Prusa gets a lot of complaints on social media nowadays, and this blog post is a response to that. I think it's interesting to get a glimpse of their manufacturing difficulties: ... (By the way,...
Prusa gets a lot of complaints on social media nowadays, and this blog post is a response to that. I think it's interesting to get a glimpse of their manufacturing difficulties:
It is quite common for a supplier to change some seemingly insignificant manufacturing process and even parts with the same specs suddenly show different results in our tests. This can negatively affect the printer’s performance.
To give you an example: some MK4 printers from the initial batches had stepper motors causing unexpected noise, contradicting our claim about the extremely quiet operation, something our printers are well known for. It was hard to find these noisy motors because they were mixed randomly in different batches. It took our team two weeks to create a special device that could quickly identify them. We used this device to check motors in our factory and also built another one and sent it to our motor supplier. Once we fixed the quality issue, we had to return many motors we already had in our warehouse. This situation has made our production a bit slower and more complicated.
Similar problems happen when a supplier suddenly changes any of the used materials or a step in the manufacturing process. This one case was unusually complex, but similar (although less severe) issues are something that our purchasing and quality departments need to deal with several times a month. Dealing with such problems in the supply chain happens often and can cause unexpected delays, which is why we sometimes inform you of these issues at the last moment.
From time to time, I see a simple suggestion: “Well, forget the local suppliers, I want my 3D printer and I don’t care where you source your parts.” In light of the problems described above, it’s not a universal solution. You will find parts sourced from China in our printers because some components are manufactured in sufficient quantities only there. And things are more complicated than just finding the supplier. Government subsidies, tax breaks and strategic efforts to dominate the 3D printing industry (similar to what happened in the market of drones, pharmaceuticals, or currently, electric cars) have resulted in such situations as diverting ordered and already paid-for components to Chinese companies.
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Every once in a while, I see a comment suggesting that we should stop using 3D printed parts on our printers, as it is slowing our production down. While I see where the logic behind such comments is coming from, it couldn’t be further from reality. Printed parts were never a bottleneck in our production. After all, we can always add more printers to the farm, optimize the G-code or use injection molding for the parts that take the longest time to print.
Yes, we do actually have injection molding lines in-house. However, molds are really expensive and take weeks to get right. And you are limited with the geometry of the parts – there are shapes that injection molding simply cannot do. On the other hand with 3D printing, we iterate the parts and constantly improve them.
(By the way, it's also true that there are shapes that 3D printers can't do, though there are likely fewer constraints.)
I have an MK4 and enclosure in a box right next to me waiting to be built. I have an MK3 that became and MK3s then an MK3S+ through upgrades that has printed several km of filament. Though it's...
I have an MK4 and enclosure in a box right next to me waiting to be built. I have an MK3 that became and MK3s then an MK3S+ through upgrades that has printed several km of filament. Though it's still a fantastic and reliable printer, I am looking forward to the load cell bed leveling and input shaping.
I looked hard at the Bambu labs printers because the cost is pretty good and the multi material system seems pretty good. But in the end it was not going to be my printer. I would be at the whim of enshittification and a proprietary software ecosystem. I wasn't confident that I would be able to tweak it and upgrade it so that it would still be relevant 6 years later like the MK3.
The community around the Prusa printers and the commitment to transparency and open source from Prusa is nearly unheard of these days, so supporting the company and the business model seems worth doing.
3D printers are precision machines, so having quality parts are extremely important. My Voron, for instance, has a Z axis that I have calibrated to something like 0.0005mm. On top of that, a lot...
3D printers are precision machines, so having quality parts are extremely important. My Voron, for instance, has a Z axis that I have calibrated to something like 0.0005mm.
On top of that, a lot of the parts that go in it are going to either be unique to 3D printers - hotends and extruders are typically made entirely of components that are made specifically for the application - or are uncommon in consumer applications and are therefore fairly rare. Some parts like stepper motors and linear rails have gone down in price spectacularly because the market for those components have exploded in demand from the consumer 3D printer market.
WIth that in mind it's not surprising that Prusa has to get some of their parts in China. It would appear that China must have eclipsed Western nations in investment in manufacturing, because it seems like the highest quality machined parts come from China these days. That's not to say that quality parts can't be made elsewhere of course (just look at companies like E3D, Microswiss, and Bondtech for some prime examples), but it's very hard to beat their quality:cost ratio much of the time. To use my Voron as an example, it's made entirely of parts sourced from China; to buy from US or European sources would have easily doubled the total cost. I have a hard time imagining what I would have paid for things like the linear rails or aluminum extrusions: I don't even know if there is a US manufacturer for them.
Prusa gets a lot of complaints on social media nowadays, and this blog post is a response to that. I think it's interesting to get a glimpse of their manufacturing difficulties:
...
(By the way, it's also true that there are shapes that 3D printers can't do, though there are likely fewer constraints.)
I have an MK4 and enclosure in a box right next to me waiting to be built. I have an MK3 that became and MK3s then an MK3S+ through upgrades that has printed several km of filament. Though it's still a fantastic and reliable printer, I am looking forward to the load cell bed leveling and input shaping.
I looked hard at the Bambu labs printers because the cost is pretty good and the multi material system seems pretty good. But in the end it was not going to be my printer. I would be at the whim of enshittification and a proprietary software ecosystem. I wasn't confident that I would be able to tweak it and upgrade it so that it would still be relevant 6 years later like the MK3.
The community around the Prusa printers and the commitment to transparency and open source from Prusa is nearly unheard of these days, so supporting the company and the business model seems worth doing.
3D printers are precision machines, so having quality parts are extremely important. My Voron, for instance, has a Z axis that I have calibrated to something like 0.0005mm.
On top of that, a lot of the parts that go in it are going to either be unique to 3D printers - hotends and extruders are typically made entirely of components that are made specifically for the application - or are uncommon in consumer applications and are therefore fairly rare. Some parts like stepper motors and linear rails have gone down in price spectacularly because the market for those components have exploded in demand from the consumer 3D printer market.
WIth that in mind it's not surprising that Prusa has to get some of their parts in China. It would appear that China must have eclipsed Western nations in investment in manufacturing, because it seems like the highest quality machined parts come from China these days. That's not to say that quality parts can't be made elsewhere of course (just look at companies like E3D, Microswiss, and Bondtech for some prime examples), but it's very hard to beat their quality:cost ratio much of the time. To use my Voron as an example, it's made entirely of parts sourced from China; to buy from US or European sources would have easily doubled the total cost. I have a hard time imagining what I would have paid for things like the linear rails or aluminum extrusions: I don't even know if there is a US manufacturer for them.
Related video from Strange Parts posted last month:
Touring inside Prusa Research's factory to see how they make their 3d printers