Cobblebot 3D Printer

[chbrules]

That is a viable option to increase stability.

However something THAT large made of metal? for only $799?

Think about it. the printrbot metal is like 1/20th the size using all metal, and is $540. how can he get such a large amount of metal, for so cheap.

This doesnt solve the issue of the build plate at that size. I swear, the creator just goes 'oh ill solve this problem by designing this bigger, we will buy it later'. Where can you even buy HBP that large. a 214x214 one costs $45, how much do you think a 520x520 one will cost? its going to be insane. I dont think such a thing even exists and when Jeremiah goes to ask suppliers theyll say, yeah we can custom make 100 of them for about $300 each. And getting a small volume of parts precision cut out of metal? good god its going to be in the order of $50-$100 per part, his printer has dozens of these.

I am 100% dead certain that this printer can not exist at that price point. Do a little research yourself and youll see how expensive things are. The heated plate will literally be hundreds of $ at that size and the metal parts could total anywhere up to $1000.

this project has no hope.

Good points. I backed out of the KS pledge. I'm looking at the Printrbot, Solidoodle 4, and the Da Vinci 2.0. Any recommendations?

[josephchun]

Your math is way off. He will not be assembling most of the units. At $299 they are kits. Even the pre-assembled units will likely be opted as kits to save on shipping on most of the units.

Who pays $25/hr to temporary assemblers? Engineers are not required for manual labor like this.

Taxes can be offset almost completely by deducting costs.

Not sure what your beef is with this project but sounds a bit fishy for someone "without a horse in the race" to go out of his way to ignore simple and obvious facts to malign someone else's work.

based on your own calculations with appropriate factors in place, this would not only be feasible but a successful model.

I agree that the acrylic plate needs to go and IF printing in abs a heated bed would be necessary. But this project does not include one at $299 so why incorporate it as an implied or necessary cost?

Also, the printer is supposed to be capable of printing in many other materials. PLA, as an example, would not require a heat bed or enclosure for that matter.

I don't know for certain if he will deliver or not but the numbers work out if you bother to look at the details.

Your post reeks of negative propaganda more than objective criticism.

If mine smells of a fanboy it's because I'm actually vested in it at $299 and want to see it succeed.

BTW, I am familiar with injection molding and the pieces are not impossible. They will require post processing but they are workable with very minor changes.

[josephchun]

twice my response has been lost and not posted so I'll try it this 3rd/last time more concise than before:

less than $17 reduction from your guestimate will make this project solvent.
acrylic bed costs less from local supplier at retail. thickness will vary cost. since neither of us know the thickness designed, we're both guessing.
without and actual BOM we're both in the dark about actual cost.
12yo has assembled and calibrated in about 90 mins. tech has done it in 30 mins. your estimates of 6.5 per day for 6 months is way off.
"measly 20k" for labor is still $20/hour for 6 months.
likely will assemble less than 100 units, the rest will be packaged as kits. If so, $1000 should cover 6.25 days of labor to assemble 100 units by a skilled tech at $20/hour. $2000 to cover packaging remaining 908 units for shipping at 24 units per day for less than 2 months.
this reduces your 20k labor cost to 3k that's assuming they need to hire some at all.
you can't include a 20k labor cost to assemble then claim they are 20k in the hole BEFORE shipping. what else would the labor cost be for? shipping itself is paid for separately by the buyers.


All of this to say that your guess is as good as mine.
I certainly don't see the compelling reason for deeming this project impossible.

In any case, I do appreciate your opinions and I thank you for them.

Will this printer work? That is an entirely different question.

Since I now have time to reply properly

1) I will admit that I missed that 'most' of the units will not be sold assembled, I saw multiple tiers, including one of the 299 ones claiming built and calibrated. I did not see that in fact the other, more popular $299 tiers were in kit form.

2) I dont know about you, but I found that building a 3D printer is actually not the easiest thing in the world. Youre right you dont need engineers, but you do need people of some technical ability. People who know how to operate a drill pres, know what a socket wrench is and how big an inch is to a centimetre. We are dealing with rather complicated little gadgets and getting one thing messed up can lead to a massive loss in money. One faulty build will incur shipping back and repair costs which could easily total the amount of a new printer. If I was running a small manufacturing business where our products must be able to operate to within 0.15mm, I want smart, capable people and the thing about them, is they are usually employed somewhere else and wont work for some dodgy kickstarter company.

