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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

They’re ignoring the time to cure and process resin prints though so doesn’t seem all that fair.

There are post processing steps in injection molding. As you can see in the video, parts come off with gates on them that need to be removed. In the case of these printed parts, you can wash 1000 in one 10 minute cycle.

A full accounting and comparison of cost and time including post processing, in a general way that applies to many parts, is tough to do well.

They also ignore making the mold, so I guess that evens it out? Mold tools are very expensive and commit you to a lot of design constraints as well as lock you in to minimum production cycles that make sense. I agree its not fair, thought.

Given the costs, I'm surprised they didn't do more printers, too.

Design constraints aren't an issue for prototype runs, since you'll have the same constraints for the production mold. Actually, now that I'm writing this out.... the constraints issue is a plus, since it's a dry run of how the actual production parts will be produced. Doing the 1000pc run on a 3d printer won't expose an 'oops' that can't actually be made in a molded part.

I agree with you, but what I was getting at was that if you're just going to print the parts for the entire run, you aren't constrained by the issues like draft, etc. Obviously, if your run is 10,000,000 pieces, then you have no choice, but if your run is <100,000, you might be better off making different design decisions and just getting more printers.

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