He was fired 13 minutes later.

Give that kid a raise. He made the video memorable.

@@TheOfficialOriginalChad Then sued

i agree with @schtinerbock4570 now you have to plan to have him drop something in the background of every video, when i-solids becomes a fortune 500 he will have his own wikipedia page

Bro is firet

The printer doesn't work if you don't have magenta filament on the shelf.

Thanks for the kind response. Admittedly, this was our second take. The first one was a bit too long, and I felt we delved too far into details better suited for future videos. In an attempt to be concise, it did feel more like a business pitch than intended, but we've been encouraged by the overall response and feedback.

Hey @IamHamdan, we really appreciate the kind words. When you do something every day, even if you are passionate about it, it can still be frustrating, difficult, or even just feel like "a normal day at the office" so its encouraging to hear this. Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement!

Hey @ShopNation! I've been a fan of your channel for a while and it would it would be awesome to meet up sometime - you are definitely more than welcome to visit. Hit us up anytime!

Thanks so much!

Many thanks, we appreciate your time and feedback!

Lol, good catch! A good old fashion drop test to ensure material durability.

Please do! We always enjoy meeting with 3d printing enthusiasts regardless of whether there is any immediate need for us to help with any projects.

You can speed it up and maintain results! I’d do some research on it.

@@TreyBlack1 have already tried. If you do that then the annealing process becomes longer sometimes by 4 hours.

We would definitely agree. Most of the speed demonstrations commonly involve PLA or PETG and things can be a lot different with engineering grade materials. Our Essentium 280i HT for example is a big and really fast machine capable of 500mm/s yet we very rarely run anywhere near those speeds with materials like PC, Ultem, or PEEK. Controlling thermodynamic properties of the material is often the biggest challenge and limiting factor.

Thanks!

Thanks for the support!

Thanks! You are welcome anytime. Just shoot us an email at sales@i-solids.com to make sure we have someone available to give a tour.

I was a bit shocked to see so many. I just gave away a FFCP to a family member because I upgraded to a Bambu Labs P1S. Although the FFCP was and still is a workhorse it's just significantly behind in every measurable way compared to the P1S. FDM has come a long way. I think they're just slowly going industrial only for the reasons stated and just waiting for those printers to kick the bucket (which I'll admit would be a while).

@@boots3372 - FDM technology has been improving so rapidly, particularly since the onset of Klipper, that it's difficult to keep up with the technology. By the time 3D printers are deployed to a print farm, they're almost obsolete. It's not just the cost of the printers that become a sunk cost. If tooling is broadly defined as optimizing processes for the machines you have, then tooling and machine specific training are more significant than machine cost. I'm not as concerned with throughput improvements with the newer faster machines, although for many designs in PLA, that is a significant factor. We print mostly TPU parts and are adding PETG for structural products. TPU is limited to printing slowly, and for structural parts, most materials are significantly stronger when printed slower. There is "Rapid PETG" that is rated for 600 mm/s but we print it at 100 mm/s. 3D printers aren't very expensive and it's practical to add more printers to get the needed throughput at the best possible strength and print quality. I suspect that's why there are so many FlashForge printers in this print farm, although I can think of better options today.

@@Liberty4Ever Yes, you make good points. I don't even print at Bambu Labs stated 500 mm/s, which is just ludicrous speeds. I mean I did once, to watch in awe! haha

Thanks for taking the time to watch and the encouraging feedback. I'd be happy to share what we can about our business. I tend to be a fairly open book since our primary goal is to see the additive manufacturing industry grow and, in turn, our piece of that pie will hopefully grow as well. We work primarily B2B and so we assume confidentiality within our standard terms of service. From that perspective we are a limited on sharing information about a lot specific projects but I think we can provide a good bit of context around the general industries and types of parts we see most. We've gotten a lot of good questions and feedback from this video but I think this might be the topic of our next video. We typically operate really lean and sometimes the more fun things like making videos and content are deprioritized but we are optimistic we will do better in 2024.

