Picture this, What do you do when you have a $1,500
proprietary designed enterprise grade doorbell on the outside of your building,
and you don't like it? You want to install a more off the shelf and actually feature
packed, much cheaper version, but no adapter exists on the market
to make these two things go together? OVERDRAMATIC YOUTUBER! You contact a 3D printer, Of course. Maybe somebody with a machine
like the Qidi X-Max 3 from the folks at ZBANX,
Sponsors of this video. We'll discuss more later why this machine
is a great fit for a project like this, producing practical prints
for plentiful profits. What we're undertaking in this video
is the type of service that a 3D printer could offer to local businesses
to meet the needs of their customers, where there aren't
commercially available options that could
then produce income with a 3D printer. Let's dive into the project. We're going to discuss considerations you need to take into account
with the customer, we're going to design
parts, we're going to 3D print them, and Yes, I am going to discuss how I decide
how much to charge for things like this. A local company came to me
with this project. They deal in home theater, high end audio, networking and home automation installs. They installed one of these boxes
into the brick wall of a customer's house about 2 years ago to accept a 2N
brand doorbell & intercom system. However, the customer
has not been very happy with that and they would like to go to a Ring
Elite doorbell. The problem is
this electrical box is not at all standard
and this doorbell does not fit into it. We need to adapt this electrical box
to this Ring doorbell. It's going to give the customer
what they want now, and options
for easier upgrades down the road. However, there is more at play here. I have to ask the customer for as much information
as I can get about the actual project. Thankfully, they provided me photos
and a pretty good breakdown of how they expect things to be installed
and assembled later. That really helps me
get on the same page as them as to what we are creating. With this photo
we see right off the bat this is installed into brick
on the exterior of a house. So I don't want any exposed hardware. I don't want to make it easy for somebody
to walk up and steal any piece of this. Also being this electrical box mounted in brick means there's going to be a gap
cut around that in the brick for it. So I need to make something
that's going to cover that gap, have a pretty decent flange
like the existing installation has. If I designed exactly to this electrical
box and only this electrical box, it would look terrible when final install. And I should consider
maybe some weather ceiling. Something like the backside of this
ring has a gasket on it. I may design that into my design
for the adapter and that flange that goes around it
as well. Yet to be seen on that. Side note,
that looks pretty rough for about 2 years of exposure
to the elements, and that's a consideration
we'll talk about later. Now with the customer's expectations
and my ideas for what needs to happen on the same page, we can move
into actually designing this part. So let's head to the computer. One important aside
here, I'm not going to do a step by step Fusion 360 tutorial in this video. I'm going to give you a few tips
that I'll use on projects like this that you could apply to any CAD software
you may choose to use. If you want an in-depth guide,
maybe let me know in the comments and we'll see about doing that
for another project. When I'm working with real world
components like these, I first need to start with measurements of the objects
so I know what I'm building to and with. But instead of wasting my time
manually measuring, what I'm going to do is jump online and look for 3D models
that are already made for these or technical drawings. Pretty much the first place
I'll look is a manufacturer's website. Surprisingly often nowadays manufacturers
have at the very least, technical drawings
that are very well laid out. So you can get an idea
of the exact dimensions of an object without having to try and measure
it yourself or actual 3D models. They usually make both of these
a little difficult to find. So let's dive in now. Looking around on 2N's website,
the particular model we're looking for is the IP Solo,
at least based on the images and information
provided to me by the customer. First place, I'm generally going to look is a support section or here
technical area. I need technical documentation in there. I'm going to find an AutoCAD file. If I click on that, it'll take me
to another page in the support section where I can, Get CAD Drawing. The file they provide is not a 3D render,
it is a literal CAD Drawing. A DWG file. All it is, is technical drawings. However,
it still gives me a lot of what I need and saves me a ton of measuring. Now there's plenty of information here
for me to work with. I could pull measurements
off of the drawing, compare them to the physical object
I'm going to work with because I have found, unfortunately,
while there are technical drawings and 3D models available from plenty
of manufacturers, it's surprising how often they don't exactly
match the reality of their products. So I'm going to create a test template. This is something I've talked about before
in my design process, where I'll make a quick template. In this case, I'll make this outside
edge of the electrical box and I'll make another one that's the inside
where the mounting screw holes are in this so that I can ensure
that my most critical dimensions off of this box match up with a real world
3D printed object. Before I start making a full, complex
design, I want to ensure the dimensions I'm working off of are accurate
