For Sale: RepRap Mendel Parts Printed with Stratasys FDM

Hello everyone,

I would like to introduce you to Protovantage.com. We are a friendly rapid prototyping company located in Morrisville, North Carolina. Our mission is to provide affordable rapid prototyping for individuals, hobbyists and educators using our Stratasys Dimension 3D printers.

We are announcing today a library of RepRap Mendel plastic parts available for purchase online. Many of these high-quality ABS plastic parts cost only a few dollars and we think you will find overall our prices very affordable. Unlike most of our competitors, we impose no minimum fees. Buy 1 part or a dozen and you'll always get our lowest price.

Rapid prototyping is our passion and we wish to support the do-it-yourself 3D printing community. So please, stop by, take a look, and let us know what you think. If we see reasonable interest in this offering, you can look forward to future promotions, offerings and more!

Thank you,
The Protovantage Team

http://www.protovantage.com/reprap/

FYI $1,577 for a full set of RP parts for 1 Mendel, I broke down the numbers on my blog.

I love you guy's ability to print 1 off parts. What is your accuracy of printing, and what is the lead time on parts?

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

Yepp, nice to see the other end of the price range!;-)

I would like to know, how much time is required to print the full set. 1 hours?;-) 24hours? 168hours?

WOW do I see that right? A full set of parts over 1500. to rich for my blood.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2009 10:41AM by troycoon.

Hello,

As posted in a comment to spacexula's blog, we initially setup this offering as a way for people to get single Mendel parts printed affordably with commercial quality. Where, for instance, the part needs more accuracy or strength than what can be printed on a RepRap. We assumed some parts you would want to make yourself, others you might rather buy.

We see that many are interested in entire kits. With that in mind, we'll try to find ways of lowering the cost for a kit. Keep in mind however, it is unlikely you will find dirt-cheap. commercially produced RepRap plastic parts. To do so would require high-volume production with an injection-mold process. The RepRap CAD models were not designed with injection molding in mind, and injection molding has huge overhead for short runs.


To answer the questions above, the layer thickness of our 3D printers is 0.010in with an X/Y resolution even greater. Parts are printed in "ABS Plus" plastic which is Stratasys' strongest material. Currently the Mendel parts are printed on-demand, so the lead time is dependent on our work queue. We out-price other commercial rapid prototyping firms by not providing guaranteed turn around times. In many cases turn around will be less than a few days, but if we have have a long work queue, it could be a week or so.

As a very quick calculation, to print 1 solid (not sparse) copy of all the parts in the Mendel part library we have it would take about 43hrs. Many of those parts need more than 1 copy so the actual time for a complete set would be much more.

As you can see that is a lot of machine time. Time that could be spent printing parts for corporate customers. So we are at odds when wanting to help the RepRap community and trying to pay our bills. But we we will continue working at making RepRap parts even more affordable.

Cheers.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2009 12:53PM by protovantage.

> As a very quick calculation, to print 1 solid (not
> sparse) copy of all the parts in the Mendel part
> library we have it would take about 43hrs. Many of
> those parts need more than 1 copy so the actual
> time for a complete set would be much more.
>
> As you can see that is a lot of machine time. Time
> that could be spent printing parts for corporate
> customers. So we are at odds when wanting to help
> the RepRap community and trying to pay our bills.
> But we we will continue working at making RepRap
> parts even more affordable.
>
> Cheers.

So, if Mendel take 72 hours to print, on a home made open source printer, and it takes you guys 43 hours on a true rapid prototyping machine....


In other words our $750 dollar printer is only 58% slower than a $10-$20 thousand dollar machine?

I think we all owe Adrian Bowyer and the rest of the team a Christmas card.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

Don't get me wrong, RepRap is great. But I hope you are considering the accuracy, repeatability and strength of commercial rapid prototyping. The advantages are not just time.

RepRap will only get better, but the commercial industry will likely have capabilities RepRap doesn't such as metal prototypes with Selective Laser Sintering, the incredible accuracy of Stereolithography, and high-strength such as with our Fused Deposition Modeling.

If you would like to see the difference for yourself, we are offering free sample parts online with an instant quote. (Which was turned off by mistake when we made our announcement on this forum).

Cheers.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2009 02:22PM by protovantage.

As posted in a comment to spacexula's blog, we initially setup this offering as a way for people to get single Mendel parts printed affordably with commercial quality. Where, for instance, the part needs more accuracy or strength than what can be printed on a RepRap.

Funny thing is, Mendels seem to do a pretty good job of making Mendel parts with sufficient accuracy and strength.

But I'm sure folk here appreciate the offer and will consider your services when they are missing a Mendel part or two.

Will you guys be building a Mendel or two?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2009 03:29PM by SebastienBailard.

