> while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional prototype for a hardware product I'm building.
You'll learn a ton of stuff about RepRaps but you're going to be behind on your hardware product at some point, if the goal is your hardware product maybe wood or farming out the parts to people that already have 3D printers would be a short-cut time wise and depending on what you do also precision and finish wise?
I'm all for a good round of Yak shaving though so don't let me distract you from your mission ;) But if you're serious about your hardware product and attempting a start-up speed is somewhat of an essential thing.
I have thought the same thing many times, and wondered whether this decision would be my battle of Waterloo, that is very good advice!
I wanted to not just build a manufactured product, I wanted to build a kit, like the RepRap, that could be fabricated by ordinary people out of a combination of printed and mostly commodity parts. I wanted to build a new kind of hardware product, one where the lead time of tooling and manufacturing could be cut out, at least for the kit version, I plan a full normal manufacturing process as well. So building was us eating our own dog food.
It's an experiment to see if the RepRap model can be extended to other areas. It's an experiment to see if 3D printers can live up to their hype. The hype is incomplete, as small plastic parts are only so useful. But I think plastic parts in combination with circuit boards, arduinos, laser cut wood parts and commodity manufactured parts is incredibly powerful.
This was my thinking on building vs buying a 3D printer when I made the decison:
I needed a large build area, and so the 12" Prusa for $650 seemed a good choice, compared to a $1300 Solidoodle that I read bad reviews of, saying that it did not work well, or a $2000+ Makerbot that I just did not have the money for on my bootstrapping budget.
When I bought the kit the seller advertised a build time of 3+ hours. I thought that's nothing, we can do it in one or two evenings and it won't set us back at all. It took much longer, but what really took time was the fine calibration and the learning curve of designing 3D parts that are able to be printed one layer at a time.
The instructional videos were outdated in many places, on older iterations of the kit. We had a heated bed short out, and we had no experience with RepRaps. The parts didn't come labelled and just figuring out what was what took a while. I didn't realize until the end that Colin at MakerFarm provides heroic, incredibly responsive email support and so many of the questions that stumped us for a while could have been answered almost instantaneously with a quick email.
Despite that, Makerfarm still makes a really great RepRap kit that I highly recommend and Colin is seriously a standup guy that replaced the shorted out heated bed for free.
I considered farming the parts out, but knew I would need to print multiple iterations and I would not get it right on the first or second or third attempts and it would slow down our OODA loop.
I can't wait to show the world what we have been doing but we are just not quite ready yet, still in super secret g14 classified startup mode.
I can't wait either, you've certainly peaked my interest!
Looks like you've really thought this out well, one of my previous experiences along the Yak Shaving line wasn't so hot so I figured I'd just give you my $0.02. Ping me when you're ready to show please!
You'll learn a ton of stuff about RepRaps but you're going to be behind on your hardware product at some point, if the goal is your hardware product maybe wood or farming out the parts to people that already have 3D printers would be a short-cut time wise and depending on what you do also precision and finish wise?
I'm all for a good round of Yak shaving though so don't let me distract you from your mission ;) But if you're serious about your hardware product and attempting a start-up speed is somewhat of an essential thing.