I’m serious as printed Nutella when I say this. You’re about to get silly thoughts in your head. Silly thoughts about fabbing up this type of trinket or that type of trinket, in a really different way than ever before.
CloudFab is set to provide you with more options for your sly design fabrication needs. How? They’re gathering all the print shops and rapid prototyping manufacturers for you. You upload the model, they take care of the rest. How much easier could it get?
We caught up with Nick Pinkston of CloudFab to see what’s going down. He uses that big, scary ‘democratize’ word, but don’t worry, he’s also thrown in an invite code for all you lucky SolidSmack readers to try out the Beta site going live TODAY.
What sort of shenanigans is CloudFab up to anyway?
CloudFab uses distributed fabrication to democratize the means of production. By distributing the fabrication amongst many shops we expand the process types available while increasing flexibly and decreasing part cost.
In the beginning, we’re concentrating on all 3D printing processes (FDM, SLA, ZCorp, PolyJet/ProJet, SLS/M,and more), but more process types, like laser cutting/etching, will become available soon.
Our system gives you quotes from multiple shops on the system – like Kayak.com does for travel deals. All you have to do is upload an STL file, pick which process and material you’d like, and our system sends every applicable seller an RFQ. The sellers then quote you back, and you get to pick the quote that fits you best. After the parts are shipped, the buyer leaves feedback to reward sellers for good service.
Will I need to sell your kidney to start fabbing?
Yea, 3D printing is expensive (especially for hobbyists), and a big part of accessibility is price. So far, we’ve found that we’ve saved customers about 50% by using the spare capacity that all job shops have plenty of. Also, with enough demand, sellers make multiple parts per build which decreases part cost even more.
It’s not always about price though, most industrial designers we talk to prefer turnaround time and quality over low pricing. If you talk to hobbyists though, they’ll put up with a lot for cheap parts. For ultra cheap printing, we’re encouraging the MakerBot / RepRap community to sign up as sellers to serve the hobbyist market.
So, who’s CloudFab?
I did some diggin, found the GearHeadz twitter stream with the CloudFab alpha announcement and site link. There’s not much at the moment on the Gearheadz site, but you can see Nick in action on the local news coverage about Entrepreneurs in the Pittsburgh area.
Ya know what, there are a couple things happening in the 3D printing, fab-it-yourself world that are making it more likely that this all goes mainstream. Making the process easier is one step in that direction. The rest is up to the companies making the printers. Done and done.
Invites for SolidSmack Readers
Interested in trying out the site and seeing the process? There’s an invite for that. Visit the CloudFab site and enter the code solidsmack in the Code box.
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SolidSmack is a very small behemoth of an online community about 3D CAD, technology, design, robots, and ninjas… Ok, maybe not ninjas so much, but those guys are COOL so there just might be something about some dang ninjas.
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Hey, thanks for the coverage. I'm the other half of the GearHeadz/CloudFab team.
Just so you know, we'll probably be using the @CloudFab account to tweet and keep updates much more than @Gearheadz. GearHeadz is the name we're incorporated under, but CloudFab is our product.
If anyone has any other questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them.
This is a very cool development. It is a nice counterpart to ShapeWays in that you get access to a broader variety of 3D printers esp the Zcorp machines which are a pre-req if you want to export your Spore characters for extra large prints.
Shapeways still has an important edge with their templatized designs and their library of parts to be manufactured. Hopefully with enough scale material costs will come down a bit for the hobbyist market.
hobbyist market is key, not only because of the hobbyists, but the people/companies wanting to try out 3D Print andRP to explore how it can play into streamlinin' the manufacturing /design process.
This is but a peek at the future that awaits all of us creative and consumer types. I'm still busy in the 2D —> 3D world but once costs come down, jumping right into 3D will be great!
Jon @ WoodMarvels.com
Hi Jon. We'll be supporting laser cutting fairly soon, actually. So even if 3D costs aren't to your liking, you could still sell laser time if you'd like.
It's definitely exciting to see what applications this can push. We build scale architectural models with 3d printers and we've noticed getting past the CAD file challenges can be tough but the software is getting better and better.
Rhino has some great tools built-in for analyzing surfaces prior to 3d printing.
For anybody interested, here's a few photos of 3d printed scale models:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/architectural_mode...
Cheers,
Sweet Onion Creations
Bozeman, MT
But what about http://www.fabbersmarket.com? They connect 3D printers with buyers.
But what about http://www.fabbersmarket.com? They connect 3D printers with buyers.
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