Things I Have Learned From Running A 3d Print Farm

have you ever wanted to start your own 3d print farm maybe you have a product idea that you'd like to be able to print out and sell maybe you already have your first printer and the thoughts crossed your mind well whether you're printing for yourself it's a small business or a larger business you have to start somewhere and this is a topic that i've seen discussed many times and i've had people ask me questions about so in today's video we're going to dive right into that if you've been watching my channel for any period of time even just two weeks ago when i mentioned it again you would know that i at one point ran a 3d print farm and while i was running that and going to school that farm pretty much paid for my rent and most of my basic expenses i ran that farm for roughly around a year and in that time i learned a lot of things that i think i did really well as well as some things that i didn't do so well and just things that i learned along the way so in today's video we're going to dive into it's going to be a little bit of a story time taking it back to the reason i started the farm what i went through as far as the steps some of the hurdles i ran into where i sold i mean really just anything i could think of that i think will be valuable regarding getting up and running with the print farm and what my experience was like we will cover in this video as a quick plug if you can't tell we've got modbot shirts i've got a couple of different ones available there's a colored version and a black and white version with a little robot on the front and a big logo on the back so if you have wanted to support the channel but maybe patreon is just not your thing we do have some sweet shirts available and i will be adding some other designs as time goes on these are actually available right below the video so if you are interested in supporting the channel check those out so last night as i was typing up the things i wanted to talk about i realized that it was going to be very difficult for me to kind of compact an a year or so of operations into a short video so in today's video we will do our absolute best to kind of summarize and go through the things that i think were important there is a ton to cover so without further ado let's get right into today's [Music] video so starting off let's talk about how i even got into that at all the year was 2016 to 2017 roughly i was renting out a room in my best friend's house at that time i was going to school and i was working full time but i really didn't like my job at the time without getting into too much detail there i was hired on to be a content creator but spent most of the eight months or so there counting inventory and dealing with inventory issues so a huge chunk of the time while i was there i was daydreaming about ways to not be there so that way i could focus more on school and doing something that i enjoyed at that point i'd been making youtube videos for roughly four years and i had gotten into 3d printing about two years prior to that so i had a couple printers but i've never really thought about printing things to sell the printers were just for projects my own personal projects and doing stuff for the channel so i couldn't tell you what initially sparked the idea of taking those printers and making something that i can then print out and sell but once the idea popped into my head i could not shake it i've always been the type of person where when i get really excited about something i go all in and this was no exception so now that i have this idea of printing things to sell fantastic but that was just the first step of course i've got to figure out now what is it that i'm going to make what is it that people want to buy and the idea of just printing out random things to sell didn't seem like the most effective way of doing things so i began the research phase which took me quite a long time i spent weeks and even months researching things online i was browsing forums seeing people talking about 3d printing for sale or 3d printing services stuff of that nature and i spent a lot of time studying up on different hobbies that were kind of niche that i felt could benefit from certain things that were 3d printed or things that could be customized within that hobby that people might be interested in i did research on things that would break that were made out of plastic either current stuff or things that you just couldn't get replacement parts for anymore or oem was really expensive so i looked into replacement parts and i spent just a ton of time digging all over the web trying to narrow down kind of some different things that i wanted to focus on in the end most of the parts on that list after doing all that research ended up being parts that i could actually make cheaper with my 3d printers or that i could in some way shape or form customize making them more desirable than what was already out there so now that i had my list i ran into my next serious speed bump and that was 3d modeling at that time i had very little 3d modeling experience i had played around with 123 design in the early stages of when i was beginning 3d printing i didn't get very far with it i mostly got really frustrated because the software would always crash or i would lose my files so i hadn't really gotten very involved with 3d modeling now i do want to stop and say that you don't have to know how to 3d model to be able to run a successful print farm or sell products there's a lot of people that i have talked to and met that have been successful by going on patreon finding someone that does know how to 3d model but maybe doesn't care to 3d print and they've got a certain tier where if you support them for a certain amount