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Hi all,

So I’m totally new to the topic of 3D printing. I only knew resin printers existed through a video on YouTube that I ended up on.

Then all of a sudden everyone’s doing it and I’m past it as usual.

Anyway, I’ve been on the hunt for a bit of a sideline. I like my job, it gives me a comfortable living and I work from home which I enjoy, that being said, I sell a product that’s expensive and that means orders aren’t a daily occurrence - I probably make about 15 sales a year, which can be a little slow when all you’re doing is checking in all the time to ensure your name is still being considered.

So this seems - potentially - viable.

Pay for files
Inform artist I intend to print commercially
Sell on eBay or similar

So my question is - is it viable?
I don’t want it to make me a living, but a few quid a month would be cool - or at least say pay for the printer over the course of a year?

If so…..which printer?

The Elegoo Jupiter probably. Still not that expensive, massive print bed.

If you purchase files for commercial printing, usually there is a pretty high upfront cost to do so, then you have to market them and sell at a cost to make it worth your while.

The other end of that is to promote yourself as a print shop and people can contact you to print files they own and have paid the user fee (much less that commercial fee or even free) since they are being printed only for their own personal use. If the person has the files and pays you a fee to print for them, that is all good - you just cannot turn around and print more to sell to others. I have done this on numerous occassions. Also, many people get files for free on Thingiverse and such and just need someone to print for them.

Case in point: A file on Thingiverse is free to download, but is marked as 'non-commercial' so you can print for your own personal use or for someone else's personal use and get paid a fee. You just cannot print them in bulk and sell to users.

thanks for the replies. I think as an investment for profit, it's not going to be for me.

I'm sure there are people making vast somes doing it, but not with my skill set and time available.

Was interesting to explore though and thanks again for the feedback

Saturn


Most of the people I see doing 3D printing work are using Saturns. Jupiters are new and offer a bigger print bed and can be a good choice too, but significantly larger printers come with some of their own struggles including simply having a bigger up front start up cost to get going.

As for selling files; a lot of Patreons have merchant tiers that you pay for monthly and many kickstarters have annual to lifetime licences to print. Each one can be different - some are life time for just the KS; some for the company as a whole (so long as you buy the STLs as well) etc....


Some of the more popular creators are already sold out of merchant tiers so there can be an element of watching them daily to see when slots come up for sale on patreon and the like.


That said you likely want to start with a smaller printer like a Mars Pro 2 to get a feel for how 3D printing works and if its for you and such. You need to understand how to get settings right; how to print; what PPE you need to be safe; how to make sure the print environment is safe; how to produce renders (most supply their own but being able to make your own helps a lot in producing a shop style); how to support models (lets you fix supports that fail; lets you adjust them to perhaps have less damaging tips so that your models have quicker cleanup)

tbh resin printing sounds like an absolutely miserable side gig. You can hit print and leave the house, sure, but you're going to be dealing with just so so many obnoxious chemicals all the time, and the models are so fragile and the market is basically full of snot-nosed ten year olds who get 5$ a month for allowance and want to use that to break into a hobby that requires like 450$ for an army.

If youre really desperate for some way to make money on the side without input get into like, bitcoin mining or something. You're not going to be turning an enjoyable downtime hobby into income with resin printing, the market isnt enthusiastically spendy and is probably full of pretty incredibly gakky people, it's a physical product you have to ship and it's super fragile, and you have to deal with toxic chemicals.

It's got all the bad job stuff. Like almost literally all of them.

Some people make it work, but they go big on it, heated + ventilated garage, 2-4 printers as a mini-farm a desk/workstation, full PPE and an etsy store/ website + self-promotion on fb groups/ ads.

And they generally have licenses to a dozen+ different sculptors.

It's not something I'd recommend as a side gig, it gets exponentially easier the more that is invested into making the workflow efficient.

I'd recommend FDM printing and terrain far, far more if you want a side gig.

Find 1-2 good licenses and stick with offering their entire range.

Then a high-quality CoreXY printer so it doesn't take weeks to print a single thing at decent quality.

