Mendel Parts, Cheap!

Hi, I'm kinda new here. The title of this is only to attract people to help me.Delete this if you want, but please don't, I need it really badly.

Before I smash open my poor piggy bank, and invest in a Rapman (bfb.com) what kind of demand is there for printed mendel parts?

What's the minimum price people would pay for a set?

Would you be able to pay your own shipping, whatever it may be,from East Coast USA to wherever you are in the world?

If I was, at first, only able to make about 1 set aweek, would people be willing to 'take a number' and wait a while?

Please answer honestly, I need the info for a project for school.
All help is appreciated.
-Ben

There is no MINIMUM price - I would take them for FREE if I could!

The MAXIMUM price is based on the demand.

Currently the demand is high, the supply is low, and the effort required to create a set is also high.

Selling on EBay (and making sure the RepRap community knows of the auction) is the best way to get the best price.

Currently they go for ~$350 although there are people that would pay as much as $500 for a complete set of Mendel RP parts.

I am sure most people would be willing to wait 2 - 4 weeks (at most).

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

Okay, a revision of above, What is the maximum price people would be willing to pay?

To be determined.

Some people have paid $1000 plus for professional printing.

There is a company in NC that will print all the parts for $1500

Most I have seen the printed parts go for was $350, but that was for a set that had not been printed yet.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

No offense, but I think $350 is sort of ridiculous.

The plastic itself costs ~$20 for a whole machine, and time spent printing (By that I mean time spent actually fabbing parts) is no more than ~72 hours at the max. I understand that machines jam, and that life and proverbial s**t happens, but why does it take so much money and so much darn time to make a set of parts?

Sorry if I angered anyone. I don't have a RepRap yet (trying hard to get parts!), but the price tag is starting to freak me out. Electronics are $175, mech. parts are $250, and (so far) plastic parts are $300. Including plastic, bed, and power supply, that price is over $1000. I beginning to wonder if I should have gotten a RapMan instead of venturing into the tenuous world of Mendel.

-Adam

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"Day breaks, but decay soon follows."

350/72 hours = 4.8 an hour. You tell me, is it legal for me to pay you 4.8 dollars an hour sit and do crosswords, or to watch TV? Nope.

Look at cross stitching. My wife LOVES that stuff. She makes scarves, and hats for her friends all the time. Now why doesn't she start a business selling those scarves? Because it takes her 5 hours to make a hat. That hat will NOT sell for more than 10 dollars. Therefore she does not sell hats.

So why does a set of Plastic Mendel pieces cost $350? Same reason you don't see home made knit hats for sell for $10.

You want Mendel pieces for less that $350, buy a Rapman, send it to Cambodia, and pay someone $1 an hour to print the parts. If they don't sell your printer as soon as you turn your back you will be able to sell Mendel pieces for $150 after shipping, tariffs, & taxes.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

Cross stitching is completely different, it is done entirely by hand. When you make parts the machine does the work.

If the machine is unreliable then it is a lot of effort, like when I made a Darwin for [factorefarm.org]. I was constantly repairing the extruder and peeling off the rafts and string with a penknife.

When I made a set of Mendel parts recently it was so much different. I just set them off in batches, wait a few hours for them to finish and then peel them off and thrown them in a box.

The three things I changed are a reliable extruder, which allows multi part layer by layer builds. No rafts, warping or de-lamination due to the heated bed. No string due to reversing. These developments completely changed the experience. Once people take these on-board the cost of printed parts will come right down.

As soon as I have a second machine working I will dedicate it to making parts in the background while I continue to use HydraRaptor for research.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I agree Nophead, but you obviously haven't debt with cross stitchers.

My wife can basically talk around the house carrying on a conversation while doing it, never looking down. It's just something she does with the back of her mind, just like when we print. We might not be watching, but we are ALWAYS listening.

I would venture to say your machine is likely one of the better set up around. Also your extruder is one of the more reliable. My only point is that NOW, and any time in the NEAR future is still too low to get a lot of people printing, but still too high for the average person to pay. If your going to pay $350 for a printed set, you almost do better to just buy a Rapman or Makerbot.

If everyone's printer worked as well as yours, and everyone had your skill at using it, the cost would go down.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

Yeah, I'm printing a Mendel set on my MakerBot, and I have to do manual cleanup with the parts because it isn't finely tuned yet. I recently switched to PLA, so there's no warping. Also, I like to watch the MakerBot to make sure nothing goes wrong during the printing.

It takes a lot of time for those of us who don't have perfect machines

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"The whole is more than the sum of its parts." - Aristotle

[www.cyrozap.com]

i don't have all standard parts but i do mendel vertex the z bar holders and the y idlers. Ben, email me (jamesdanielvATmsn.com, change AT with @)and we'll work out shipping. no cost of parts.


james

Cyrozap Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah, I'm printing a Mendel set on my MakerBot,
> and I have to do manual cleanup with the parts
> because it isn't finely tuned yet. I recently
> switched to PLA, so there's no warping. Also, I
> like to watch the MakerBot to make sure nothing
> goes wrong during the printing.
>
> It takes a lot of time for those of us who don't
> have perfect machines

Even with a well tuned machine that doesn't normally have any issues it still takes a heck of a long time!

> The plastic itself costs ~$20 for a whole machine, and time spent printing

I do believe 1kg of plastic is required for a set of Mendel, its 40-45GPB +shipping from bitsfrombytes.com.

Also you can buy cheap plastic from elsewhere (like 5kg in a spool), but there is a chance it has an oval shape, and worse quality.

I did this, and broke my extruder (the ptfe tube), so I have a little experience of this.

Also there are many things which can go wrong, so leaving the machine unattended is a brave thing.

Also depending on your machine, a heated bed can consume lot of power, which costs money (especially if you pause the print during night, you cant switch off the heated bed). Mine use 200W, so pausing a print for a night costs 1.6kWh.

Despite all my finetunings, my success rate is not something Im proud of.

Recently I discovered the aging of Polyimide tape (blogpost coming).

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Mendel build log: [blog.arcol.hu]