korneel

yeah same here.. i was coming back to the forum.. posting a bit.. but now i get all kinds of ghost notifications annoying the hell out of me..

I have no problems sharing the orders i'm getting via 3d hubs publicly, I am extremely interested, is this your full time job and does this cover your operational costs? how many orders do you get? I should say first of all that we are in this to make a profit, although we do have a community spirit! We now do a lot of work for a local podiatrist who is into giving a better solution to people on low incomes, by providing custom insoles rather than off the shelf standard sizes, which are considerably cheaper. We take a fitment measured to each individual and produce it for him at the price of a standard stock insole, or lower if necessary. Onto your question… Full time job – No moving to yes. The business has been setup for my son who is a mechanical engineer in his last year of college; it will be his full time job. I was extremely lucky a couple of years ago to be able to take very early retirement. My son does the design with Solidworks and I do the printing. We share the selling and I do the financials. My wife does the marketing and administration. I do not take any money from the business, it all goes to my son. My son has limited time and I have other things I want to do with my life so it is not a full time job, but it will be for my son when he finishes college in the summer. Operational costs: In truth no, not everything is covered. The cost of design and 3D printing/tools is covered + profit. Sales and administration are not covered – but right now they have a low spend. The work I and my wife do is f.o.c to help my son get the business up and running and earn some money. No. of orders – extremely variable; this really is by design right now due to limited time. We do some selling but not that much, most of our work to date has come by word of mouth and currently we run at about 40% production capacity – which allows us to take on emergency repeat business – last year we had a very late order on a Sunday evening to produce some wrist straps (which hold a motion sensor) for the British Elite swimming squad who were leaving for Japan on the Wednesday. We will always want to be able to provide that level of service so will always run below 100% capacity. The volume of orders will change from the summer onwards – we hope!! – once my son is full time. Our medium term plan is to grow to four printers, not necessarily all FDM. Excluding the podiatry work we normally get one to two orders a week; some weeks we will have nothing but that gives us a slot to do some R&D/testing and printer maintenance if needed. We do design, prototyping, production and we get quite a lot of repeat business on the production side – which is a volume business not a one off. This of course is easy as we have all the relevant print settings and filament and know how we will produce it. Originally for us we had assumed that our work would be some design and prototyping but in reality it has been design and prototyping leading to production and repeat production business, plus further repeat design and prototyping business for other products or existing product modifications. Hope that helps. tha;s awesome thanks so much for your reply and candor! I find it incredibly useful to see how others are doing this I wish you the best of luck, it sounds like you do have the bases covered!

i believe the encasing and the wiring is new on the PT100. there is also a new source of the actual element so with all the changes the temperature variance should be way better. in my experience, the old PT100 was sometimes off by as much as 10 degrees while the new one it almost always spot on.

so if you get a good cone, and it's important to have an automatic round shape and the flow should be very consistent, that means at least your feeder is working well and the PTFE is not deformed and your nozzle is ok. so that's good news! then it's down to temperature playing.. what is the speed you are using, the material, and the temperature and the layer height?

i would say, please don't do atomic pulls with PLA or ABS.. you can't really clean the nozzle with it and it'll break when force is applied. please use Nylon for this...

well, you can still wreck it within the month when you start the print, do you get a very nice ice cone shape on the front left? it is at 8 minutes and 50 seconds this is exactly how it should look like, a nice upside down softice that is being pushed out.. does it do the same thing for you?

how old is the printer and have you ever replaced the PTFE coupler and/or performed a hot/cold pull?

yeah but isn't that the thing? honestly, I think you will never be able to compete with 3D Hubs in that manner.. most people on 3d hubs (even the larger hubs!) are simply people running this from their homes, or, even fablabs which are community sponsored "companies" that provide free 3d printing services or printing for a nominal fee to the community (amongst many other things). I don't need to take hourly wages into account.. i'm working from home and i just walk to the printer and back.. i enjoy "playing" with the printers so I don't mind.. and while in the end of the year I do declare my income from 3D printing to the government, most 3D Hubs won't.. I have no problems sharing the orders i'm getting via 3d hubs publicly, I am extremely interested, is this your full time job and does this cover your operational costs? how many orders do you get?