Then offer something your competitors running Ender 3's don't - 0.1mm layer height instead of the garbage quality 0.2 that most print shops sell. You'll be able to market a smaller number of higher quality prints at a similar price to the output from a large print farm churning out lower quality prints.

I experimented with doing commerical prints for a month, didn't go well so I dropped it, I may try again in future, but it'll be on an etsy store rather than trying to make a website work.

The last bit of advice I'd offer is that it's absolutely not something to go straight into as a newbie, get a printer for yourself first, learn the process and then have a think about whether you want to go commercial with it.

The chemical side isn't too bad so long as you have a sensible setup.

A good supply of Nitrile gloves; mask suited to filter organic particles; sensible clothing; clean open work area with a work mat with raised edge lip (silicon dog mats are popular as a cheap option). A wash and cure station helps out a lot in speeding up and making the curing part reliable. Heck I know some operate 2 wash and cures - one set to wash only and one set to cure only (cuts out the chances for mistakes).


In general health and safety is fairly easy; but it does require some degree of forethought and sensible practice to stick too.
And really its the same if you've 1 printer or 20 printers. The only real difference is that with more printers the viability of enclosures and room level ventilation goes up.

After that disposal of waste is another consideration. Anything that comes into contact with the wet resin or uncured or partially cured resin needs curing before disposal. Again not complicated, you just need a sensible setup.

Not sure why all the others saying it's not worth it as a side business.
I'm doing it as a side business, started with a single Mars, invested the first profits into a Mars 2 Pro and a proper cleaning station and that works pretty well for me.
I have a couple monthly commercial tiers from Patreon and a few lifetime licences from Kickstarters.
Most of my orders are through Ebay, because they just have a huge customer base. Paid Facebook ads help a bit to get traffic to my own webshop.

It can be a massive time sink, my catalogue is rarely up-to-date with the newest releases.
Printing mostly overnight, cleaning in the morning, day job, removing supports, curing and preparing new files in the evening after the kids are in bed.
It all works out okay.

I would totally recommend it as a side job if you enjoy the hobby aspect that goes along with 3D printing.

scarletsquig wrote:
Some people make it work, but they go big on it, heated + ventilated garage, 2-4 printers as a mini-farm a desk/workstation, full PPE and an etsy store/ website + self-promotion on fb groups/ ads.

And they generally have licenses to a dozen+ different sculptors.

It's not something I'd recommend as a side gig, it gets exponentially easier the more that is invested into making the workflow efficient.

I'd recommend FDM printing and terrain far, far more if you want a side gig.

Find 1-2 good licenses and stick with offering their entire range.

Then a high-quality CoreXY printer so it doesn't take weeks to print a single thing at decent quality.

Then offer something your competitors running Ender 3's don't - 0.1mm layer height instead of the garbage quality 0.2 that most print shops sell. You'll be able to market a smaller number of higher quality prints at a similar price to the output from a large print farm churning out lower quality prints.

I experimented with doing commerical prints for a month, didn't go well so I dropped it, I may try again in future, but it'll be on an etsy store rather than trying to make a website work.

The last bit of advice I'd offer is that it's absolutely not something to go straight into as a newbie, get a printer for yourself first, learn the process and then have a think about whether you want to go commercial with it.

Yeah I think terrain is probably a bit more attractive really. I mean there's just so many models, whereas at least with terrain it can fit in to alot of different systems.

It's worth exploring.


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scarletsquig wrote:
Some people make it work, but they go big on it, heated + ventilated garage, 2-4 printers as a mini-farm a desk/workstation, full PPE and an etsy store/ website + self-promotion on fb groups/ ads.

The last bit of advice I'd offer is that it's absolutely not something to go straight into as a newbie, get a printer for yourself first, learn the process and then have a think about whether you want to go commercial with it.

Totally with you here, I mean if I take the plunge I'd need to the acquire the skills to make it work. However, taking the plunge would be on the basis that it's to become a sideline rather than purely a hobby, so if it's not a viable sideline, it won't be a hobby either.

