This is where the cost moves into the thousands of dollars. You have two choices: (a) Make more prototypes yourself or (b) pay someone to make more prototypes for you.
Again, at this stage, if I had been an industry expert, I could have saved time and money. I was not, so I did not.
The depth of my ignorance
My limited knowledge of the following stage of ideal mold design led me to create CAD designs the equivalent molds of which would have been absurdly difficult to manufacture. I iterated through many design changes that didn’t make much sense from a manufacturing point of view, but I had to see and feel the prototypes in my hand before I began to understand the depth of my ignorance.
The material used by the 3D printer that met my needs cost about $5 an ounce. Paying a third-party to print a part for me would have cost an order of magnitude more judging from what I could see of prices on the Internet. I tried as best I could to estimate how many pieces I was planning to produce, and in terms of buying a 3D printer or paying someone to make the prototypes, it was a wash as far as costs were concerned, so I took the plunge and decided to buy a 3D printer. There were two more advantages to having my own 3D printer at home: confidentiality and speed of turnaround. There was also the excitement and the education of having exclusive access to this technology.
I looked at five different 3D printer manufacturers. Each of them provided me with prototypes of my design produced by their 3D printer. Each one was different and one in particular stood out far above the other three in terms of meeting my needs. One of them used a powder to build the prototypes, which crumbled in my hand like weak chalk. Another produced prototypes by layering thousands of sheets of plastic together and cutting around the edges to produce something unlike what I thought the final injected parts should be. In the end, I decided on the Stratasys Dimension BST, purchasing one through Stratasys’ partner in
I also looked at what Stratasys called their Red Eye service which sent overnight to a customer a piece the customer had designed, but that Stratasys would print a physical unit of. You upload your CAD file to their website; they would make the piece for you and ship it to your door. You might consider that service if you are only planning on a few iterations. For me, I wanted the ability to print prototypes not just of my first product, but also of other products that would follow.
Thus, I got my education in CAD, the option to print an endless supply of prototypes, and instant production for the price of about $25k. Had I only needed a few parts, I probably would have settled for the Red Eye service, but I wanted he whole cow. Even with the ship-to-your-door service of Red Eye, the sheer number of parts I needed would have delayed me well over the price of the $25k. Instead of waiting 8 hours for a part to be printed, I would have had to wait perhaps two days. Three months of prototype printing would have stretched out to over a year.
- If you have experience in CAD and only need a handful of prototypes printed, use a service to get the prototypes you need.
The education this 3D printer gave put me in a far better position to design my next product in a fraction of the time and cost, when that time comes.
This 3D technology is dropping in price quickly, and before a year had passed after I had bought the 3D printer, prices dropped by 25%..
No sooner did I get the first printed pieces out of the 3D printer did I start making big changes to my design. Being able to snap multiple pieces together gave me the opportunity to test my product design in many new ways. It took anything from 6 hours to 2 days to complete a print run of one or more pieces and I would start such a production job to run while I made adjustments based on what I had learned the previous night. I was learning a lot about this new 3D printing technology and I was also able to experiment with significant departures from the main design in ways that would have been outrageously expensive had I not got the 3D printer sitting in my garage. Between learning more about CAD and how to exploit the 3D printer, I was learning a lot.
Still, I was a long, long way from product readiness. I felt like a modern day Professor Caractacus Potts from the movie Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. I would disappear into my garage with the latest design on CD, and I would return with strangely shaped pieces of plastic of different colors that had been printed by the 3D printer. I always had great talking points to show visitors and friends, as I slapped these unusual snap-together pieces on the kitchen table for all to examine, but my ever-patient wife was beginning to think she was married to the good Professor Potts. Spending $25,000 of our life savings was a tough pill to swallow for both of us and it took me a good 10 months of hand-wringing before I took the plunge and bought the machine.
In the end, I believed the arrival of the 3D printer was a significant expansion of product creation opportunity for the novice, and I wanted to take advantage of it before everyone and his mother had one in their garage. The 3D printer was my doorway from software products to hardware products. As the Australian Bob
Cost of this stage: $25,000. Costs so far: $25,800
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