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Comment by SirFatty | Hacker News Reader

Why the need to print cheap plastic crap? That's why we have dollar stores and China.

Sometimes you want cheap plastic crap your local dollar store doesn't have and you don't want to find a Chinese willing to poison himself to make you 1000 pieces.

I use a $400 printer to print production parts for an industrial machine. The parts are custom shapes (I designed the machine).

There's a reason Stratasys is in trouble. Same reason IBM was in trouble after PC clone makers started eating their profit margin for lunch.

spare part material cost: $5

spare part cost on the market: $50

more like

Spare part cost on printer $5

Spare part cost on market $2.50

Spare part minimum order on market 100000

The limiting factor of 3d printers isn't the material cost (the plastic is fairly cheap), it's the printing time.

Also delivered not within next 5 minutes.

Car manufacturer often charge a premium for the most mundane plastic parts.

And the part you print won't last, hence the "cheap" part of my comment. Where I work, we have a $30k printer that do that kind of work, production work, and it's not cheap.

Depends, I wasn't referring to parts with mechanical or thermal constraints, just weird electronic physical adapters. Sure they use well picked material for this that may or may not be superior to 3D printed plastics, but I'm really doubtful.

Making 1 of 1 kind of items.

Oh, I get that part... but how many people have that need or even the skill. No wonder the market is floundering...

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