3D Printing - Future Opportunities

High end units--$100K+ that corporations can afford--do perform better than their tabletop counterparts.

But in either case, high or low end, you need a competent operator...and for us home users, that essentially means buying yourself a job.

Now I've operated fine plasma cutting tables that required their own G-code programming following uploading of a CAD drawing (which I also drew--I've learned and forgotten AutoCAD and VersaCAD three times over the years)...and that took months to get good at. Even with a simple mixing of a few gases plus some torch head settings--height, burn time etc.

I know someone who prints prosthetic hands. For fun, since we're part of a horror fan group, he turned the printer to printing a movie logo. It took him, well the printer, 3 hours. I think it was 16 hours for a hand.

This article states "Each hand takes about 20 hours to print and another two or three hours to assemble."

And for $20-$50 in revenue?

...Why would you bother? Sure, it could be a nice side business making you say $30 in profit a day...but the idea of "turn it on and it'll plop out a hundred by daybreak" is totally false.

Imagine how long it would take to print a full chess set, or enough jewelry pieces to make some decent money. And that's IF you get all the settings just right....and don't run out of printing material halfway through.

For now, the cost-benefit ratio is not great. It's a hobby at best for us non-corporate types, and a highly technical one at that.

Yup...and read the reviews.

Soak in the technical aspects, the confusion, and the fact that they all require calibration and some Ikea-assembly-required stuff to figure out that isn't quite covered in the manual.

Note how they ask each other technical questions in the comments. And that they say perfect output is definitely not achieved every time.

The guy I know doing the hands and logos etc. says, "I rent printer time out as a side business at $10/hr. For people that need prototypes, inventions, or art projects."

$10/hr? This isn't a business.

Let's assume we get the printer for $700. It takes several days to test the calibration so a decent result comes out more often than not.

Even at $50, which is what people are paying for an assembled (that costs money), articulated hand...you'll need to sell FOURTEEN just to break even.

That's not considering labor, consumables, and screw-up time.

And it will take you two weeks just to print those hands.

Given that most people give up after three days or less on an idea, how viable does this sound?

Will they stick around to figure production out?

Will they stick around to learn how to sell these things? FOURTEEN of them?

Unlikely.

Much more likely it'll quickly become a $700 paperweight.

My purpose isn't to be mean. It's to educate people of the reality of the situation. I've done plenty of research and reading and watching of videos about 3D printing and it's simply not the easy moneymaker some believe it will be.