Goal:

To buy a printer that acts as a workhorse to pump out lots of widgets for use as parts in another machine which I will be retailing. Sure plastic injection molding is cheaper at scale, but I am just starting, and I read that PIJ is expensive. It takes about 100 hours to produce all dozen or so pieces which make a single product, on the Ender, which means it would take at least 4 Enders to complete one final product a day, assuming 24 hour clock, and therefore 30 Enders to produce 10 final products per a day, which is bare minimum.

Price vs Speed:

Seems machines like Ender 3 operate at around 70mm/sec. It can go faster I read (200mm/sec) but quality may suffer.

Then I read about various "fast" machines like Delta WASP 20×40 which have " maximum print speed of 500 mm per second." but I dont care about max, I care about max speed at a good quality. Even then at max speed that is only 2.5x faster for about 15x the cost ($3000 vs $200 for Ender).

Then I read I about dual extruders like FlashForge Creator Pro and wonder if they are faster. I have little knowledge about all the various units out there but reading around seem that few are more than double or triple the Ender speed.

Production line use:

Since my purpose is to produce 1000s of these parts, getting a machine that can just keep going, do several at a time or in parallel, etc... seems to make sense. Anything that can cut down on human labor is valuable. E.g. read that Ultimaker is useful to " produce the same part with similar dimensions multiple times." but no clue if/how that works and which other printers do the same. Obviously if I can run a print job and have a few dozen machines, i'd rather automate replication as much as possible.


Quality:

I just printed my first object on a 3d printer (Ender 3) and the quality seems far too low for my purpose--lined texture even at 0.1mm. I assume higher end machines can make smoother objects that feel more like PIJ but not sure of cost and realistic speeds of these units. E.g. I read that Ultimaker runs at 20 microns.

If it werent for the low quality, considering the cost of Ender is only $200, seems like buying a whole bunch of them is definitely the way to go.

I'm also willing to buy used if there are many of them for sale.


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