I only stated the "Not beating up" part because many people on here think that anything above $200 for a printed Mendel set is too much.

I am sure that the parts you make are many times higher quality than what any RepRap can currently produce, and that if RepRap ever get's to commercial quality, the commercial sector will have improved just as much.

Honestly for the RepRap community the likely best application of your technology is the printing of tight tolerance items, like advanced extruders, or gearboxes.

Thanks for your offer! I will likely end up using your services at some point.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

>> As a very quick calculation, to print 1 solid (not
>> sparse) copy of all the parts in the Mendel part
>> library we have it would take about 43hrs. Many of
>> those parts need more than 1 copy so the actual
>> time for a complete set would be much more.

> So, if Mendel take 72 hours to print, on a home made open source
> printer, and it takes you guys 43 hours on a true rapid prototyping
> machine....

spacexula: You got your number wrong. 43 hours is printing all unique parts.
Mendel has 98 parts in total from which are 42 uniques.

So about 90hours seems more right.

And I dont know how you got the 72hours either. I have parts which printed about 7 hours.
The z-leadscrew-base_2off.stl for example took me 6 hours and 17 minutes to print at 16mm/s.

Im not completely happy with the part so I will half the extrusion speed, so it means about 13 hours continous printing!

So you seems to underestimated the required time to print a copy of mendel.

Just my 2 cents.

> Funny thing is, Mendels seem to do a pretty good job of making Mendel
> parts with sufficient accuracy and strength. smiling smiley

There are some difficult parts, where it does make sense to order it.

Namely Im thinking of:
z-leadscrew-base_2off.stl (2*51.87$)
x-carriage-lower_1off.stl (43.67$)
x-carriage-upper_1off.stl (37.70$)

I think the two most difficult parts are x-carriage-lower_1off.stl and x-carriage-upper_1off.stl.

Best regards,
Khiraly

I think the Mendel prints substantially faster then 16mm/s and doesn't have any problem printing its own parts in PLA.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

It is very good to know which parts are most difficult to produce, I may use this survive for those parts. I have been kicking around the idea of using my cnc mill to make some of the parts and using the cupcake cnc at work for some parts. Maybe I can cut the buildtime for my sons Mendel.

Cheers
TroyGeek

> spacexula: You got your number wrong. 43 hours is
> printing all unique parts.
> Mendel has 98 parts in total from which are 42
> uniques.
>
> So about 90hours seems more right.
>
> And I dont know how you got the 72hours either. I
> have parts which printed about 7 hours.
> The z-leadscrew-base_2off.stl for example took me
> 6 hours and 17 minutes to print at 16mm/s.

I am still waiting on my Makerbot delivery (Got my tracking # 2 hours ago!!!). The 72 hour print time is based off hydroraptors Darwin print time, and a number I have seen floating around the highly reliable, never wrong, internet forums .

Thanks for clarifying

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

> I think the Mendel prints substantially faster then 16mm/s and doesn't
> have any problem printing its own parts in PLA.

I dont think 32 or 64mm/s extrusion speed can be achieved without altering the extrusion speed in the middle of printing.

I would not mind printing the raft at 32mm/s. But when the layer is really small, the machine shakes a lot.

Although Im only building the Mendel, I dont operate one (yet).

Btw, how reliable is the Mendel's extrusion head? Ie. can I push 1-2kg of plastic without any major hiccups?

Best regards,
Laszlo

Since I moved to a stepper based extruder, the extruder is no longer my limiting factor on speed. I still do the outlines at 16mm/s to maintain accuarcy but I now do the infill at 32mm/s, so I could now beat the times I published for Darwin.

That is with a moving table that weighs 8Kg. A mendel should be able to go at least as fast.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

nophead: and what do you do, with layers, which are really small?
My machine shakes a lot at 16mm/s, so I fear to go faster...

But I would like to hear some data of an Mendel owner. What is the highest speed, etc.

But honestly knowing all this tricks and playing with skeinforge takes time. Im already playing (ie. finetuning mine) more than a month now.

And I almost printed a full set of Mendel, so I know how frustrating can it be. But definietly I could not reproduce the entire Mendel set under 72hours. Not even under a week. And I cant run it 24/7 because I cant sleep with machine running at night.


However I do see some room of improvements in the building process. But I cant believe 72hours is achievable...;-\

you know i find it hilarious that this printer is being sold. when i manage to find all the parts i need for this thing i will be using the philosophy that the creator of this had in mind and thats to make one improve it and pass it on FOR FREE not try to make some half assed profit on it. i find it sad that the people of this world are taking one mans dream, sprinkling it with a little greed, and turning it into a shit storm of stupidity. so thank you greedy people for ruining yet another great idea by turning it into something that almost noone can do.