and the printing tolerances are as well. Once those template designs are done,
I can send them to the printer. I am going to print them
in the same material that I'm intending to use
for the final project to ensure shrinkage & any material
properties are taken into account when fitting these things up onto
the electrical box. Which I'll first set the one that's going to be the mounting
flange down inside of the box. So that tells me my screw holes
are aligned exactly where I need them. And then the one that goes on the face of it for the flange, it's
going to overlap everything. That one seems to be pretty good too. So the technical drawing that I got
is good. On to the Ring doorbell. I tried to find a 3D model of this
and since it's sold / owned by Amazon,
I didn't really have much luck with that. I did go to GrabCAD.com,
which is a place I'll often have luck finding 3D models of real world objects. No dice this time though, so I'm going to work off of the actual
mounting flange of this. You see, this seems to mount into
a standard single gang electrical box, like a light switch in your bedroom would. That is a very standard thing,
and I know exactly where to get a 3D model of that,
which would be McMaster.com In case you've been living under
a rock, this is McMaster-Carr's website. They are an industrial supply house
with hardware, raw materials, tools, equipment so much you could need
for Industrial or Maker projects. What I need is a single gang
electrical box. I searched for that
and I found exactly what I want. The steel switch box will work just fine
if I click on some of these part numbers, the numbers right next to the price,
they have a product detail section. Now what I want is missing from here. I click this last one,
you'll see “CAD 3D STEP”. That is what I want. So you just got to find the product
that you're looking for. Not everything has a 3D file,
but a large portion of the stuff on their website does. If I click download on that, I'll download
a 3D STEP file that I can then pull into my CAD software of choice
and build off of. I'm going to create a template print just like I did for the electrical box
side of things for this Ring doorbell. Based off of the hole
mounting for the single gang box and measurements
off of the outside of this doorbell. And with a very quick print later,
I'm ready to mock that up onto the Ring doorbell
and see if it fits, which it does! Now I have point A
and point B of my design, so I'm ready to move forward
and get these together ** Wild Flying Template Print ** and create
an adapter for them to go together. Let's just go ahead and leave these
right here. I'm going to jump to the completed design, show you a few details
that I want to include in it that’ll just be easier
to show you on the finished part, and then we'll discuss
the materials we're going to choose, because that's a definite consideration
here. Here is an exploded
view of the completed design. Now this is made in two pieces. Fairly early on, I realized that
with the large flange overlapping the brick that I was going to need, I would either have to create a design
that required a ton of support, which is something I try to avoid at
almost all cost. Or I had to make it two pieces. Making it in two pieces also meant
that I can hide the mounting hardware for the main adapter where it screws
into the electrical box inside, underneath the flange,
reducing the exterior hardware. There'll be some heat press inserts
in the lower adapter piece that adapts the electrical box
to the new mounting flange. And then screws will go through the ring
doorbell, through the flange, into that electrical box. Let's just print these parts. Then you can see it all assembled in
the real world, and it'll make more sense then. We do need to decide
on a filament now, which is important on a project like this, ** RepRack-ing ** we're going to go with ASA. The reason for this is I already showed
the doorbell is mounted on the exterior of a house and it looks pretty rough
in its current state after just 2 years. So between UV exposure and exposure
to the elements of the outside world, there may also been
some chemical stuff in there. I don't know. It looks pretty rough to me. Maybe somebody pressure washed with
a harsh soap on the outside of this house. I don't know. But I'm going to try and use something
that should hold up pretty well to UV exposure, to the elements
and maybe mild chemicals. And that's where ASA is coming in. I could use PolyCarbonate
for this application as well. The doorbell mounting. But the only PolyCarbonate
I have are clear / translucent and well, that's just not going to look very good
unless they want that 9 aesthetic for their Ring doorbell. So PolyLite ASA
Black is what I'm going with. It should match pretty closely
to the look of the black Ring doorbell and also just hold up pretty well.
Material choice made it's time to talk about the machine
I'm going to use to produce these prints
before we get to making them. This big, beautiful box
is the new and improved X-Max3 It has a big bad build volume of 325mm
on X&Y and 315mm on Z. It's one of the only machines
in this price category to feature an active chamber heater, that can get the build volume
up to 65 degrees Celsius to reduce trouble for materials like ABS, ASA or other filaments that are prone to warping. The larger
build volume means you can do large single parts or large batches of parts
for getting a lot of things done quickly. That speed is down to the Core-XY
motion system with a direct drive toolhead that also features hardened
steel hollow tubing for the X axis rods. For reduced weight,
but also long service life. And it runs Klipper firmware by default.
