We have an Objet 30 Prime in our office, There are good and bad point. to this printer. My biggest concern is waste, you spend a lot of money for the materials and average 33% of that to waste. Don’t get me wrong the parts are beautiful when they come off of the printer and out of the support.
- Vero materials get super soft and pliable when they get hot (120+ degrees) so do not leave them sit in your car with the ac off for more than 10 to 15 minutes. This is from experience. Also during post processing only use COLD water!
- Tango materials start breaking done in a few days. Found this our after our first few parts for a client when they came back to us because of failures.
- Endur (RGD450) - Good material in general and produces great looking parts.
As for the 2nd Quote, I would attempt to get 2nd quote to see if you can get a better price.
You can also look into the envisionTEC line of printers. We also have a ULTRA 3SP and Micro Edu. If you have any questions about these please ask.
Great questions! The Objet30 Pro is a lights out system when running with a wide range of materials. There are limitations to the material, as you will see with any 3D printer. There are always pros and cons. I would recommend reaching out to a company for a benchmark of your part printed on an Objet30 prime to test the materials yourself. With regards to pricing, I can tell you that the Objet Desktop line starts around $20k (+/- depending on time of year, availability of demo units, etc). The Objet24 for example runs at that price. This is a slightly smaller build tray than the 30 and only has one available material (VeroWhite rigid material). The Objet30, Objet30 Pro and Objet30 Prime are at different price points and offer different capabilities. Please feel free to let me know if there are any other questions I can help to answer about the system and it’s capabilities. (I have 3 Objet Desktop printers outside my office door) Thanks and Good luck!
we have Onjet30 Prime (not Pro, but this is next model) since January 2015 and I’m regretting buying it. Don’t take me wrong, it is a very good printer, high definition and can print models using different materials. But it is a very expensive to operate due to technology used and material cost. Price you were quoted is probably used machine as new was more expensive ( north of 30K$). Technology is similar to your office ink jet printer with the same high cost of consumable. In addition changing material requires purging the old material, cleanning jets and placing new material in. If you are switching from dark to light material or materials of different composition ( Vero to tango ) you have to run full material purge. Cost from 100g to north of 200g of wasted material. It is a lot. I don’t know what FDM printer you have today, but for this number of parts looking like one you are showing here (unless you need HD finish and special material) I will purchase several Zortrax M200 printers and run them 24/7 to finish run.
Where are you located? Find Zortrax dealer in your area and talk to them and ask to print test sample for you. This how we are working with our customers, we are printing sample on different printers and usually Zortrax is a winner, unless request is for HD part. If you are located in USA please check our web site.
That’s a good question. I don’t personally know of any machines like you are describing. When plastics were huge in the 80’s there were a lot of smaller presses but they weren’t automated. I’m sure if you look long enough you can find something!
Hi Brandon. I recently completed a 10,000 part order using 3d printers over the course of several months. Like you the mold was too expensive, the original lost in China. The end use was a replacement box for smart meters out of UL94 ABS. I made custom machines for the jobs with oversize nozzles, custom slicing and a special de-plating sub-routine routine, invented a special coating for the bed that releases the prints %100 at the cycle end, and a climate controlled cabinet to run the machines in with an attached dry compartment for filament storage. Once the system is running a worker would visit the print room 3 times a day for monitoring and restarting prints etc. I am at the University of Windsor in Canada, running a Fortus 400mc plus our own machines. The Fortus is what you want for those parts I think. I can set up a factory here for you at a very reasonable cost. I would love to give you a quote for the that run. I think it would be a great learning experience for our students. PS I’ve been starting to see unmoldable parts in million quantity for quotes. Its coming fast.
Hi Brandon, I’ve owned an Objet Eden 500 and an objet Connex 500 in the past. Probably the most user friendly and reliable technology on the market. Material isn’t cheap - but cost is relative to what your customer is paying! I would advise that you get a test print first. The materials are not mechanically strong and they have a low heat deflection temperature. All the best, Martin
if Your Costumer wants to have 10k of These simple Part, why he doesnt build a Injection Mould? That makes definetly more sense, than printing this Amount!! What Material You want to use? The Polyjet Materials are basically developed to print Prototypes, so the Lifetime isnt compareable to Injectionmoulding Parts!
I have two Objet30 Prime and at all Im satisfied with the Printers. But it insnt so easy as the Industry promised. The Postprocessing takes too much time and the Printspeed should be faster.
The Price is actually between 35-45k€. All less this Price is not seriously, from my Point of View.
I would look at far east rapid injection tooling, or potentially protolabs.com
I don’t think the Objet would give part of sufficient strength, and the cleaning of support, build time and setup would be very time consuming.
We have an Objet 24 in-house and as long as the cleaning maintenance procedures are followed, with a yearly service, it runs extremely well and reliably. However, for a job like this we would not consider using it.
I completely disagree with the comment you cannot print end use parts at costs where you can make money and prosper. There are printers out there today that are industrial grade, have a wide range of engineering grade materials available and you do not have to obtain the materials from the vendor where you purchased the printer.
