The Advantages Of An In-Office 3D Printer

Creating your own original product is as difficult as you probably imagined. No, actually most likely a lot more than you imagined. There’s a lot of planning, organization, and design that goes into every little bit of your product in order to make it as close to your concept as possible. There are a lot of difficulties that come with designing your own product, but there is a way to take some weight off of you and your team’s shoulders with a 3D printer.

Cheap 3D printers are actually pretty easy to come by, nowadays, thanks to the industry’s speedy growth and the incredible commercial availability of this appliance.

IMAGE: UNSPLASH

1. Have Full Control

3D printers allow you to have full control over your product’s design. Oftentimes, when businesses want to have a basic prototype of their product for initial testing, they’ll outsource its manufacturing to a 3rd party.

While this has been done for a long time, it’s the most efficient way of doing things. These 3rd party manufacturers don’t always understand what you have in mind or make slight miscalculations. And unless you have one of your own people with them, dictating exactly how and what they should be designing, the prototype may come out looking completely different than what you were expecting.

But with any in-office 3D printer, in fact, even with a cheap 3D printer, you have complete agency over the construction and design of your product. You can make all the calculations and design choices, have full control over everything that is being created and get a prototype of your product that’s as close to your original concept as it can possibly be. You don’t have to worry about giving a third party manufacturer all the minute instructions on how to create your product; you can just do it yourself and have full control over every single aspect of its design and build.

2. Time Efficiency

If you’re working with a third party manufacturer, that means you need to be willing to give them enough time to get your instructions, interpret them, build a copy of your product, then ship it back and hope that they got everything correct. And if they didn’t, if even the tiniest aspect of that copy is wrong and doesn’t work correctly, you’ll have to send it back to them to start the process all over again.

It’s safe to say, that while you may have the patience for this, your investors, clients or business partners probably don’t. Even with a cheap 3D printer, you can completely skip the third party step and begin creating your own prototypes and copies of your product. Bypassing the third party manufacturer not only saves you money, but also gives you more time to get things right.

You don’t have to worry about waiting on your product for weeks to arrive, and when it does, crossing your fingers that all the instructions were followed to a tee. You can just do it yourself, within the comfort of your own workspace and have it ready in no time.

3. More Creative Freedom

Experimenting with your newly designed product is a natural part creating pretty much anything. You want to try different variants of it, maybe with several designed tweaks and fixes. After all: you’re probably not going to get it correct the first time. So just experiment until you find that sweet spot.

Now imagine doing all that in your office or workshop, without having to leave the premises. Imagine making your product, as well as dozens of its variants at your own leisure. This gives you a great opportunity to try new things, without having to rely on the ingenuity of a third party manufacturer.

Thanks to this added breathing room, you have more opportunities to experiment with your product and the creative freedom allows you to try different routes to reaching the perfect results. And a 3D printer gives you this opportunity to try this out yourself, without having to take long and complicated steps.

They say: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” One could say that 3D printers were pretty much made to confirm this statement.

If you are interested in even more technology-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.

IMAGE: UNSPLASH