Cost of printing a mendel?

So i'm wondering how much it costs in components/power/other mesurable disposables (not including time) to create a reprap mendel's printable components. does it really cost $150 to $250 to print a mendel with a mendel or is that the set price + profit? that seems steep! i've really been looking forward to building my reprap as i have just gotten the electronics however at these prices i imagine i will be making the rest out of wood . this will be my first reprap build so i wont make any promises but if prices for mendel parts are really inflated then i think it would be truly in the spirit of the open source movement for people to print at cost and pay it forward!

This seems to be a supply/demand thing. It's about what people were paying for printed parts on eBay a few months ago. It has been noted that eBay prices are falling lately, theoretically because of increased availability and more people printing them. Fixed prices at the stores will probably lag any changes on eBay by a matter of months.

The actual cost in plastic and electricity isn't that much, but there is some value in getting your printer running reliably too. Even so, demand has driven the price far above all costs.

that's sad. the high cost of parts is really prohibitive especially since the project is open source! do the people that make the reprap even profit from this (which in turn helps pay for development) or is it individuals and third party companies that are profiting from it. if you look at the arduino most of the shields and third party parts are at least reasonably priced compared to things like the basic stamp. at least if it was at cost + a bit to keep the machine going then there would be more progress. oh well, time to break out the jig saw

Mendel kits are in the rough neighborhood of US$1000. If the cost of the printed parts was reduced to $50, you've only lowered the total cost to around $850. If your source the hardware yourself, scavenge steppers, and get unassembled electronics, you can lower the cost more, but it's still a few hundred. The cost of the plastics doesn't seem that prohibitive to me in comparison.

Commercial printing isn't exactly cost competitive, so the Rep[St]Rap parts are cheaper.

When I looked at the time and effort required to make an alternative work, $150-200 didn't seem so bad. Well, I don't have a proper jig saw either, so...

Mendel parts have been seen going for as low as $75 on eBay. It would appear that either the market for parts is getting saturated, or supply is catching up with demand. Folks are predicting further drops this year as more printers get up and running.

Print YOUR first set of high quality Mendel RP parts reamed and ready to sell and THEN tell me what you think they are worth.

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

dropping the cost to by 100-150 would be a HUGE bonus. especially if you can print your own circuit boards or make/buy clone arduino megas as well as the controller board the cost can plummet. steppers and the metal hardware are probably the only things you can't easily fabricate yourself


rhmorrison Wrote:
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> Print YOUR first set of high quality Mendel RP
> parts reamed and ready to sell and THEN tell me
> what you think they are worth.


Why do a thing to them after they're out of the printer? i'd rather order cheaper unfinished parts and clean them up myself them then pay someone $100 to do it for me. thing is none of that is really available

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2011 12:56PM by Zerobotman.

If you contact someone that is regularly selling Mendel sets you can probably handle a cheaper price if you tell him you want them straight from the printer "as they are".

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

If you consider the cost, time and effort involved in tooling up so you can print parts I don't think £150 or so is overpriced at all!!

It's not just about the plastic cost.

@angryhippy

150 british pounds is WAY overpriced! it's around $320 isn't it? anyway my point is that it's an open source project and for that to me it would make sense if people did more to distribute the printer as freely as possible unless the funds are somehow being used to further development which in most cases they arn't.

@rhmorrison

i'm just guessing but i assume you are a producer right? if so what would you say the markdown for fresh off the press parts?

I have just started printing my first set of Mendel parts (in translucent blue PLA that glows under black light) and since I have a neighbor upstairs that complains if I print anything on my Mendel after 23:00 it will definitely be a couple of weeks (if not a month) before I have my first set done. Plus, since I live in Germany the S&H would be cheapest for someone living in Germany.

It took me months to get my settings such that an 8mm hole comes out exactly 8mm and then I have found that many of the STL files have holes that are as big as 9.3 mm to compensate for the fact that most people don't spend the time to get their settings right!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2011 07:28AM by rhmorrison.

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

Quote

150 british pounds is WAY overpriced! it's around $320 isn't it?

[www.foxbusiness.com]# Actually it's closer to $240, which is not too bad.