The 5 inch touch screen interface allows for control of the machine,
as well as calibration, such as Input Shaper
tuning right off the touch screen. Now, what does any of that mean
in the real world? To me, it means getting the job done
quicker so you can get paid sooner. Things like this client work
that we're doing in this video, or rapid prototyping jobs
where you might go through a couple of iterations
to get to the final product. You can get it done quicker on this
machine, so you're not wasting time. All of that
going for an MSRP of $1099 USD. That's the same price that the Prusa
Mk4 is currently going for. So let's compare with this design,
this machine versus that one. Now, I tried my best to match settings
between the two slicers and let them use their default speeds
built into their slicer profiles. I used the Mk4 “Speed” profile,
not the “Quality” one. And still we came in
at less than half the print time using the X-Max 3
for these same parts. Now since I know somebody would say it,
I also sliced again using the new Input Sharper profile
in the slicer for the Mk4 and we still ended up with a two hour time
difference between these two machines. And don't forget, this machine
has a heated and enclosed build volume for trouble free printing of materials
like we're using in this project. All of this you can find at the Link
in the Description down below if you want to pick
one of these up for yourself. Now let's get this machine out of the way
and get back to this project. There are a couple of elements to these
designs that I didn't show you earlier. I might as well show you now in the fully printed parts.
Such as the flange, the face you'll see when you walk up and address
the doorbell. On the back side of it there is a groove that I designed
into here, that is for a bit of weather stripping. Say, 3/8
inch wide weatherstripping I'm going to stick to the backside of this and that will allow it to seal to the wall
to prevent water from getting in behind the doorbell into the electrical box
or worse yet, into the wall itself. On the face of the adapter piece, there's a little ridge
that is raised up off of the surface of it that actually aligns to a smaller groove
on the backside of the flange that keys these two pieces together. So you don't have to worry about the holes
being misaligned for the ring doorbell and cross threading something. A pair of heat
press inserts are pressed into the adapter pieces as I already mentioned. I'm using #6-32 sized inserts
so that they'll be the same size as your standard outlet
box screw would be. So any electrician who comes along
and installs something later or hardware that's likely to come with the doorbell
or other options down the road should fit in here no problem. I also added the bit of the key shapes
that are in the electrical box to the outside of the adapter piece, so it fits in there nice and snug
but not too tight. Four #8 screws go through the adapter into
the electrical box and retain it in place. One last thing I think I'm going to do
before I deliver this to the customer is I'm going to make a pair of shims
to go behind this adapter piece, probably 3 millimeters
or maybe 4 millimeters thick. The reasoning behind
that is in case the electrical boxes set into the brick a little bit. I've been basing all of this off
of the electrical box being flushed to the face of the brick, but just in case
it's recessed into the brick a little bit, that'll give a little space
away from the wall with this flange. So this won't be kind of bottoming out
on the wall itself and getting a bad seal. The only reason I didn't make this adapter
a little taller to account for that was I was worried that if the electrical box
is proud of the wall if it's sticking out a little bit,
then the gasket that I'm putting around the flange wouldn't seal quite right
causing possible water leaks. So I've got to kind of balance this.
Where I think a shim that goes behind here, in case they need
it, is going to be a better option. Final assembly is really straightforward. The flange sits on the face of the electrical box adapter that's already
installed in the electrical box, and then the Ring doorbell fits into that
with a pair of #6-32 Screws. They go through the Ring doorbell,
through the flange, and then into the adapter piece,
into those heat press inserts. Two screws hold
this whole thing sandwiched together. If I do say so myself,
I think the final result of this assembled setup really looks good. It's going to do what the customer needs. It's going to allow for future upgrades
and it looks sleek while doing so. Now it's time to talk, what probably most of you
are interested in, $ MONEY $! How much would I charge for a project
like this and will I charge my customer? I personally come from the custom
automotive world. That's what I did for a career
before this. So when it comes to projects like this,
I charge time & materials. How long does a task take me? How long does it have to run on a machine?
That I am paying the upkeep, and the maintenance,
and the purchasing price of. And how many materials
are going into the product? Since I'm pretty time blind with my ADHD,
I run a stopwatch on my cell phone
while I was working on the design process. In total, I spent 4 hours on the design,
including these original test pieces that fit the electrical box
and the Ring doorbell. That's part of the design process. Those only took like 15 minutes to design up themselves,
so that's not a particularly big deal. But the overall process 4 hours,
which I personally charge $75 an hour for.
Where does that dollar figure come from? It's what I used to charge
when I worked on cars for people. Time is money. If I'm spending time working on this,
I'm not doing that other thing that could be making me money.
So I'm going to charge the same amount. Not a very scientific system, I understand that,
but I still think it comes out to a fair value for the work that is going in,
and the experience that I have creating designs
like this. With design time covered to get our total price,
we also need to factor in Print time. The customer did request 2 full sets
of these, so I guess they have back ups, I'm not really sure why, I don't care.
