base coat which is that black color so really just a bit like this gets you that first pass and then i'll come along with the heat gun and then i can get right back to adding the next layer right here so there you have it not extremely fast but a big step up from where i was [Music] now for the final two pieces here the cork inserts for this part so i've got a logo that i put up here on top just like so and then i've got two inserts that go right down here on the bottom that allow you to have a little cork on the bottom so that it's nice and soft when you put it down and it doesn't slide around so this part right here just comes from amazon pre-made and it has a little bit of a sticky back right here so all i have to do is line this up in my laser engraver and then burn that shade in to the top of the cork material there that means i could just place the cork inserts where they needed to go and then run the whole batch in one go this works out really good however every once in a while for some odd reason the laser doesn't always engrave where it needs to be engraved i don't know why it does this but this leaves me with a little bit of scrap material and that ultimately is what i end up cutting the base piece out pieces out of so what i've done here is just lined up a rectangle and that's just a template for me to go in here and cut these by hand just like so and then i have that little rectangle piece i need and placed right here in the base like that and once i have two of these i flip it over and push down and that gives me this nice even thud and the thing doesn't move around great one more thing i did here to make this a little bit more efficient between the two revisions was obviously these feet down here are no longer physically bolted on they're just printed in so i'm going to add the cork inserts here before i go and stencil it out and paint them black so this will go right over here like that and then i just paint all of this black so that'll make this a little bit more efficient in order to line this piece up here because it would look bad if it was crooked i ended up using my laser engraver to make this template this template here goes over the feet like so and will flip up just like this to line up my logo so i think that's a pretty neat use and one of many that i found for something like this laser engraver so one clear coat later and this part is now complete it's rather humbling when you step back and you look at something like this which is relatively simple just how many steps it takes in order to get to a final product however if you thought that was the end nope not even close you still need to package this thing put it up for sale and then ship the thing and as it turns out that takes a lot of time too shipping boxes can be kind of expensive so here's a pro tip what you do is you search for what you want in google you click on amazon you start searching all the stuff you do not buy anything just look at all the prices click on all the things you get the bots smelling you and then you come back like a day later and what you'll find is that the bots are probably going to offer you up a better deal for the same things that you were looking at the day before i don't know who's looking at who but i think it's possible to work the system now that i had some boxes i just needed packing material ended up wrapping this in cellophane and then putting just scrap newspaper around it this was during the election so there was plenty of scrap going around but here is where i ran into a big problem as it turns out not all junk mail weighs the same so when you package the part some of these were coming in a little bit too heavy and as it turns out if i was one ounce too heavy the price of shipping internationally would go up from expensive to really expensive so i desperately needed to find a way to make the package just a little bit lighter [Music] this is the original package a little bit too heavy here's what i came up with it's the exact same box except for i cut the tabs down just a little bit and as it turns out this amount of material right here would be worth ten dollars per package this really doesn't feel like ten dollars to me so a tiny little change like this had a major effect on shipping and as it turns out a slightly lighter product will have this exact same effect so this right here is the best example of how just everything is connected from the design to the operations to put the thing together to ultimately shipping it out the door it all matters and it all comes back to the exact same equation how many steps does it take how much material is used how much does it cost to ship and if all of that works well together then you end up with a price that has a little bit of margin so you can make a profit in the end so here it is the completed part this is what i put on my etsy store and i sell at thirty dollars a piece and there's two burning questions that you probably have one how much money do i get to keep from that thirty dollars and the second thing is how practical is it to use a 3d printer to make something like this well let's take a look at the money so when i add up all the costs such as printing the unit or adding all the fasteners and paint to it add in the shipping and the fact that etsy gets a small cut for me using their store plus the fact that i have a little bit of tax in the end i end up keeping about 50 cents on the dollar so in my first batch i sold this for 900 and therefore kept 350 for myself which in case you're wondering yes i've already spent that money on upgrades for future videos such as a new shotgun mic to hopefully fix the audio and make it a little bit nicer for you and a resin 3d printer plus the laser engraver i might have spent more than i made hence the second batch of sweepies but now for the big burning question does it make sense to use a 3d printer to produce something like this well for a small batch like i'm doing right now which is 30 units every month and a half two months or whatever yes you'll know i'm not going to find anything more inexpensive than a 3d printer to produce this it's awesome all i do is load the filament press go it is probably the easiest step of all the steps it takes to actually sell this thing however if we start to look at this from a full-time perspective you can see that things are going to be a little bit different so let's say i was making these eight hours a day five days a week as my full-time job considering that it took my first batch here about 34 minutes on average to make one of these and then my second batch here is down to 23 minutes per unit i can make anywhere from 15 to 21 of these a day now when we add in the fact that an automated 3d printer runs 24 7 i'm going to need anywhere from 10 to 15 printers to keep up with the production based on the amount of power it takes to run that printer that's anywhere from 1 300 watts upwards of 1900 watts and since i'm using 120 volts that's anywhere from 11 to 16 amps so yes it is actually possible in a home like mine to run enough of these to supply me with enough work to do full time however very quickly i'm going to run out of wall sockets and power in order to scale that up beyond me but how much income would that generate for me well as it turns out when you factor in some inefficiencies let's say i'm about 70 percent efficient i would make anywhere from 19 to 30 an hour producing this so not necessarily quit your day job kind of money but kind of equivalent to a day job it's not bad it is possible to use a 3d printer to make enough stuff like this to earn an income though unless i had a heck of a lot more power to throw at the problem or or is able to make my 3d printers a whole lot more efficient i'm not sure i would try to scale up a whole business around the idea of 3d printers however if we start to look at other technologies that is still technically 3d printing the equation might change just a little bit but that's another video for another time not only that there's a lot of things i've got to talk about here as far as how to like set up your 3d printer to be automated if any of that sounds interesting to you maybe consider hitting subscribe button because that's going to be definitely a topic i talk about here in the future at any rate that's all i've got time for today thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: Watch It Print

Views: 541,738

Rating: 4.8630366 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printer, product design, money, ender 3, automated 3d printer, how to, Sell product, sell online

Id: N_ZIukfpw5M

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021