Besides, it's natural for people to be motivated to make profit on ventures such as this. Maybe not so much here, but elsewhere money is a very good motivator. Actually, the fact that people are making money off of this will probably increase the amount of people that have RepRaps. That's one of the reasons I got into RepRap (although now that I look at Ebay, I won't be able to make quite so much money off of it anymore). Sooner or later, those new RepRap operators, "investors," will actually bring the price of RepRap down due to an influx of the supply of printed parts.

Hi..

I think if you wait a few more months you may find the prices dropping even more.. There are a heap of people who are geeting very close to finshing they bots off and to help off set the cost they may just print some set of and sell them.

Plus with the Prusa you can pick-up a set of parts for $120.00...

Auzze

I think the parts should be much cheaper. The heart of the project is supposed to gain wealth from the items you can print other than the printer parts. If you want to go with the bees and flowers scenario, it's like the bees selling the pollen to the highest bidding flower while still keeping the honey they make.

I think the current estimate is that it takes 50 hours of non-stop printing to get all the parts for a Mendel. If someone charges $200 they're only getting $4 per hour...that is basically free.

Another way to look at it is that there is currently very little about a Mendel that is average-person-friendly. Even if you get a complete kit so that you don't have to worry about sourcing or preparing any of the parts yourself, getting the thing put together correctly and then getting it printing correctly is an endeavor. Think of the $200 for parts as a "deposit" that proves you actually are serious about finishing the bot. If the parts were given away for free half of the people who got them would give up and toss the unfinished bot in a corner, or get frustrated when it didn't work immediately and let it gather dust...effectively "killing" that Mendel. No one can gain wealth from a printer that's sitting in someone else's closet.

makeme Wrote:
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> Think of the $200 for parts as a "deposit" that
> proves you actually are serious about finishing
> the bot. If the parts were given away for free


Quite! I have spent somewhere between £600 and £700 on my printer and if it was not for the financial investment I would have given up ages ago.

Don't get me wrong though/ I am glad I did have the 'incentive' to work through the tough spots because that is where I actually learn, and the whole spectrum of new skills really interests me.

ps. printer still not printing but I am ready to push plastic this weekend.... maybe even tonight

I hope you arrive at an acceptable print quality quicker than I did...

First print July 26, 2010, print quality where I am happy with it ~ December 26, 2010 - 5 Months!

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

lol - that's inlikely

I started my build June 2010... and still not even pushed plastic!!

I started my build the beginning of February 2010 (actually ordered the electronics from Makerbot the end of December 2009) but had three weeks of vacation in January and didn't receive my Makerbot order until February.

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

I think that the build logs help a lot for new users. most of the major problems have been worked out by people like rhmorrison, and software and hardware are getting better all the time. i started printing on jan 5, and i'm almost good enough to sell parts (next test is full beds)

Even so, i started building in September, so there is a significant man-hour investment involved.
The bottom line is that there is an incentive to get your printer up to sellable quality quickly, which i think is a good thing. If there wasn't a chance of recouping my costs, that might have been just enough to stop me from diving into this project in the first place, let alone progressing this far.

I don't think print time comes into consideration other than utilities cost. You simply hit print and walk away to come back to a set of parts (given that you have it tuned to do so). You aren't really doing any work other than pressing a button. You could factor in the time you spent tweaking and clean-up I guess. Not sure how much material it takes to print a Prusa in ABS or PLA, but its not the 2.5-3lbs it was for the Sells Mendel. So at $50 - $65 a 5lb roll of plastic (PLA - ABS), its easy to see how a little inflated prices are. but again, just my opinion.

I have personally started to sell sets for $100 and aim to ride the market down to somewhere in the $50 - $75 range. Every set I sell helps me to create my RepRap farm, which lets me produce more sets, which also in turn helps me to drive down cost to others who are interested in joining the community. Even then at $50, there is profit to be made, it pays for a spool of plastic right there.

- Andy
[digifabindustries.blogspot.com]

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- Andy
digifabindustries.blogspot.com

ata0921 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You simply hit print
> and walk away to come back to a set of parts
> (given that you have it tuned to do so). You
> aren't really doing any work other than pressing a
> button.

