I spent $10,000 on 3D Printers...What now? // The Print Farm

I have somehow amassed over ten thousand dollars worth of 3D printing equipment and it's about time I set up a proper print Farm Watch How I created a dedicated Space by being intentional and focusing on workflow and efficiency and of course going a little over the top with it even if you're not into 3D printing at all there just might be something here that can help you in your shop or workspace [Music] this video is brought to you by Shopify but we'll get to that later as my 3D printing business has grown so has my fleet of prusa I3 Mark III printers and frankly I'm running out of places to put them I've got three sitting in my wife's office which is on the main level of our house which is also where I fulfill all the packages do all the prep work to the parts and do some light assembly of the products that I sell and I've got three more prusas downstairs in my basement office sitting on this thing plus this other 3D printer I've got back here that I use for r d type stuff and while the setup technically works it's not ideal to have them all spread out like this because checking on and changing prints becomes kind of a chore and if you've seen any of my other Shop videos you know that I'm all about efficiency and to make things worse I've actually got four more that I ordered they're on their way right now just to keep up with the man which means that I'll soon have 10 printers to keep up with and manage and as you can tell I don't have anywhere else to put them so what I want to do is be intentional and get all these workhorses in one spot so that I can manage them more efficiently and get them out of the way of our everyday lives which includes tiny fingers of children who constantly want to touch them but there's really only one spot I left in our house to even do this and that spot is right there on that shelf here in the unfinished part of our basement and to give you some context back behind me is the home gym that we built out here on the channel probably a year and a half ago but the spot right here is the future print Farm location based on the Shelf size I can fit nine printers pretty comfortably the 10th printer is going to stay in my office to do basic prototyping and to prove out the print files that'll eventually go to the other nine in the print farm so first things first let's get all this stuff cleared out of the way [Music] thank you now the standard wire mesh shelving that comes on these shelves is not going to work very well with the little rubber feet on the 3D printer so I'm gonna have to replace all that with some plywood I'll go ahead and get the Shelf Heights adjusted just to make sure we've got room for everything and then it's just a matter of ripping down some three quarter inch plywood to the right size and yes three quarter inch plywood is probably Overkill but oh well [Music] all right we've got all the solid shelves in place but before we start adding the printers I'm going to wait for those other ones to show up in the mail in the meantime let's build a little workbench all right the next order business is to create kind of a workstation cart to go along with the shelving unit if there's one thing I found out about 3D printing is that there's lots of tasks you do in association with printing things like cleaning up parts by removing little boogers or stringing doing some light assembly or installing Hardware like heat set inserts having a dedicated spot to do this which isn't my wife's office is going to make things a lot easier so I mentioned earlier that I currently use my wife's office to do fulfillment and some assembly well that assembly actually happens inside of the closet so all the tasks that I would normally do here like put in heat set inserts with this press here do all the assembly with all the parts and pieces all that's going to happen down on a little cart workbench whatever the heck you want to call it down in the basement slight change of planes you see I had every intention of building this thing I haven't made a little sketch showing exactly what I wanted to make and it was very purpose-built to what I'm going to use it for but then I got to thinking why build something so specific out of materials that are so expensive for a condition that I know is going to change so instead what I did is I went found the cheapest rolling toolbox I could possibly find which is this Yukon Harbor Freight brand and to be honest I paid about the same that I would the materials that I would have had to build this thing out of anyways let alone my time now I know the quality of this thing is not spectacular but this is going to be a lot easier to repurpose later than a special built cart that I would have made for this solution there are a couple things however that I want to customize for this and the first one weirdly enough is to hang a trash can off the side of it now one thing I've come to find is that as you're trimming off those little boogers and strings from prints those little things get everywhere and having a place to sweep everything into a trash can it's going to keep the area nice and clean and make my life easier and the second is to create kind of a back mounted shelf to hold these little bins for Hardware now there's a lot of things that I'm always grabbing for whether it be t-bolts washers or even knobs for things like stop blocks that I just want to have out in the open and available at all times that's not only going to make it easier and prevent me from having to open a drawer to get them but it's also going to show me exactly what I need to reorder so let's knock those out real quick and then we'll go put it in place so the whole reason I have a print Farm in the first place is because I print products that I then sell online and up to this point I've used Etsy but with a high fee structure and having not that much control over how my products are listed and offered I've decided to build my own store using Shopify and if you don't know Shopify is basically a tool for creating an online business and what I really appreciate about Shopify is you can make it as easy or complicated as you want what I mean is that there are templates or themes as they call them that you can use to build out a polished finish website in really no time at all or you can hire a Shopify expert who can write custom code and give you a totally customized store I'm electing to go the easier route and using a paid theme and so far it's been super easy I'm actually currently in the process of building out that store and it's going a lot faster than I would have thought and one of the big reasons why is also a reason why I like Shopify is that it's built with an ecosystem of third-party apps that you can use to streamline your business these apps lets you do pretty much anything with your store from collect marketing emails send out newsletters and import things from sites like Etsy so I actually used an Etsy import I linked up to my Etsy account and it took all of my listings and pulled them onto my new site this literally saved me hours of work now I have a brand new Shopify store with all of my current products which I can now customize and change to my heart's content and to be honest there are tons of examples of apps just like that so if you've ever wanted to start an online business take a look at Shopify literally millions of companies have used Shopify to build out their online stores you can go try it out risk-free with a 14 day free trial by heading to shopify.com shopnation seriously even if you're just curious