Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

It might be a good idea, but Kickstarter have recently made it very clear that per-orders aren't why they exist. By accepting these per-order style Kickstarters they risk having people think of it as a store, which is bound to cause frustration when projects are delayed or cancelled and money is lost.

I've got no beef against the people using Kickstarter as a store to handle their initial production sizing. I think the branding and curation are valuable to me for locating these sorts of projects.

There is always a risk of unforeseen delays or even failure of the project, but that isn't unique to Kickstarter. Any tiny company that funds purchasing with pre-orders is offering the same dynamic, except they will go bankrupt instead of just sort of dissolve.

Eventually someone may have a large fraudulent project and flee with the money, but again, that isn't special. It happens in traditional companies too.

Perhaps eventually Kickstarter will need to have graduated oversight. If your project goes over six figures you must convince someone at Kickstarter that you aren't blowing smoke. If it goes over seven figures you have to pay for a Kickstarter supplied auditor to whom you must show progress for incremental payment releases.

I operate an Objet Connex260 that also has separate resolutions for the X/Y Axis, and the Z-axis 'layer thickness'. Objet specs it at '600 dpi' in the X/Y axes, and '1600 dpi' in the Z axis. http://objet.com/sites/default/files/C260_A4_il_en_lowres.pd...

As it was explained to me by objet, the X/Y resolution is the size of the individual droplets of resin that can be laid down by the Connex's digital print heads. They are larger than the thickness of each layer, therefore the resolution is better in the Z-axis than in the X & Y.

In Formlabs case, I would imagine this is the 'width' or diameter of their laser. The way I read it, the smallest cured point they can produce in a layer is 300 microns, or 0.3mm.

The Formlabs printer does look well polished, but I don't think it is 'disrupting 3D printing'. the B9 Creator* is in the same price range with higher resolution, and may have the ability to include multi-material printing eventually. I believe resin may be cheaper for the B9, too. *http://shop.b9creator.com/?pn=B9Creator+-+KIT&p=621&...

[EDIT] include link to B9

I don't think it would work in exactly the same way you are describing but there may be alternatives. Manufacturing equipment is very expensive and the only way to justify the cost is to keep it running daily, sometimes 24/7/365. The change parts for each unique product are also quite expensive (easily $10k+). If I want to open a KickManufacturing plant, I have to buy/maintain/service hundreds of different kinds of equipment which includes the cost of the hardware, software, and technicians. On top of that, each new product will barely have 10k - 100k units ordered if I'm lucky. After that the change parts are useless. The other problem with this is the manufacturing equipment that can do lots of different configurations is slower, error-prone, and more expensive than specialized equipment that does just one thing. So if one of the Kickstarter products does become a success and they want 100m units, you need to buy new equipment or source a better large-scale manufacturer. And worst of all, most of the equipment will be collecting dust 95% of the time unless someone has just the right Kickstarter project for them.

What most entrepreneurs spend their time between getting funded and beginning shipment is finding the right manufacturer who can allocate runtime on their lines. The manufacturers lose money when the lines aren't running. The entrepreneurs get delayed when the lines are busy. This is a very complex B2B market that has no current solution. If someone solves this problem, we can have significantly better fulfillment of Kickstarter orders.

Such a site would have manufacturers periodically uploading capacities and capabilities of their equipment, warehouse/distribution resources, and costs associated with each line/product-type by time/quality. The entrepreneurs would be able to book the best-fit manufacturer (be it in US, China, or Norway) and pay a reservation-fee to the manufacturer which sits in escrow pending successful contract. The reservation-fee would be high enough to deter fake orders and be credited towards the actual product order. The site could fund itself by collecting interest on the escrow or charging per new B2B relation.

I think a first step would be a service (maybe even just run by Kickstarter) that would handle the printing and shipping of T-Shirts.

In every post-mortem of a Kickstarter project I hear the project owners lamenting how much more time and effort it took to handle sending rewards out than they had anticipated.

Actually, I'm waiting for someone to create the Kickstarter that people seem to think Kickstarter is: a way to get pre orders for a new product.

I mean seriously, there are a lot of people using Kickstarter for this and now they've explicitly said that's not what it's for. So, Entrepreneurial Opportunity. There's obviously a lot of people who need this kind of "pre-order aggregator" service. So when will a motivated HN'er build it and rake in the bucks :-)

Related, but a different aspect of product design: http://www.quirky.com/

There was a really great project called Maker Factory that was geared towards this http://makerfactory.com seemed to never quite get the community it needed to take off

Fully funded in under 12 hours. 708 hours to go.

For something that is ready to enter manufacturing I think a pre-order model is appropriate. I'd be alarmed if someone used those words on an idea or something in the middle of the prototyping process.

A "donate now" button for a commercial venture is an instant and permanent red flag for me.

I think you actually pre-order one, so you are getting something for your investment.

It is much faster to position a laser spot than it is to move an extruder head. As you would expect though there is a trade-off between resolution and layer thickness vs. print speed since more layers/raster lines need to be used.

While I understand the gist your comment, you probably didn't read the link. This is exactly how the market works: traders don't have time to follow closely all the markets of all companies they are trading, so they will eat whatever canned news they get -- provided it came from a reputable source.

So when JP Morgan issues a memo saying "Formlabs ... could be a threat to incumbent 3D printer solutions at the low-end of the market in the near-term... First take: potential negative for DDD" - and in the exact same week that Wired published a cover page with Bre Pettis and his good-looking MakerBot Replicator 2... well, maybe it's time to lock in the 110% gains you had this year with DDD and move on...

that is, until we're printing food. The French Culinary Institute has been working on 3D food printers for years.

That would be amazing. The amount of non-recyclable plastic that I throw away every day is insane. I feel horrible for the environment.

I've been putting off going to Columbus Idea Foundry, but with all the cool tech there I might just have to get my membership.

Looking at the Replicator2 specs vs Formlabs. I see that Makerbot lists layer height and XY resolution as 100 microns, while Formlabs has layer height as 25 microns, but XY as 300 microns. Does the improvement in layer height matter much when the XY resolution isn't as accurate? What I'm basically wondering is are you only as good your least accurate spec?

So it just needs energy to solidify? Would heat also work?

So the molecules that it's made of up combine into new molecules that are solid? Do you know what the chemical reaction is?

Or are we facing into another printer ink situation?

Why do programmers always assume every field is just like computing? Not everything gets cheaper.

Chemistry is a mature industry. Photopolymers are 50+ years old, and unpatented. There's no real reason to believe UV-cure resin will ever get much below $100/litre, which is a solid 10 times more expensive than ABS.

That birdcage was actually pre-cleaned to make it look as good as possible.

You've been telling people to hold off buying a 3D printer from other manufacturers until this one was unveiled. But I don't get the impression this is in the product phase yet. There are some slick pictures and a nice presentation but nothing at all that indicates the thing actually exists in an about to ship state.

What exactly is the state of development of the formlabs product?