Practical write-ups on costing, failure tracking, automation and functional design — from a working reliability engineer.
Most makers price on filament weight alone and lose money on every job. Here's the full cost stack — material, electricity, labor, overhead and failure rate — and how to set a sell price that actually clears a margin.
Layer adhesion, stringing, warp, bed adhesion, nozzle clog. Log every failure with a mode and a root cause, and a Pareto chart shows you exactly where to spend your fix-it time. Run failures like a maintenance department runs downtime.
The five-tab system I use to run my print farm: job log, filament inventory, cost dashboard, failure log and setup. Every job logged, every spool accounted for — without writing a line of code.
Material selection, tolerance and fit for functional parts, and how to spec a print job for a facility. The judgment calls that separate a functional part from a fragile trinket.
One facility with 20 sensor enclosures is $1,500+. Why repeat B2B orders beat retail volume, and how to turn a single custom job into a standing account.
Building the operation in public: what to automate, what to measure, and what actually moves revenue. Follow the build on YouTube.
Wyze