Thanks, we appreciate the kind words and support!

Sounds great! Just shoot us a quick message or email whenever is best for you.

Maintenance with 130 Enders would be a complete nightmare....

Thanks for the kind feedback and I'm sorry I missed you. I would agree all the way around. A lot of people look at X-Y speed and acceleration as having a direct relationship with time/part - this might somewhat true for simple consumer materials with really simple geometries but in the vast majority of situation we've seen its the material properties and/or complex geometry that become the concern and printing faster only increase the risk of failure and/or decreases the layer adhesion. If I increase my overall print speed by and average of 30% but I also decrease my yield rate by 10% then there is real potential that I am actually at a net loss when you consider that 10% failed prints means an increase in material costs and potential inventory issues, labor costs to adjust productions schedule for reprints, expedited shipping costs for not hitting original deadlines, potential lost future opportunities if it were to jeopardize a customer relationship. All of these things are very important and could be costly to a business but none of these would really apply to a consumer working on their own projects and wanting them to be done an hour or two faster. I also like what you say about the number of nozzles - we use the term "nozzle density". I would much prefer 2 printers running at 100mm/s than 1 printer running at 300mm/s. With two printers I had redundancy in case one were to go down and I can schedule them to have 1 person start them simultaneously. On the other hand, with a single faster printer I would have to schedule someone twice a day to accomplish the same number of print jobs and if it were to break then I would be in a lot more trouble.

​@@AlexanderSmith600obviously you didn't have to replace a bed on x1c. Talking about nightmare.😂 Silly fanboy.

yeah that through me off lol

Nice! We started in 2015 with just a knockoff Makerbot from Micro Center running in a closet so you never know. We like working with "competition" so we'll hopefully keep in touch!

@@i-solids That's actually where I'm at now. And yes, it's also in a closet. I sell small items of my own design on Etsy. I'm only dreaming of one day growing to your level! I really appreciate your videos and your shop. It shows me there's a way.

Haha, we've had more than our fair share of filament spaghetti and hot ends completely covered in plastic.

Indeed, me too...

I'll make a note to see if we can make this a future video but the short answer is this is our own internally created software that interfaces with a modified versions of klipper / octoprint running on each printers. This setup allows all of the machines to operate all independently but can be controlled by a certain location as needed. Similar to a "SCADA" or supervisory control and data acquisition system in a factory environment. There are some 3rd party system like 3DPrinterOS but many of them tend to be designed more for an educational or multiuser scheduling environment whereas our needs were a little different.

Lol! When we first started up in 2015, one of things we liked to do was provide a live broadcast of every 3d printer we had. This originally to monitor them remotely but we also foudn that customers enjoyed seeing their parts being made if they wanted to. At the time 3D printers were still pretty rare to see so many people would sit and watch parts being printed for hours. We unfortunately had to get rid of this as we grew for two reasons: 1) With more and more printers our internet bandwidth was becoming a bottleneck and 2) as we started working with more and more businesses the confidentiality of parts being produced prevented us from sharing most of what we work on. Perhaps we could live stream a few cameras around the shop? The only concern there is we are all pretty close here and might have a strange sense of humor from time to time.

​@@i-solids some solutions: 1. Don't use video, only 1-layer shots (real-time timelapse) 2. Use unique links for every prints, not for printers. Print starting - user get link. Printing ended - link die. If user set "public model" option - privacy of link doesn't matter

This is one of our favorite questions. The answer can be complex and sometimes surprising-perhaps this is another great opportunity for a future video. The reason it is complex is because there are a lot of different factors that come into play, such as material usage, machine utilization, ease of powder or support removal, geometric concerns, lead time, risk profile, etc. Many of these things might not be worth investing too much time in for prototype production or smaller volumes, but with large quantities, workflow efficiency is the main driver in delivering on-time, with good quality, and with profitability. Generally speaking, FDM has a lower equipment and material cost but higher labor and a lower yield rate. Alternatively, MJF has a high capital value and material cost, but it is very reliable and much lower labor relative to production volume. This means that MJF can be equal to or lower cost than FDM for complex geometries, tight tolerance requirements, high volumes of smaller parts, or critically short lead times. FDM, on the other hand, can be much cheaper for simple or bulky designs where lower infill percentage will be sufficient, for really large parts that aren't as time-sensitive, and when using some colors.

