Dadio wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 5:51 am
It's very hard to guess what is going to sell , there are quite a few parts that are either on Shapeways or Thiniverse for free that I though would move fast but have not moved much or at all , even some of the parts that are relatively cheap on Shapeways don't get any interest , I though that once I got the 834b Dogfighter gearbox on sale it would move fast as they are popular cars and the gearbox is unobtainium , if your paying a monthly fee then you need to be pretty sure of sales and that requires you to advertise in some way , look at Ampro Engineering and his You Tube stuff , I'm fairly introverted especially with a camera involved and it has to be produced well too , its worth really analysing Ampro's you tube stuff because that's kind of how to do it .
Yeah, agree, but those guys are probably doing this in a very different way than what we are doing. I personally prefer buying a stl or a set of stls, and manage the impression by myself, not only because I have a 3D printer and that some stuff are easy to print by yourself, but also because I found out that with the boxed way on imaterialise, I can send a lot of part in one go for a MJF printing (it maybe the same for SLS, but I didn't check, because theroically MJF PA12 is stronger and more precise, although with less options in terms of materials), I could save a lot of money on the print itself compared to order parts one by one (the box with the parts I ordered was 60ish delivered, and it would have been 180+ delivered if I had chosen to send each part separately)...
The example of the Sand Rail from Knight Custom is quite interesting : about 300 euros in parts from Shapeways Marketplace, about 30euros plus printing for the whole STL set. I made estimations for a Hunter chassis (based on a stl I cna't share) : the lowest print costs I found are around 100 in MJF PA12 and around 130 euros in MJF PA12 40% Glass filled. And depending of the service you use, print a complete chassis, print chassis parts separately or print chassis part nested change totally the price or not: each service has its own way to price, and it needs to get understood to take the most benefit of the prints. At the end, I believe that getting a stl set is at the end going to get cheaper (if you want more details on this and the estimations I did, feel free to contact me, you know where to find me
)... And that it is even without talking about proper capabilities to print (which is always possible)...
In any case,
@HiTec, hope you don't mind too much the diversion from your original topic, and
@Dadio, thanks for sharing viewpoints
