Kessil

New Nem guard from BRS

I wouldn't say BRS came out with them, BRS is sell what someone manufactured. By the looks of it, 3D printed, and I'm sorry but if I'm buying a commercial product like this and paying like ~$40 I want it to look like a finished product, not sure if it's just a pre-production photo but there's all sorts of burs on the edges. Throw it in a tumbler or whatever you need to do to knock off those edges, but that just looks sloppy. I know Griz 3d prints his too, but his pictures look like a much more finished product.
 
Based on the design, those would be made by a guy in the UK (who called me all kinds of nasty names and threatened to sue me when I started selling my design).

Its a more elegant design than mine, I'm not very good at 3d modeling yet, but he is terrible at printing with this material. Under extrusion not only causes visual blemishes like that but with thin walls like this, isn't as durable as it should be.

He was originally charging $50 + shipping for the mp40 when I started selling mine. He cut his price to $25 a few months later and blames me for his loss in profits, even though I don't ship outside of the US.

I have had a few online retailers willing to stock my guards but honestly, I can barely keep up with demand from this forum, Facebook and ebay orders as it is.

I have nearly two dozen designs of things I would sell if I had available machine time. Frag racks, probe mounts, float switch mounts, test kit organizers / dryers, mushroom / anemone boxes, dosing pump mounts, power supply mounts.... Basically anything I've needed and don't want to buy, I just make.

The only other thing holding me up is I'm really nervous about magnets. I really don't want to be responsible for a magnet coating failure and it leeching into someone's tank.
 
sfsuphysics said:
I wouldn't say BRS came out with them, BRS is sell what someone manufactured. By the looks of it, 3D printed, and I'm sorry but if I'm buying a commercial product like this and paying like ~$40 I want it to look like a finished product, not sure if it's just a pre-production photo but there's all sorts of burs on the edges. Throw it in a tumbler or whatever you need to do to knock off those edges, but that just looks sloppy. I know Griz 3d prints his too, but his pictures look like a much more finished product.
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Petg is not hard to print with but it is hard to make look really good. It has to print slowly and you have to have your machine dialed in. The sweet spot for making it look good is quite small compared to other materials. I put a $70 all metal hotend on each machine just because of this material. 3d printing is not ideal for mass production, especially if you don't have time to maintain each machine and do quality control checks on every part printed.
 
sfsuphysics said:
I wouldn't say BRS came out with them, BRS is sell what someone manufactured. By the looks of it, 3D printed, and I'm sorry but if I'm buying a commercial product like this and paying like ~$40 I want it to look like a finished product, not sure if it's just a pre-production photo but there's all sorts of burs on the edges. Throw it in a tumbler or whatever you need to do to knock off those edges, but that just looks sloppy. I know Griz 3d prints his too, but his pictures look like a much more finished product.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that looks really crummy.
 
I think they look good for what they are. You can’t expect 3D printed plastic items to look as finished as professionally mass-produced items.

That said, to me the appeal of 3D printing is to make unique items in small runs, not many thousands of the exact same item. We already have better and cheaper ways of doing that.
 
I somewhat disagree. 3d printed stuff is obviously 3d printed but that isn't an excuse for it to look like crap.

You are right though, it's not very practical for mass production.

I wish I had $9k to do a batch of injection molded guards. They would look much better and be more durable.
 
Right, I would expect that if they can make enough volume to sell on brs then it should be cost effective enough to just do it as an injection mold.
 
grizfyrfyter said:
You need to do a run of like 5k parts to make it cost effective.

That's a risk.
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I would think if he’s selling to BRS he’s got to be having to make quite a few. Also unless he worked out an exclusive deal with them he could be selling them to other online retailers as well. 5,000 units doesn’t seem like that much if you have a national market.
 
Once the new machines are set up and running smoothly, I have to crank out about 50 for a couple sites. If they have enough demand, I'd run an injection set and have the printers working on other stuff.

I'm not even taking commission orders right now (partially cause I had to take the guy to court to get paid for the last big job).
 
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