@SandervG you might want to tell your official retailer CoolBlue about this new printer and the fact that it's actually available.. http://www.coolblue.nl/zoeken?query=ultimaker+2

Thanks for your detailed write up, but there must be something wrong I am afraid. Why does it take 8.5 hours to print 33 grams? A Marvin, for example, scaled by 3, takes roughly 5 hours @20% infill and weighs ~55 grams I'm using an average leaning towards worst case scenario with 0.1 mm layer height..

Some parts will be available as spare parts, like the PT100, heater cartridge and PTFE TFM coupler. But the entire extrusion upgrade pack won't be split up in feeder / printhead seperate packages. So let me make sure I completely understand... Olsson Block - Already got it (just not installed yet - Christmas present) Improved Shroud - Have a similar printed model Removal of spring - Have a similar printed model TPM coupler - Have a small supply of TFT coupler from gr8 Improved glass clips - ehh 35W heater - Already got it (just not installed yet - Christmas present) Improved PT100 - can buy as replacement part Feeder - only available in upgrade kit I'm still using the stock feeder (it's never really failed me and my printer has nearly 2000 print hours, but I also almost always print ABS). I am VERY interested in the new feeder. BUT because I was willing to keep up with the community "upgrades" (minus the feeder), I doubt it will make a lot of sense to purchase the upgrade kit. Why penalize the person wanting to improve their printer by not offering this separately? well, I don't completely agree; the metal shroud is way better than the printed one. i had to replace my printed one every 1000 hours and running 3 printers that sucks. also sometimes when i did not apply the kapton tape correctly it would leek. it just gave me headaches and made the printers look ugly. TFM couplers versus PTFE coupler : with the TFM coupler no worries about running out. i've been running one of those for 5000 hours, no joke, with all materials. i can destroy a PTFE coupler within 50 hours.. how do you find out the PTFE coupler is gone? by having your print fail. not fun. spring : agree glass clips : i never remove the bed so agree heater : yes, the new heater is better but if you already have that one (thanks @swordriff!) then agreed. improved PT100 : way more accurate and better print results, get it. feeder : while I like the new geared feeder, i'm still in love with @Ultiarjans rail system with it's improved feeder..

that's a pretty steep price I suppose.. I calculated my pricing as follows; it takes roughly 8,5 hours to print 33 grams. 33 grams divided by 1,36 (weight per cm3) is about 24,26 cubic centimeters now we now that 24,26 cubic centimeters costs us 8,5 hours and 33 grams 8,5 hours of printing with a power cost of 25 cents an hours is 2,125 euros 33 grams , with filament cost at 35,95 euros pet 750 grams is about 1,5818 euros add to that a cost of 100 euros per 500 hours of printing for maintenance , which is 2 cents an hour so that's 17 cents in total so to print 24,26 cubic centimeters the cost (excluding printer maintenance and write-off) my cost would be 3,88 euros in the worst case scenario (i get a good discount on filament + my printer does not run 250 watts continuously.) so worst case scenario is 16 cents per cubic centimeter as cost. then i had to think about do I want to make money with this, or just get a boatload of large prints? so I just added 5 cents per cubic centimeters and was hoping for large prints (and yes, i do charge support seperately. with my pricing i get about 5 to 10 orders a week, enough to run 3 ultimakers continuously. my latest order was 227.8 cubic centimeters. after adding some additional cost for the support material, I walk away with about 20 euros net profit excluding discounts and all other things which i invest in buying new printers and doing dumb stuff this project then keeps my printer occupied for 30+ hours. thanks to the modifications on my printers about 1 in a 100 prints fail. the average order value on my hub is between 50 and 100 euros. i try to get large prints instead of a lot of smaller prints since that is what actually makes money. 4 euros setup price because that seemed like a good number for some reason

so I had a chat with the Makerpoint guys yesterday.. his site is in english, http://www.makerpoint.nl/en/ , and he will ship worldwide.. he does have to update the shipping costs I suppose

totally agreed I know you're one of those resellers (I'm always open to buy Um2s on the cheap ) and yeah, where do you stop? I've been caught on the bad side of the equation enough times,. and i simply reason with it by thinking about the fact that when i bought the machine i thought it was worth the money and it was a great machine. the fact that there are some improvements now doesn't change those facts. so you're still going to get that great machine..

question about the upgrade kit though; will it be possible to buy separate portions? I don't care about the feeder, but I do care about the fans and the aluminum spacer.. would be great to get my spacer replaced by a machined one..