they will give you their models that you can then 3d print and sell there's also other websites like even on thingiverse there's plenty of models on there where the creator gives permission for you to be able to sell their models but please be respectful and follow the guidelines or the licensing that the artist has put there's tons of people that take 3d models that are for just personal use and sell them and that is a really really sucky thing to do so backing to what i wanted to do i did need to learn how to 3d model and most all of my parts were functional parts they weren't like pretty trinkets or really nice looking complex models they were more functional things like for example like one of the parts was a simple gear the models i needed to be able to create weren't very complex and i spent the next probably two or three weeks going over youtube just downloading i downloaded fusion 360 and started playing around with it there is a very awesome individual by the name of lars christensen that has a youtube channel he is a fusion 360 wizard and has everything from the basics and getting up and running all the way to advanced stuff i highly recommend checking him out and within just a few days of watching some videos and browsing online i was able to do pretty much what i needed to be able to do to make my products which was just spending most of the time using my calipers to measure things in the real world and very little time entering in measurements and extruding things so don't be discouraged if you think that you need oh no 3d modeling is so tough i had no experience and to do some at least basic things you can get your bearings very quickly so i originally started off with just a few models that i printed out on my printers and took some photos of and posted it took at least a week or two before my first sale came in but once it did i was ecstatic the sale was probably eight dollars but it was all that i needed to get that reassurance that i am on to something and people are willing to pay for these printed parts over the next few months i really put my foot on the gas and when i wasn't at work or i wasn't at school i was at home i was 3d modeling i was printing i was taking photos i was creating descriptions i was packing and shipping it went from an occasional sale to a couple sales a week to a couple sales a day and at the peak i think i had something like 100 different items listed in my store as far as platforms go i sold on quite a few different ones the primary ones that i found the most success on were ebay and etsy i did sell on bonanza and i did sell on amazon but amazon is a whole different beast and bonanza didn't really seem to yield a whole lot so i definitely would say to start off on etsy or ebay at least again that's what worked for me and really master those two platforms one quick tip that i highly recommend early on is to somewhere in the listing you don't necessarily have to put in the title but somewhere in your listing you should definitely say that the parts are 3d printed starting off i didn't put that in there at least um not in the very first few weeks and after getting one or two kind of angry or frustrated messages i quickly learned to cover my butt and just say these parts are 3d printed most of the time people don't care as long as they serve their intended purpose but there was a few people that weren't too crazy about the idea of layer lines so again just putting that in the description is something i highly recommend now let's take a moment and talk about logistics i very quickly learned that i did not have space for inventory like i mentioned at the beginning of this i at the time was renting out a bedroom out of my best friend's house and you walked in the bedroom and there was basically bed desk print farm and closet so there was not a whole lot of room to print out parts and store parts or store all sorts of different spools of filament i also quickly learned that it was very difficult to keep stock of all of the different filaments initially i had this idea of offering all these crazy cool different filament colors and it became very tedious to see how much filament i had left in you know x and y color and prices fluctuated on filament at the time all over the place i was getting them on amazon just kind of like as cheap as i could over here and then over here so it became really difficult and it caused a couple of times where um i didn't have filament for order so the orders were late and it added an additional layer of stress so within the first couple of months of running this print farm i decided on two things that to me were incredibly valuable the first was i'm not offering a ton of different colors i ended up getting rid of all the colors that i offered and i offered the prints in black and i offered them in white so that allowed logistically for me to not have to keep nearly as much filament again the parts that i was making were pretty much functional parts all around so the colors although maybe there was some sales that i lost or some people that might have been a little bit bummed out didn't seem to have a big effect on what i was doing now of course this will vary depending on what it is that you're making but if you're making functional parts i think that you'll have less issue offering you know just your standard black white or gray colors versus the whole spectrum of colors the second thing i decided was that like i mentioned i did not have space for inventory so i decided that i was not going to have inventory what i ended up doing was when an order would come in i would print out the part and i changed my etsy and ebay to have from like one day handling to having five day handling which was a really nice buffer to make sure