DePartedPrinter wrote:Why doesn't Filastruder just buy every printer available and design mounts for upgrades? Be a great tax write off anyways.
Short answer:
As I've explained previously, time.
Long answer:
Option 1: I do it all.
Lets say there are 10 printers we want to cover. This isn't actually that many:
SD2/3/4
SD Press
SD Workbench
Printrbot Metal
Printbot Simple
Printrbot Plus
Prusa i3
Mendel90
Lulzbot TAZ4
Rostock MAX v2
There are still a LOT of printers left out, but we'll roll with it for the sake of argument. The only printer I am familiar with is the first one. For a printer I'm unfamiliar with, I'd expect 3 full days of time spent: designing/reverse engineering, printing/mounting/firmware updates, testing/documentation.
So that's 240 hours of work. Now I also do consulting work, so I'd have to give that up for a while. My consulting work starts at $50/hour, so that would be a minimum of $12k of consulting income lost, plus depreciation value of the printers (~$10k if given away, $5k if sold). If the printers are given away or sold, additional shipping expenses are incurred, and who is at fault if the printer is damaged in shipment?
Option 2:
Give away free parts/store credit.
This takes much less than 3 days, since the end user is already very familiar with the printer at hand - and how to speak to/document for its users. If a new hotend came out, I could probably design and document a mount for it in a day for my SD3. Clearly this model works, as MacGyverX has already ended up with a free hotend as a result. Lets say everyone gets a free hotend as a result of their work. This costs me less than $80/ea, times 10.
So to recap:
Option 1 costs $17,000 - $22,000.
Option 2 costs $800.
Which one is better?
Then they could do a consignment with Filastruder to sell the mounts in Tim's store. Win Win
