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Speaking of whether or not you could MakerBot a “real” product¹ , here’s a fairly thorough little case study of one company using a Thing-O-Matic to manufacture a final product. Conclusion?

3D printers can make “Real” products
As of today, people will pay for 3D printed parts and as we develop new techniques for combining it with digital manufacturing technologies, such as laser cutting and water jet machining, our products will become more complex. We believe that our only limitation is our imagination.

I Heart Robotics, who are also in Brooklyn, give a great breakdown of all the costs that go into making a TriK Tripod Adapter (for a Kinect), which sells on their store for $19.95.

They say the only complaint they’ve gotten so far was when they couldn’t make the adapter in the color a customer wanted. That’s a pretty easy fix.

It’s also cool to see these guys using their Thing-O-Matic to produce a part where they’re not quite sure of the market. You don’t have to do too much market research if you can make the product on demand, and if you only sell 20 of them, you probably don’t want to sink a bunch of money into injection molding costs. They’ve sold 56 adapters since buying their Thing-O-Matic in September, 2011, which nearly pays for the machine itself. As they note in the blog post, with 107 units sold overall, they certainly could never have profited from another method of manufacturing.

1. okay, we were speaking about this a while ago… [↩]