that i had time to print out the parts when they came in and i didn't again have to keep tubs all over the place with various parts that were printed because it's pretty difficult also when you've got that many items to gauge what's going to sell next with that being said there was a few times though where i did start to see patterns on oh this item seems kind of more popular or oh i'm getting roughly this many sales per week so if i had downtime i would definitely take one of those machines to print out a couple other parts but as a general rule i did not keep inventory and i also one of the things that i thought of initially was that with 3d printing since clearly it's not the fastest process ever my parts were relatively small and my goal was to have them each part take no longer than roughly four to eight hours and so because of that having that five day lead time ended up being plenty for me one other huge benefit about having parts that weren't very large was shipping so shipping is a huge thing of course with selling online and i used usps for everything i used first class by combination of a bubble mailer as well as some boxes so if it was like one or two parts it would go in the bubble mailer if it was a lot of parts it would go in a box but on average i was paying two dollars and sixty six cents per order and that was with tracking and two to three day shipping which was absolutely fantastic you will want to make sure that you have your printed parts wrapped up nicely i learned very early on that some of the parts were not making the transit and so for those specific parts i just added an additional level of bubble wrap to make sure that they were protected and that my customers were getting things that weren't showing up broken as far as printers go i had four different machines in my farm and that was definitely not ideal mainly because i had to slice each file four different times and have all these different g-codes floating around as well as spare parts and just knowing how to do maintenance on each of these machines again in my situation the reason was because i already had these printers but if i was starting over again i would definitely make sure that i had all the same machine so that way i could only slice the file once and i didn't have to keep so many different spare parts on hand of course there is an exception to this like if you have some parts that are small and you've got small printers for that and you've got some parts that are large and you have large printers for that or if you've got different materials like you've got a machine that specializes in flexible is a machine that specializes in abrasives and so on and so forth but for my purpose where all the machines were able to print in the same basic material which i was just using pla it is much nicer not having such a wide range of different machines as far as controlling the farm i cannot speak highly enough about octoprint which we've covered multiple times on this channel when i originally started off i was using a combination of sd cards and usb cables to my computer and all it took was one windows update that i did not plan for to lose a couple prints and realize that i never am going to be doing that again so octoprint's awesome i had each printer running their own instance and so when a order came in i would literally look over to the right and see which printer wasn't printing and start a print job you know wirelessly from my computer to the printer there are some kind of octoprint farm management software's out there now i think there's literally one called octofarm but even at the time just using core octoprint it worked really really nicely for the size farm i was running which was again a pretty small one at just four machines one other biggie is the filament and i'm not talking about how i mentioned a moment ago keeping different colors was difficult in managing that although that's a part of it but having high quality filament when i got into this i was ordering filament from everywhere primarily amazon i was looking for super deals like the cheapest i can find these which was it was pretty much all pla that i printed so the cheapest i could find pla and that burned me on more than one occasion because the filament would come in and i couldn't even load it into the printer it was so brittle like it would just snap off like if i just looked at it wrong and so dealing with that troubleshooting dealing with amazon sending things back dealing with like i i lost more money and time dealing with that than just spending a little bit more and having a reliable source for filament i will say that i do think filament has gotten better since then and that a lot of those really cheap companies have kind of weaned out but still make sure you've got yourself a good filament that you're happy with and i would highly recommend sticking with it or at least finding something that you know is consistent and it's going to be reliable for yourself and your customers as far as pricing out printed parts that's kind of tough there's a lot of factors involved anything from material you're using you know what your overhead looks like for me since i was printing i was doing everything and doing it out of my room i had very little to no overhead at all and because i was just using pla that i was getting for 20 or under that my material cost was really really low as well so depending on your situation and whether you've got employees or whether you've got expensive material you you'll have to calculate you know what makes the most sense for the products that you're trying to offer and of course also a big factor is what people are willing to pay you can't charge some exorbitant amount when people can get it for less expensive