M2's spotted in 3ders.org article!

[pyronaught]

The labor would be the time spent changing out a print job, which can vary a lot depending on how you do it. If you have to let the platform cool to around 40 to get the part off, prep the surface with something (glue stick, hairspray, ABS slurry or whatever), let the plate heat back up and then start the next job, believe it or not that is about a 20 minute process. It doesn't seem like it when you are doing it, but I timed it. You can cut that down to 5 minutes by working with two plates of glass and swapping them out to keep from having to wait for the cool down and heat up steps, which is where the majority of time gets spent. At the end of a print you turn the hot plate back on immediately so it doesn't cool (or just change the code to not shut itself off), then remove the hot glass plate with the part still on it and drop in the pre-prepped cold glass. It only takes a few minutes for the cold glass to get up to the working temp. Then while it's printing, the other plate with the part on it can cool all the way down and the part pops off while you are doing something else and not "on the clock".

[ednisley]

spend your whole print time tending to the printer

We don't know how many printers or how many bottles per run, so I made some semi-wild-ass guesses.

Let's try again with different SWAGs:

At 1.5 hours/bottle, I'd really want (at least) six bottles on the platform: nine hours would eat up a shift. Half a dozen printers gives you 36 bottles/day and I don't see that as the kind of production that can supply orders like the one for 1000 bottles they mentioned.

If they're making money selling ointment, they need lots of bottles. With 24 printers (!) that each produce one platform of six bottles per shift (say 144 bottles/day), then the operator must turn around three printers every hour: 20 minutes per printer. That's about as fast as you could possibly want do it on average, figuring things don't go smoothly every time.

If you figure burdened labor at $24/hr, each set of six bottles costs you $8: still a bit over a buck a bottle.

You'd need job scheduling to stagger the printer finish times over the entire day. Set 'em all up the day before and automagically start each printer at a specific time during third shift?

It starts to look a lot like a factory, doesn't it? [grin]

[pyronaught]

Kinda makes you wonder how they are going to produce those 1000 bottles. I didn't exactly see a wall full of printers there.

[insta]

Too bad they don't know about a guy who DOES have a wall of the same printers they are using plus the ability to do automated print ejection for 24-hour production.

[pyronaught]

Too bad they don't know about a guy who DOES have a wall of the same printers they are using plus the ability to do automated print ejection for 24-hour production.

Automated print ejection? Do you have video of that in action?

[insta]

no is trade secret and is definitely not using gcode to bash the part against the frame when the print is done

[pyronaught]

no is trade secret and is definitely not using gcode to bash the part against the frame when the print is done

I think I found your invention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Viy928RLsdU