My use of $25/hour for assembly was based on my own experiences and knowing just how hard it is to find the right people who understand 3D printers. Its a very rare skill set to have. Personally, I would not have looked at anyone who wasnt at least some way tertiary qualified to build the printers my colleagues and I have designed in the past. If I am trusting people with my business reputation to not stuff up, I will trust people who are worth 25/hour.

Of course in the Cobblebot scenario, of course jeremiah could pay some local kids $10/hour to build his kits, or maybe get his wife or something to build a few for free every day to help start up. Tell me, would you want a printer built and calibrated by your average young-adult with no 3d printing experience? It is REALLY HARD to find people with this skill set, and Id know Ive owned a 3DP business for over a year now, found 2 people ever I would trust to operate my machines.

If my reasoning got a bit jumbled there, it was basically finding people with 3DP building skills ready to work locally is extremely difficult. Your best shot is to find some retired machinist or graduate engineer or something, someone who can give you a full time effort and you can simply put a manual in front of them and they will know exactly how to put it together. And either way, these people arent cheap.

3) Well yes of course, but not all the way. When a company that raises a huge amount of money pays a group of people to work, the combined taxable income, after deductions, is still going to be around the tens of thousands.

4) My 'beef' with the project is that I cant stand reading all the comments of backers who wasted money. Whether its Makibox, P3d, phoenix or any other cheap garbage 3DP company, its heartbreaking reading how some parents wanted a 3DP gift for their teenage kid or something last christmas, but now it wont even arrive until 2015 (and it actually wont ever arrive those companies will all be bankrupt by then). This project is going to be no different. You get all these happy, enthusiastic people who want to join this industry but some freakin lawyer comes along and says hes invented a miracle machine and pays his suppliers in monopoly money, passing the savings on to you (thats the same level of truth the project has currently), and all those people will get burned. Meanwhile you get these really cool companies who grinded out quality machines for years on end and put the big companies to shame with their innovations, yet they struggle to sell machines coz all the 'new 3d printer' money is being funnelled into kickstarter printers which never deliver

Some people (not you but I get this around the place) think im some competitor, some bitter inventor upset his printer didnt sell. Heres something for you all. I am a consultant. People pay me to tell them what to do. They pitch their ideas, I do the research and come back with estimates and probe the market etc to determine viability and then get back to them with my findings. They can ignore me or listen to the reality of the situation. I have had 3 different 'companies' try to invent a new printer and go through me for my advice. 2 of them listened to me and chose to keep their day job, one didnt and lost about $60k of his savings pursuing a vaporware project. The ones that listened realised that my estimates and numbers are conservative and they did their own research, only a little, to realise they were coming to the same conclusions.

I am not suggesting I am always right or my maths is perfect, but it MAKES SENSE in this world. I dont 'fudge the numbers'. I say 'here is a realistic range. If you get lucky and everything goes smoothly, expect this. If you are a normal business and operate with the usual difficulties, expect that'. All of my maths is general and is basically a range. Certain factors might vary by +/- 10% but overall they should balance out.

Had the cobblebot team come to me before pitching, I dont care if they make $1 or $1million, its the same work for me, I would have very strongly said 'go home, finalise your design and come back when you have an idea on who you are going to hire to build and calibrate a brand new type of printer. Once you have done that, then we can start figuring out what to sell this thing for and dont suggest a price to me until this is finished'

Based on my calculations... OK I'm going to go in-depth for you, and state all of my assumptions and be conservative. This is what I would do if someone came to me trying to invent a new type of printer.