or you know it's just too high that nobody would pay that for whatever it is that you're creating so it's a little bit of trial and error and i did fluctuate prices on my products a bit here and there as i felt was necessary really the main thing that i was spending was time and that is something that is incredibly valuable your time you know you could put a dollar on it but time is something you can't get back and so what i ended up doing was i put bigger nozzles on some of my machines i went with larger layer lines in the instances that i could and that really helped me cut down on part time and in some instances i was able to take a part that you know would take four hours and cut it down to two or two and a half hours which is a huge a huge savings i can nearly double my yield by throwing on the larger nozzle and you know again going with slightly larger layer lines so i probably should mention that that job that i initially didn't like at the beginning of this video i actually ended up leaving that job and running this farm full-time for roughly nine months to a year and then at that point i decided it was probably time for me to find another job and the main reason for that was that at that time i had turned 26 and i was no longer on my parents health insurance and so that was a big eye-opener of hey you've got to figure out insurance like yesterday on top of that as much as i loved being my own boss i really missed having a stable paycheck and knowing how to budget based off of that with the print farm i had some months where it was insane especially during like the holiday times or you know whatever caused the spike and then i had some months where sales were really really slow and i did not enjoy that uh inconsistency and uncertainty of it and to be perfectly honest with you the one of my biggest gripes was i was getting a bit a bit burnt out on my bedroom being a manufacturing distributing shipping plant i mean there was packages everywhere there was filament everywhere it didn't feel like i couldn't even enjoy being in my own room because all i could think about was like need to work like so many things going on so that was another huge part of it as well even after landing that next job i continued to run the print farm for at least a few months i eventually had to move for work and at that point i just kind of decided that i would pump the brakes on the shops and i hit you know basically stop or you know not available right now i don't remember what equivalent etsy you can like go on vacation or something like that on ebay i don't exactly remember what i did um but i pressed pause decided i would allow myself to settle into the new place and then kind of reevaluate ultimately i decided with working the 40 hours a week and making youtube videos that i just didn't have the energy at that point to carry on and ultimately close down the shops for good if i ever had the space i would absolutely love to start back up again probably a bit smaller scale even if it's just a fun little thing on the side um the main things is that i just want its own space whether it's a garage or its own room i don't want a print farm in my bedroom i don't want a print farm in my living room this recording studio is my living room which is fine but the print farm with the constant humming of the printers going around the clock and just you know again in the room that i was living in was not ideal and i also again would i would be going with either all the same printer or two similar printers so that way i didn't have to have so many different variations of g-code and parts on hand i learned a ton through that process not just about 3d printing but about running my own business the pros and the cons and overall it was incredibly rewarding but that was pretty much my 3d printing farm experience and granted i did rush over certain elements of it because it just couldn't fit like i said at the beginning of this video a whole year of my life into a video that would be attainable or something that people would want to watch so if there's something that i didn't cover on enough please let me know in the comments down below i'd be happy to either revisit it or make a part 2 type thing in the future also if you do have your own print farm and there's anything you feel like i missed that might be useful for people that are interested or you know again things that you think are valuable or things that might have been difficult for you let us know in the comments down below i'd love to hear as well and kind of get the conversation started on that note don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos i make a video every single saturday so there is always fresh content coming your way the channel has grown substantially this year and i could not be more ecstatic you guys are absolutely amazing i appreciate the comments the likes the shares all the support you guys keep coming back every week which keeps me coming back every week and thinking of video ideas that i think will be entertaining and educational for you guys if you do want to support the channel furthermore i'll place links down below to the patreon as well thank you to all my current patreon supporters you guys are absolutely amazing and i really appreciate you allowing me to spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you guys on that note this has been diana from modbot and i will see you guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 159,047

Keywords: 3d print farm, how to 3d print farm, 3d print farm for beginners, 3d printing service, 3d print service, selling 3d prints, ender 3, budget 3d print farm, 3d printing products, 3d printing products to sell

Id: sgAxvsJGuno

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020