E3D V6 clone quality ?

Back in the days IBM, COMMODORE and others were charging thousands of dollars for a personal computer, then the chinese took the little chips that took hundreds if not thousands of engineers hours to design and develop and what happened? There is a computer in every home today, as cheap as 200 dollars.

Commodore is gone, IBM set itself for an specific market, and the rest just learned to live and work with the chinese manufacturers.

Let's make it clear, no one can compete with them, even if you file for a patent they will use it as toilet paper. The market will reach a point where the designer will utilize chinese manufacturers, set their own QA and just add some small profit to the final product.

Either you set yourself as IBM and find your niche or go global with little margins with the chinese.

Just as a note for some of the guys that said 80 bucks is too much, for the last year and a half I have been working on my own hotend and so far after so much complaining of my wife I have spend over a thousand dollars in research and iterations, final design is been made for 200 dollars (only one) and that doesn't count working hours, so mid june coming I will have my own $1,200 hotend.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/01/2016 10:37PM by ggherbaz.

Quote
ggherbaz
Either you set yourself as IBM and find your niche or go global with little margins with the chinese.

There's a 3rd option... be like Apple, Dell, HP, and hundreds of others and get the Chinese to build your product cheaply and sell at a large margin. But, to be fair, this only works when you already have control of a fairly large market.

For me there is no choice. My hot ends will come from E3D. I do not want to miss the Gummy Bears! Also, I am convinced we need to support the innovation.

I am a bit contradictory here. I always feel that the original creators deserve support and credit, so my hot ends are original E3D.
But at the same time I believe that the 3D printer world still has a big open source aspect to it, together we are trying to improve and grow this community.

So for me, trying to make my own V6 hot end is logical, and I am grateful for the drawings. That is, if I want to experiment or see what works and what does not, in a hot end.
That is for personal use and that is fine.

Yes it is a pity that the cheap clones are making life difficult, it is a fact of life in any industry by now.

I am in the process of developing a product myself and know exactly how much things cost to manufacture and those people that say the V6 is way too expensive do not know what they are talking about.

Lykle

Most of the people that post here are from developed countries, with salaries in the thousands a month and most "not all" can afford some quality stuff (original e3d) but for a great majority who lives in 3rd world countries where salaries barely reaches the 200 mark it is out of the question, for them a 200 dollars printer with "clone everything" is their only chance to enjoy this wonderful experience.

That's what chinese stuff allows, and that's why they exist, surely they should not use someone else brand but if a company does an open source design, they are allowing the copy. E3d can easily make their designs close source and trademark their brand internationally, they will still reach their targeted market and receive some international protection of their brand.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/07/2016 11:18PM by ggherbaz.

E3D releases their hotends with a -NC license so no, they're not allowing the clones.

The biggest problem though is clone shops using the E3D name for their inferior goods, it hurts E3D's reputation for having quality products.

this is definitely a pre Trianglelab / Mellow thread lol ... or Turnberg 3d or other clones that i literally choose over the original e3d v6 hotends I own ....

Yes previous threads were 2016 when e3d and one or two others made hotends that worked and everyone else sold "e3d v6s" and "j head hot ends" which were all broadly e3d v5 hotends as they are easy to machine/cast in chinesium for about $5 which could work if you re-engineered them a bit and polished the roughly drilled heartbreaks internally.

Now some of these cloners have made quality hot end products but they have to charge quality prices for them.

I used to buy cheap printer parts when I was messing about with 3d printers but started buying quality kit when I got a bit more serious, so I've always argued the clones were not always 100% bad they gave people chance to have a dabble cheaply.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

Here's my viewpoint, from my many years in quality assurance: if a particular product has mostly good reviews, with the occasional bad one, there's a fair chance that as a whole the product is a good one and the manufacturer has a good testing system. If there reviews are an even mix of good and bad (as often found with Chinese E3D clones such as these) then it means that their quality assurance is non-existent.

The effective result is that when you buy a clone you have a 50:50 chance of getting something that works, else it's a dud.

Looks like the UK is slapping 20% on all purchases on ebay from other countries(but China's not in the EU)...regardless of any 10 or 15 quid item limit...Them damn Chinese trying to sell us cheap goods...we can't have that we must make everything expensive for our Citizens again!

bbbbut Minister your already charging them top dollar for everything, they will not stand for it...
tuff let them eat each other...

I've seen some nice prints from clones but E3D tolerances and surface finish requirements are very high quality.

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[www.thingiverse.com]
[hackaday.io]

E3D don't seem that fussed about clones. Even to the extent of publishing engineering drawings. Just so long as it's sold as an E3D and not having the design sold with a different name.

[e3d-online.dozuki.com]

The thing with clones is the quality control is iffy. You don't know distant it is from published specification.