They wanted 2, they're getting 2. I did end up slowing down the print
speed on these just a little bit. I wanted to maximize the quality
of the final product. Since it's the first time I'm working
with this customer, I want to ensure they're getting my best foot forward here,
and I think I definitely nailed it. These turned out beautiful. Now, mind you, slower was still fast. The adapter and the flange piece
took 7 hours to print, meaning it was 14 hours
for the two sets that they requested. The shim pieces that I added on to there
took 45 minutes to print all of these. And the original test pieces
that I mocked up on parts took just under half an hour,
meaning this whole thing took 15 hours and 15 minutes to print. And I couldn't make that happen again
if I tried. I take those print hours
and I times them by $8 per hour. How much I charge per hour of machine
time. Some folks charge a setup fee
where having to prep the bed load filament they charge for that. Or a post-processing fee for removing
supports and inserting inserts. I don't really bill for that. I find it the easiest to track
just the print hours because if I forget how long it took,
I can always re-slice the design and get really close
to the estimate of it. Or on a machine like the X-Max,
I could jump in Fluidd and actually check the history
of the time it took for that print. Full transparency
on how I came up with that dollar figure, a while ago when I was selling something
like Flexi Elephants, I knew I wanted to charge $30
for those things. It was a price I felt was fair
and people would be interested at. But it took like 10 hours
to print on the Ender 3 So $30 divided by 10 = $3 per hour.
If somebody wanted a bigger one, Well, I took the print time and I times it by $3,
and that set my pricing moving forward. But then I got machines like the Qidi
X-Max, that print way faster. Seriously, that same 10 hour Elephant, 3 hours
and 20 minutes on that machine. So does that mean that
I should take a loss because an admittedly more expensive
machine, goes way faster? No! So I bill a higher cost
per hour for that machine. Also, then inflation hit so I bumped the price up to where it is
now, $8 per hour. You're going to have to decide what dollar figure works for you
for your time in your machines. Filament material cost is pretty darn easy. I don't generally use slicer estimates
just because they can be off a little bit. I actually weigh my real world components
unless they're too big, then I'll go off Slicer estimates.
Weighing up all the individual parts printed for this project totals up to 317
grams of filament used. Namely this PolyMaker ASA. This one kilogram
spool of which costs $29.99. I divide that by 1000, the number of grams on the spool,
then times that by our 317 grams we used and we ended up with $9.51
worth of plastic in this project. The last variable I need for my total cost
of this is the additional hardware that it required. Such as the seal
to go on the back side of the flange, the #6 and $8 screws
that assemble that whole thing and the heat press inserts for it.
Which all totals up to a grand total of $4.78. To get my final price, I have design time, print time,
the filament cost, and additional hardware expense, all adding up to $436.29
total for this project. Now clearly design
time was the bulk of the expense here. We made an adapter
that didn't exist before. This project goes from one manufacturers
design to an entirely different one, and I think is fairly elegant. So 4 hours feels pretty reasonable
for that to my mind. But I'm going to make it clear to the customer
that that design was an upfront charge. I will save the files. (or provide if requested) So maybe if they sold hundreds
of these things to their customers, they could offer this
as an upgrade service. I'll have the file and in the future I'll only bill them
for print time and materials. So their future costs would be much less
and they can factor that into their billing,
if they want to offer a service. Now what about the Qidi X-Max 3? Again, this video is Sponsored by ZBANX and Qidi-Tech,
so take it as you will. But I am legitimately impressed
with this machine. This is revision two. They've made some definite
improvements over the first one. I'll probably do a dedicated video
comparing the two just for the fun of it. But this thing,
I didn't have a single print failure through this entire project
and when you're doing client work that matters, it's not wasted material
or wasted times. And the print quality
that I got off of it, I posted these flanges on my Instagram
story blind. I didn't say anything about them. And I had people in my messages
asking “how I printed that well?” “what tuning did I do?” “What machine printed those?” “Was it a Voron or Bambu?” No, it was the X-Max
3. “Did it have ironing settings on?” Nope. Minor tuning on this thing. Following my own tuning guide,
I got this thing dialed in and printing beautifully. For the type of client work
that I do, with that heated build volume, there aren't really any other machines
in this price range with that feature. So the materials I like to use, this thing can just chew through those jobs
and it's a really good choice for that. It also has auxiliary part cooling, I forgot to mention earlier,
so printing your PLA prints really fast, It can do that too. And it's got a bigger
build volume in the Bambu X1, something that quite a few people
have wanted from that machine. You've got it here on this one
for actually less money than the X1. I'm excited to use the X-Max3
more in future videos. I think that's going to wrap it up
for this one folks. If you have a different way
you like to bill when it comes to client work, maybe drop that into the comments
down below and we can all learn together. Hope you found this video interesting. If you did, maybe you'll enjoy the Live
Unboxing of the X-Max 3, or this video where I made a custom
dash cluster for my Dad's custom truck with the previous revision of the X-
Max 3. All right folks, get Subscribed
to ensure your 3D prints don't fail. It's not a guarantee,
but it can't hurt. See you!
