A video came up for me from YouTube and it caused me to stick my toe in the rabbit hole that is industrial 3D printing. I’ve heard of laser sintering and other stuff, but this is FDM and prints some of the plastics I use.
The machine is an FDM core XY and you can use engineering filaments with it. The bed goes to 200c, the hot end to 500c, and the chamber is heated, not just enclosed a holding in heat from the bed and hot end but independently heated, to 100c. I know someone must have used it to make tea. It’s also Idex. The bed has 3 motors so it can level itself and there is a point for the nozzles to touch so they can be leveled too. The average cost is just under $10,000. The Bambu printers come close in some areas, and it cost only a tenth of this thing.
After you have it you probably want support for it, at $1,000 a month. You could buy an X1C every month and just toss it out at the end. Let’s say you have a part and your not real sure how it print it and what material to use and what slicer settings to use. $2,500 and they will do it all for you. Let’s say you just want help with part design and print orientation. That’s only $500. I need to think about my helping out on reddit.
Industry is different. Your time futzing around with the printer is free. Industry pays people and it cost them if they don’t have the part. A little PEEK part might be worth $50,000 to a company so the costs, exorbitant though they seem, are nothing to a company.