Well, yeah...but that's kind of like saying an author shouldn't charge more for their book than the paper costs.

makeme Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ata0921 Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > You simply hit print
> > and walk away to come back to a set of parts
> > (given that you have it tuned to do so). You
> > aren't really doing any work other than pressing
> a
> > button.
>
> Well, yeah...but that's kind of like saying an
> author shouldn't charge more for their book than
> the paper costs.

He shouldn't if he's trying to let or get everyone to read it.

And to be literal (which I hate), most authors don't get to call the pricing schemes on their work (unless your a big shot). Publishers cut them a check and they get some said royalties, the end. And then there is mass production of the said books and blah, blah, blah which costs money and so on, I don't think many of us out there have RepRap factories (yet...).

RepRap is a free OPEN SOURCE project. If we wanted to get as many people involved as possible, we COULD choose to sell parts at materials and utilities cost only. Maybe throw in the hours to tweak/setup as well.

- Andy
[digifabindustries.blogspot.com]

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- Andy
digifabindustries.blogspot.com

> RepRap is a free OPEN SOURCE project. If we wanted
> to get as many people involved as possible, we
> COULD choose to sell parts at materials and
> utilities cost only. Maybe throw in the hours to
> tweak/setup as well.

No, if the goal was to maximize participation the design would be altered to be dramatically more user friendly. Along the lines of the difference between this:

and this:


At the moment, the most common goal seems to be meeting the technical challenge of advancing the state of the art, and also enjoying the potential for recouping some of one's sunk cost.

You check out the instructions for the Darwin? Night and day when it comes to the Mendel. I do agree, it can be more user friendly still.

But to recoup one's sunk cost doesn't mean to charge a premium just for the sake of that goal. Can we agree that lower costs will be a good thing?

Lower costs also lowers barriers of entry and increases willingness to participate. One day maybe things can be super-simplified to the point where infants can assemble a 3D printer, but until then, people will have to do things they are not really familiar with. If it weren't for people willingness to venture into the "unknown" or unfamiliar, we would still be beating each other with sticks and stones.

And you have to have progression before you make some serious advancements, more participants = more active "experimenters"/developers.

So in the end, lower costs is good. More simplification is good. Recouping money is good too, but say couldn't you still make money at $100 a set. Probably could go down to $50 a set and walk away with some profit.

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- Andy
digifabindustries.blogspot.com

Lower cost is good for the new beginner. However reprap is free as in speech, not beer. if you really want to go cheap - build a wolfstrap and print the parts yourself, or cut them from wood and build a wooden mendel. With the design of the mendel you can always trade price for ease of build and the other way round. Developement of better solutions as well as new capabilities costs a lot of time and money. I think it is only fair, that you can get at least a part of it back by selling parts for a reasonable price. if you try to sell larger numbersyou need to pay taxes and social insurance for your earnings, which is more than 50% where I live. So if you are able to sell a prusa set for 100€ and you calculate your costs (including wear and tear, failed prints,...) it will probably cost you 50€ to print it. that leaves you with less than 25€ profit. T make a living out of it you would have to sell at least 40-50 per month - but to print that number you need more printers, more space and somebody to help you package and ship them.

Like Adrian has said, there is no money to be made in RepRap (unless you were one of the first few to put sets on eBay, what were they going for $700?). I was just trying to discuss the bare minimum price in which one could sell and still "profit" from given the costs people fix to using/printing with their printers in correlation to what prices were posted as.

All good points made above. But back to the topic, Prusa Mendel in materials only is prolly somewhere between $10-$20 given ABS/PLA.

- Andy
[digifabindustries.blogspot.com]

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- Andy
digifabindustries.blogspot.com

yes, but calculating the price only by the weight of plastic would be the same , as calculating the price of a car by looking only at the fuel consumption. 50.- should be enough, maybe 45.-.

"MATERIALS ONLY" = just talking about cost of plastic/no longer talking prices. Well aware that there are other costs/factors that go into pricing.

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- Andy
digifabindustries.blogspot.com

Maybe you can get a non-profit started.

Many of the parts sets are sold on ebay, so it's often the buyers demand that is setting the price. Why would someone sell parts below market demand, unless just to offload them quicker?