well, with the old PT100, when you were doing 250 degrees, it was actually doing 260 so i would say yes PS : i believe the new Um2 has a stronger heater as well... it can easily do 270... I mean do you know how much the new coupler can take? haven't tested it that far.. I simply tested durability..

can you share a picture of the feeder with the top cover taken of? Thanks. it's just going to be 2 gears.. one smaller from the motor and a larger one that has a curled knob attached to it...

well, with the old PT100, when you were doing 250 degrees, it was actually doing 260 so i would say yes PS : i believe the new Um2 has a stronger heater as well...

well, you know how much of a fan I am of your upgrades but I think you'll like the new feeder. no more heat transfer and way way way less chances of the head digging in at prints with heavy retractions. that's the only downside of your version of the feeder. when the stepper motor gets hot, during a lot of retractions, it just digs in.. only way to prevent it is to print slower. this geared feeder does not have that issue. downside.. material changes are much more difficult. the PT100 is way better. the temperature is stable and the old ones were off by 10 degrees every now and then. I run 3 machines and i measured the heads from the inside with my Fluke meter.. and consistently when the machine said the head was 250 degrees, it was actually 258 to 260 degrees. the new PT100 has been spot on for me every single time. then there is the tube/spring replacement.. i suppose you know my feelings about that one and the TFM coupler.. loving it.. that thing is insane.. i've ran ABS through it for 600+ hours, then immediately after PLA.. not a problem. I had to replace one after 4000 hours, not because it was broken, but because I messed up the Olsson Block and that got junk in between the coupler and the block, messing it up.. that thing alone is worth a 100 euros easy.. I disagree; i know they have not rested.. just because you don't see a lot of things doesn't mean they are not doing a lot of things. I'm a very skeptical person and I wish they were more open about some stuff but they are working their asses off.. when it comes to the improvements, they take the Um2 from a good printer that requires care, to a great printer, maybe even the best printer (that still requires care btw ) .. the feeder, the tube, the PT100, the Olsson Block, the new fan shroud, they are all awesome and definitely worth the investment.

so since I was tagged anyway.. I've been running the new TFM coupler for about 10K combined hours. yes you read that right, 10K hours. as in, XT, PLA, ABS, whatever.. every now and then I had to clean the nozzle.. but the coupler itself just perfect.. in my opinion, that will be the greatest improvement to the printers.. a coupler that, combined with the spring replacement, will just work without worrying about wear. I have one that has been in one of my printers for over 6 months now.. (you see, Ultimaker tests stuff ) and it is still going strong.. I know people see me complain every now and then in the forums (and yes, there are points that are just bugging the hell out of me when it comes to certain portions of the company) but in the end, Ultimaker is a great company that has it's users best interests as priority one..

congratulations on the birth of the Um2+ and the UM 2 Extended + i especially like the aluminium spring replacement

so i charge 4 euro setup costs and 0,21 euro per cm3.. and that makes me an acceptable amount of money how large would you consider a large piece? i think you might need to tweak your setup a bit if it needs babysitting.. i do 40 hour prints on a regular basis and i just let it go.. my failure rate is around 1 percent.. reel tangles to me means you need to buy better filament

Hey @SandervG .. just wondering.. since this was brought to Ultimakers attention a week ago (and granted, jan1 was a day off) and you promptly replied that a shipment was being prepared for Makerpoint.. now, a week later, of all Ultimaker 2 parts still only 2 are actually in stock.. and still there is now way to order a part if it's in backorder.. this really is unacceptable... and Ultimaker has been told a week ago.. While I understand that you've got stuff to do, If someone would point out to me and tell me, hey, your reseller doesn't actually sell your stuff so can you take a look at that, that would be high on my priority list. also, CoolBlue still insists that you can only print PLA with the device and that it's not yet ready for dual extrusion but.. it's coming!

also I reread my post and it makes me come across very ungrateful and bitter. It was not meant that way I was laughing at the irony of me pointing out that communication is key and that there should be better communication and working together when stuff like closing a store is happening.. promptly following by a major announcement on the same day Ultimaker announces that their forum will be offline... oh sweet Irony.. thou are a harsh mistress

this seems terribly exciting! just too bad the forum will be offline on the day a major announcement takes place... this is too good to make up but, I'm really excited about it! i have a sneaking suspicion a lot of this is very welcome