Bill of materials. Based on the fact that printer vitamins and their cheapest can be bought for somewhere around $180, this is the base line. This is super-conservative. Most budget prusas come in at around $300 for materials however a lot of that cost is the frame. Given the fact that Cobblebot has secured over 1,200 orders we can cut these costs down. Now that $180 of course, didnt include the frame. thats just the motors/rods/psu/electronics/bearings etc. Cobblebots IM pieces look actually quite significant in size, some could even be a few $ per one. These total, super conservative, might come to around $20. Now cobblebot is also using gigantic rods, and a lot of them. the rods cost is going to increase by a factor of about 8 times but these can be gotten cheaply with huge orders. Lets take a safe estimate and say $40 for all of those massive rods. Since we are using an acrylic non moving build plate, this can be dirt cheap with mass quantities to lets say $10 per one, at that size. Cobblebot also uses an LCD, so add around $10 there for mass amounts bought.

So we are up to $260.

Now, lets assume jeremiah and his friend are working for no money. They need to pump out 1200 printers in 6 months, 6.57 per day. Assuming they are all in kit form, they will hire one more person to help, paid at a measly 20k

Injection molding. Generally, around $50k all up for 3d printer brackets is somewhat standard. But since Cobblebot lives in the land of unicorns, lets say he found someone to do them for $30k. its possible, but highly unlikely. people dont give huge discounts to tiny quantities like 1000.

In this super-conservative magical world, the cobblebot is a perfect machine which requires no after-market support and never breaks. therefore, they have no need to keep replacement parts in stock or send them out. These printers will be built in his garage and there is no need for employee insurances since they are all self insured. Electricity is also free.

By the equation in my article, now adding in credit card surcharges which I forgot to earlier

Income > Expenses

$373,916 * (kickstarters commission 0.96) * (credit card fees 0.97) > 1208*$260 + 30k + 20k
$344,600 (Income) > $364k (Expenses)
$344,000 (Income) > $364k (Expenses)

Oh wow... even in this unicorn land, the project is $20,000 in debt before they fulfil their backers orders. What does that mean? that means 5.5% of backers wont receive their printers at all and all of those who do, the company is bankrupt after 6 months, so you have no support for your product.

Goodnight Cobblebot.

If you call that a successful model, you are insane.

How can one give objective criticism to such a product which is impossible even in the land of perfect everything?

Want a more realistic analysis? Warranty and replacement parts costs will be roughly 10% being conservative here still. The team of workers will take 120k/year salary split beteween them which honestly, is fair. molding is 50k and we will throw in an additional 10k to cover the fact the printer isnt even finalised yet, taking a months worth of work and prototypes.

344,000 > 1208*(260*1.1) + 60k + 50k + 10k
344k > 345k + 120k
344k > 465k

the project is 121k debt after the 7 months.

What does this mean? it means 33.5% of backers will never see a printer and again those that do have no support as the company is bankrupt.

---

You call it negative propaganda, I call it valid assumptions and legitimate maths.
And you want to know the kicker to all this... This is assuming the printer actually you know, WORKS. Considering the design is wobbly as all hell and no oe has seen videos of it printing something large, its kind of a big deal to add to this mix.

[Zenica]

yet they struggle to sell machines coz all the 'new 3d printer' money is being funneled into kickstarter printers which never deliver

This right here is as critical as the possibility that backers may never see that parts bag.
The collateral side effect is a legitimate start up may fail because a "business" that never
intended on delivering is both absorbing money and leaving consumers with a negative
impression of the industry.

[LambdaFF]

4) My 'beef' with the project is that I cant stand reading all the comments of backers who wasted money.

I really support you on that.

djbowny, you have some very good and strong points. You clearly feel something on a personal level here, especially given your defense in your sig.

When you give advise to your clients, is it normal to use the terms "magical world" and "unicorn land" when telling them about their business plans?

In my line of work we say "le monde des bisounours", and we build helicopters for a living, can you believe it ?
Bisounours_bandeau_994.jpg

[3dspider]

I find it interesting that your only posts on here are to attack this project.
Did you make this account for the express reason of attacking this project? And if so, why?
It looks like you have a business selling 3d printed parts.
So do cheaper 3d printers threaten your business model?
Will you be attacking all similarly priced printers on Kickstarter, or have you singled out the Cobblebot for some reason?
Oh, and your prices: are they AUD, or USD?