We can use over 1000+ kg of filament per month and the demand for certain material/color combinations can fluctuate a good bit so finding a supplier that has this level of inventory available and has a diverse product line (ABS, ASA, PETG, TPU, and PC, etc) on top of also have repeatable colors, material traceability / datasheets, and of course at a low price is a lot of to ask. A few years back Polymaker opened a warehouse in the Houston area and we have worked closely ever since. There are things that we run into from time to time but overall we recommend them for most consumer grade materials and even some higher end engineer grade materials. For applications that require material certification or for really exotic materials like carbon fiber PEEK or ABS-FR we like working with Essentium and 3DXTech.

I'm sorry you can't scan that 3d object till you replace your filament with Genuine HP filament.

HP has some pretty shady business practices. Like putting 3 different labels on the same printer and disabling speed and features in the firmware for the "cheaper" models.

​@@FrugalShaveyeah, HP is one of the companies that I would avoid at every opportunity. A lot of printer companies are scamming their own customers, but HP seems to be the worst.

Thanks! Thats a great question - our SLS printers are capable of "cold metal fusion" printing but we haven't yet begun offering that since it does require post processing in many cases. I think we might be close to adding this option though.

The X1E seems to be the logical choice in the Bambu lineup.

While the Flashforge Creator Pro 2s are slow they are absolute workhorses and produce high quality parts.

As a business model his it’s great you never dump a machine that is profitable or could be later used to take the slack of a one off print. The older machines are paid-off so as they wear out you can repair them and the repair is tax deductible where a newer you have to depreciate out for 3 years on taxes. If they sale the machine they than have to increase their income and have a lost of emergency production from a small footprint printer. As they continue expanding their operation by adding more building space those printers will be used less and only use in your emergency or if you are at full capacity on your newer equipment. It’s all about customer service the cost to produce on those machines may be higher on each part but losing the job because you just replace them is very bad business it’s all about the scale of the operation as they get bigger even if those machines only make $0.005 per part that machine is that profitable. There is a company in Texas that I know of that there profit per unit is at that level and are making millions a year. 50 years from now he could still be using those machines to take up the overflow of production. This my friends is an operation that will at some point to be used to teach in universities for your bachelor degree in business or your MBA. They have someone that is advising them that is very good or they are just that good in house with the $ numbers.

Please think about total cost of ownership and not about the first impact… e.g. maintenance, labor, space

There is a very loud background noise in the shop and the mic was having to transition between. We appreciate the feedback and will work to see if we can get something to work a little better. Thanks!

That's awesome! It can be difficult and sometimes even frustrating when machines arent operating properly but we genuinely enjoy what we do. Please feel free to reach out to admin@i-solids.com with inquiries about open positions.

check your device, the audio in the video is fine

they will likely lean on the engineering services portion at that point I would think. aside from the larger high output HPs at its core their business model is essentially centralizing and scaling to quantity output a technology who's core advantage is decentralization and custom/small batch.

They are making money off it.

Hahaha.... well, actually, yeah kind of. I'm not the biggest fan of HP consumer products but they do make a very nice additive production workflow. There is a pricey maintenance agreement with a 24 hours response time - if anything were to go wrong we normally have parts overnighted and a technician on site the next day. With one machine offline it could cost $1000s in downtime per day. With that said - there are a lot more companies taking lessons learned HP to improve their products and increasing competition in the space - we hope this keeps HP honest and drives down the cost over time.

You’re THAT GUY who finds issue with everything.

We intentionally tried to not show any specific parts or customer details in this video for confidentiality but we do plan to share some more information on this soon!