It is no secret that we use 3D printing in our business, and have been printing our original product designs on our own 3D printers. As we prepare to bring some of those products to market, we have been searching for a service company to expand our printing capacity as needed. In this WTFFF?! episode Tom and Tracy interview David Feeney, CEO and founder of SD3D, a service business that has gone from a garage startup in late 2012 to a legitimate short run production facility today. This interview is a great case study in what it takes to start a 3D print service business. David has experienced challenges along the way, optimizing the process of sending prints to one of the machines in the “farm,” and customizing the hardware of the machines to perform as needed in a production environment. As a mechanical engineer, David has even added more customized sensors to his printers to make them more reliable, and drive the failure rates down to percentages in the low [...]
