Questions about Elapsed printing time

I am investigating building a RepRap (or one of the variants) in order to be able to print 'slightly' customised items 'quickly'.

Can anyone give me some guidelines on how to estimate elapsed printing times? I am only interested in print time, not the design or customisation time.

Also, I am not looking for exact science, but rather 'rules of thumb'.

And finally, what are the key critical factors in the time required to print an object, and how would one go about reducing them (either by improving the printer or improving the design) ?

Thanks.


Steve

Skeinforge gives an estimate of printing time along with other statistics like material cost after it generates g-codes. Once you've set your parameters that affect feed rate, extrusion height, and extrusion width, then you can probably estimate build time based on volume. But it's easier to just get it from Skeinforge.

Brnrd

Thanks for the initial insight. I will install Skeinforge and have a quick look around.

In the meantime, are there any 'guestimates' that something that is small disc (approx. 4cm in diameter and .3 or .4 cm thick).

This would be a volume of approx. 5 cm3

A small disk like that shouldn't take more than 45 minutes to print, but it depends highly on the nozzle size and print speed you use.

I tried a 40mm dia x 4 mm thick disk on ReplicatorG/Skeinforge and with the infill solidity of 0.2, it would less than 20 min at a feed rate of 16 mm/s. At 30 mm/s feed rate, it would take less than 12 min.