[tpmx]

I never really understood why they stayed with building a giant 3d printer farm to build all those 3d printer parts, except for it being "cool". Especially in .cz, I think think they could have gotten all those parts injection moulded for a lower cost. At a higher precision.

[jrockway]

Dogfooding is valuable. If there is a fundamental flaw in their printers, they're going to find out about it firsthand.

It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.

[tpmx]

Sure, but they've kept doing it for many years now. At some point it shifts into some kind of "religion". Or, judging from your response, it's a part of their brand?

[kbob]

Keep in mind that the printers are getting regular upgrade cycles. A 2019 i3 MK3S is nothing like a 2015 i3. Firmware upgrades are released every couple of months. So continuous testing is still valuable.

[jrockway]

I was going to cite this example. I think recent MK3Ss have different fan shrouds than the first batch of MK3Ss, because the community found a better design. All Prusa had to do to upgrade new customers was to send their print farm a different file; total cost $0. Meanwhile, customers with the original design could download a file and print it, getting a factory-quality part for (essentially) free.

Managing a printer farm sounds like a lot work, but they did do that work and can reap the benefit that prototyping and manufacturing are the exact same process. It's like saying "why does Google have all these servers when they could just buy them from AWS?" Well, they got good at building datacenters before you could just rent a datacenter from Amazon. If you're good at something, keep it up!

[magicalhippo]

Having just built a MK3S and not having done much printing before, it was nice to see just what kind of things you could build. The level of detail, how to design the parts that need to be somewhat strong etc.

Another point is that it allows you to print spare parts for your own or a friends printer if something breaks, or print upgraded parts if they tweak the design.

[tpmx]

The could have

a) injection moulded the parts

b) provided all of the parts as 3d models for for spares

though. There's something else all you guys are being weird about.

Is it the IKEA effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect) in action?

I was interested in upgrading my 3d printer to a prusa model.. but... the having the parts being built to subpar-precision using a FDM printer in a Czech 3d printer cluster didn't seem super exciting in itself...

[cthalupa]

>having the parts being built to subpar-precision using a FDM printer in a Czech 3d printer cluster didn't seem super exciting in itself...

None of the parts need to have tighter tolerances or higher precision for the Prusa printers to work well.

The fact of the matter is, print quality on basically any FDM printer out there can be dialed in and be really damn close. Even on the cheaper ones. The differences are more on print speed, bed leveling, crash/out of filament/etc. detection, recovery after power loss, etc. And none of those are affected by whether or not the plastic was injection molded or 3D printed.

In exchange, they gain a lot of dogfooding on their designs, including through physical and software upgrades, etc. They get to do a lot of testing on how well things like their powder coated sheets hold up to extended workhorse levels of printing.

And yes, some of it is a bit of marketing - Our printers are so good, we print them on themselves! - and the adhering to the whole RepRap movement, but there are a lot of benefits that they clearly believe outweigh the downsides.

[mch82]

The objective of the RepRap project is 3D printers that are “self-replicating”, meaning they print 100% of their own parts.