Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_yes
Our students have been slow to adopt CAD, despite two engineering mentors' urgings, so we are thinking of using the following system to encourage them: The printer's primary use is for team projects and those will have highest priority on the printer. Team members are welcome to print items for personal projects. Items which they design will be charged the team's cost for filament and other consumables. Items which have been designed by others will be charged at a rate that is 25-50% higher.
Has any team tried something similar? How did it go?
Has anyone put together a cost-per-print analysis?
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Cost per print analysis, is pretty easy with FDM style printers. You should work out some depreciation rate. I would suggest something around 2500 hrs and split the cost of a replacement printer out over this. Then you can estimate cost of parts produced as material cost + electricity + depreciation. Electricity is going to be hard to estimate accurately. Fortunately, it is rather small. For hobbyist grade printers, I just count it as the sum of the wattage of the heating elements. This works out to around 200-300W for printers with a heated bed or around 4 cents per hour for most of the US. Things start to get murky when you start printing more than one persons parts at the same time. Calculating exactly how much time of the total each part would take is hard to do as the complexity and geometry plays a large part in print time.
This of course is working on the assumption that the labor in setting up and running the printer is free. If you are trying to calculate those costs, things start to get interesting.