M2's spotted in 3ders.org article!

[ednisley]

They lose a little on every sale but make it up in the volume.

Aye! That order for 1000 jars might just catapult them into the ranks of negative-thousandaires...

Probably like chocolate: they don't ship PLA jars to the southwest US between May and October.

[JeremyV]

Believe it or not you can buy this stuff at Walgreen's
While it seems like it would not be cost effective to print those contaniers I am guessing that the product in the jars costs pennys so they can spend a bit on the jars and still make a profit.
In the short term printing the jars gets them off and running quickly.
It would be interesting to know how much wear on the printers there is and how many jars you can make before replacing printer parts. Also how much electricity it takes.
Making there own filliment has to cut down the cost as well.

They may not be making much an hour with there printers but then again it's not super hard to supervise a few printers while they do the work.
Definitely does not seem like the best way to maximize profits but hey at least so far they seem to be making money printing stuff so more power to them

In closing if they can produce there own filliment then it seemse like it wouldn't be very hard for them to print a part make a mold from the printed part melt out the PLA and start molding there own jars in house. That would save a ton of time. As far as the design not being able to be cast.. Make a slight design change and a 3 pice mold should do it.

[insta]

They could probably directly print a low-volume blow mold with ePC or ePA, and use it for blowing HDPE/LDPE bottles directly.

[Vandal968]

with ePC or ePA,

Had to look these up. ePC is Polycarbonate, but what is ePA? eSun's website doesn't really have any info:
http://www.esun3d.net/xwxx.aspx?id=527&TypeId=8

Do you know the glass transition temp for either of these?

cheers,
c

[insta]

ePA is their new Nylon (polyamide). I don't know if it's regularly available yet, but I ordered a bunch. I love it ...

I don't know the Tg, but the ePA wants a minimum of 250C to print (ignore that 215-235C suggested range...), and is happier around 270C. The ePC is somewhat similar, happiest around 250C. Regular PC is more like 290C.

[innkeeper]

seems cost effective to me if there making their own filament.
if you consider a 55lb bag of most polymers can be had for about 150 bucks, that is a lotta jars for little cost.

consider if you had them injection or blow molded elsewhere and get them shipped to you... its gonna be a lot more then that.
for small quantities for a home business. seems practical.

plus they get to have there own patented designed container they can call bio degradable.

hey... when your marketing your own product, every little bit helps.

I don't think the temperature thing is a reasonable concern, as most products that fall into this category, would melt and become unusable long before the pla packaging.

[pyronaught]

These people are hard-core!

Can one of you folks clue me in on the cost vs. profit for a DIY jar that requires 1.5 hours of machine time?

My back of the envelope says their machine depreciation, operator burden, materials, and suchlike adds up to maybe $5/hour/machine, so that jar costs $7.50 and should sell for $15-ish without contents.

But they're selling 3D printed pots for $4 and big jars for $9, with ointment.

What am I missing?

How are you calculating machine deprecation? That would be a tough thing to estimate without some data on how many hours the various components last and their replacement costs.

[ednisley]

calculating machine deprecation

If you expense the whole thing and be done with it, then it's a buck an hour for the first year. I doubt the useful life under continuous operation would exceed three years, so straight line depreciation would give you $0.30/hr. You could talk me down to maybe $0.25/hr, but not much lower.

Spare parts & tech labor might add up to $0.50/hr/machine; insta surely has a handle on that number. Correctly accounting for debug time & expertise, which surely isn't something you can expect at minimum wage, would be tricky.

However, the biggest part of the per-unit cost will be direct labor. If one operator can tend five machines (plus their filament factory?), burdened labor comes close to $5/hr all by itself.

No matter how I slice it, a 1.5 hour jar ain't cheap!

[pyronaught]

Well, given that every part on the M2 that sees wear is replaceable, you wouldn't have a full-out replacement cost every three years. You'd have a belt here, a motor there, electronics one year etc. The big custom machined components that make up the frame would cost the most, but those should last forever.

I wouldn't want to be doing short little print jobs like that for a few dollars though. The labor component is the same for a one hour print as it is for a twenty hour print, but you can sell the twenty hour print for much more even though it cost you roughly the same to make in terms of personal time. I just got done changing out 120 one hour print jobs over the course of a few weeks and I would NOT want to be doing that every day! For something with a small footprint like those jars at least you could batch print a whole tray full and cut down on the labor of changing out prints. It looked like they were only doing two at a time in the picture though.

[innkeeper]

I don't buy into the cost of labor in this case....
if you spend your whole print time tending to the printer, then there is something wrong.

i would imagine for a small business, the same person is printing the jars, filling them and boxing them.
so even if you can print a set of jars in 4 hours... chances are you spent all of 15 min dealing with printing.

i would assume they print as many as they can at once and seems like 2 printers (but who knows), and they are likely not standing there just watching it and not doing anything else.