go check it out you will be shocked at how easy it is to set up your own online store okay let's go finish this thing foreign myself getting this down one flight of stairs by myself but we got it here and kudos to the Yukon brand it survived I think but now that it is here let's deck it out with our custom features load it up [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] super stoked with how this little workstation is turning out it's still early days everything's not quite how it should be I'll probably tackle that organization at some point in the future but to keep this train rolling let's move back to the printer rack and deal with vibration and power so the power consumption of one individual printer is fairly low it typically pulls about 60 watts it might Spike up to about 300 watts but when you start combining nine of them at a time then you run into issues especially if they all hit that high point at the same time and then we compound that with the fact that a power blip to a 3D printer at least is no bueno so what I like to do is run all of my printers through a UPS or uninterrupted power supply it's essentially a battery that acts as a capacitor in case there's a power blip or if the power draw from the combination of all the printers running through the ups is higher than the voltage can supply now upstairs in my wife's office I'm running three printers through an 1100 VA rated UPS system and to be honest it's worked three printers have been running through that thing for a very long time and sure enough it saves all the prints during power blips but always felt like it's a little bit undersized because when the power does go out the ups only lasts about 15 minutes of time for the printers I went ahead and got 1500 VA rated systems just to give me that much more buffer so in total my rack is going to have three UPS systems each UPS running three different printers which all need to be powered by something now in a perfect world I'd probably have three circuits one circuit per Bank of three printers but because the world is imperfect I technically only have one circuit here but I'm going to try and piggyback off of a different one maybe for my office which is on the other side of this wall now I'm not an electrician but I think two circuits is cutting this a little close but we're going to try it and finally we should talk about vibration because when you've got nine printers running on one shelf there is a slight chance that you will encounter a resonance which is fancy Engineers speak for things will start shaking like crazy so to combat this I'm going to attempt to isolate each one of my printers using a 12 inch by 12 inch cement paver which is then sitting on top of a thin strip of foam that's placed on the Shelf the idea here is that I'm increasing the mass and adding a dampening factor with the foam which should in theory isolate all of the printers so before we move the printers on the rack let's take care of those two items now while it might be functional I think it's kind of ugly so I went a little overboard and made a three-sided apron that's going to go around each of these to hide that I think once all the printers are in place it's going to make it look that much better and speaking of over the top I went ahead and added two of these Barina fixtures that I had left over from doing the lighting down here in the basement when we did the garage gym build out I also added one right above the rack to get the top printers I am a huge fan of these Barina fixtures they're cheap they're easy to use and they're super reliable not really any functional reason for this other than it looks cool so really the last thing to do is to obviously load it up with 3D printers and it just so happens that those four that I ordered are set to arrive today so let's get those unboxed loaded up see how it works foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] now even though there was a small hiccup with Customs where the four printers I ordered were kind of held up there for about 10 days it did allow me to set up the six printers that I had in the rack and run it as a print Farm cranking out parts and I gotta say I'm really digging it and then the remaining printer showed up filling out the rack making it all symmetrical and just I don't know makes me feel good okay so now I want to try and get ahead of some questions that I'm sure some people are going to be asking and the first one is probably about ventilation as you can probably see I don't have any ventilation for this setup currently and I really don't plan on adding one big reason for that is I print almost exclusively in petg which doesn't emit very many vocs and really has no smell at all now obviously if I was putting in a nastier material like ABS I would definitely want to ventilate this another question maybe about the temperature or humidity down here in my basement now the cool thing about this basement and maybe all basements I really don't know is that it stays pretty much the same temperature year round and that's usually in somewhere in the mid 70s the humidity level down here is also extremely low and that's partially because there is a Jerry rigged way to get conditioned air into the space so it's technically kind of air conditioned although not totally and low humidity levels is great for 3D printing filament especially the materials that absorb moisture like nylons ABS that kind of stuff some of you may be wondering where the heck do I store all the filament you can see behind me I put up two shelves to store a bunch of filament and though this may look like a lot it's actually just under a month's worth of run time so I technically need more storage that I'm going to kind of look around here for so all in all I'm super happy with how this thing turned out and sure enough the UPS systems were actually tested the other day when we had a power blip sure enough it saved all the prints there were no impacts on print quality or anything like that and these things just kept on going and because I've had the opportunity to run these printers for several days non-stop I've got to see if vibration ever rears its ugly head and I'm happy to say it hasn't now is that because we put them on cement pavers with a foam dampener I don't know and as cool as the printers are to look at I think the star of the show for me at least is this little workstation it's worked out perfect twice a day I go to the rack I pull prints off I bring them here I clean them up I put them away and I sweep everything into the trash can exactly like I thought it up now there's still plenty of opportunity for organization and optimization all that kind of stuff I'll definitely get to that but for right now this works great so what do you guys think Overkill is there something you could at least take from this and apply to your shop or is there something that you think I should be doing differently leave those all down in the comments below and if you enjoyed the video smash the Thumbs Up Button I'm gonna go fire these up and get them back to work I will see you guys on the next project until then keep pursuing shop greatness foreign [Music]

Channel: Shop Nation

Views: 276,470

Keywords: shop nation, shopnation, print farm, 3d printing, 3d printers, prusa, prusa i3, mk3S+, 3d printed, 3d printer, 3d printer business, 3d printed products, set up a print farm, 3d printing workspace, 3d printing makerspace, additive manufacturing, filament storage, print rack, printer fleet, printer army

Id: hL17PPiB6ds

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022