But, i'll look into merchant tiers on Patreon, that's a great snippet of advice, setting up a website etc isn't an issue, I sell for a living anyway so no worries on that side of things. More a case of having a saleable product to market.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ok, so, having had some time to look about. I’m all on board for Fdm and going terrain. Found some great looking sculptors I’d be keen to work with but for the short term, be interested in perfecting their models and make sure I’d sell a good product.

So, which printer?

£500 budget - what do you suggest? I’m thinking Endor 6?

I make a living off my 3D printers - you'll need at least 2 to begin with imho, as when one breaks and you're waiting on parts for a week or two you still need to fulfil customer orders. Having a big parts stash is not always the answer as fixing stuff can take time you don't always have.

I find FDM much less hassle for making money than resin - the chemicals and cleanup is more tedious. I hit print with the FDM printers, walk away, come back, the print has already popped itself off the bed so I chuck it in a box and post it. I design all my files to not require supports so there's no post-processing.

For production I run a farm of Prusa Mk3S+ units - I have had cheaper printers but found they lacked reliability without a lot of work and I don't want repairing and tweaking printers to be the focus of the hobby/business, I'd much rather just print. I heartily recommend the Prusa Mk3S+ for commercial FDM printing.

If you wanted to print minis I've found the Mars 2 Pro to be inexpensive and have quality output. It's not 4K but it's a half decent way to dip your toe into the water, imho. The charcoal filter is an added bonus, but I vent all of my resin stuff (FDM too) out the window anyway as it's pretty toxic and some of the resins smell awful.

Resin I run a variety of printers, but they're largely for prototyping STLs to sell rather than selling prints directly.

I think when starting out I recouped the cost of the first printer in a few months, and that was learning Blender as I went to design the stuff. If you put time into figuring out the ins and outs of printing you'll save yourself a lot of stress down the track as there's a lot of little things that can change the output of the print drastically, for both FDM and resin.

No aspect of this hobby or printer is plug-n-play, as there is a lot to learn. You will need to get educated and comfortable before you even think about printing items for sale.

Not sure that was the suggested in either my original post or griffins really useful reply.

But hey you rock on

NP - I will keep my comments and 8 years of 3D print experience for both personal and resale to myself...

 MDSW wrote:
If you purchase files for commercial printing, usually there is a pretty high upfront cost to do so, then you have to market them and sell at a cost to make it worth your while.

The other end of that is to promote yourself as a print shop and people can contact you to print files they own and have paid the user fee (much less that commercial fee or even free) since they are being printed only for their own personal use. If the person has the files and pays you a fee to print for them, that is all good - you just cannot turn around and print more to sell to others. I have done this on numerous occasions. Also, many people get files for free on Thingiverse and such and just need someone to print for them.

Case in point: A file on Thingiverse is free to download, but is marked as 'non-commercial' so you can print for your own personal use or for someone else's personal use and get paid a fee. You just cannot print them in bulk and sell to users.

I've never seen this myself. I've spoken with a number of commercial printing companies that refuse to offer more than 30$ a month for access to entire Patreon catalogues. One such company Rise From Resin https://www.risefromresin.co.uk/miniatures got into a heated exchange with us over not wanting to create a monthly line of miniatures simply so they
could resell them. Going into the conversation we had informed this company that we are not interested in a Patreon style of doing business. And would be creating an entire line of new miniatures of assorted minis about 5 a month, exclusively for resale, which was all the time we had to make comfortably, given we have an entire wargame in development. Five was all we could spare the time for.

We had informed them that our standards for mini production were very high and being a small team we don't have the means to mass-produce 30 40 miniatures a month or more. They offered us an extremely low rate saying that other companies with higher amounts of miniatures sold for less than 50 dollars a month Such as Artisan Guild.

We informed the company that the payment was laughably low for us to make an entirely new line of 20 to 30 miniatures a month simply so they could resell them, with hundreds of hours of work. That could net their company hundreds if not thousands of dollars in monthly sales. We had told them we would have been okay with royalties on the sales even offering a lowball figure, which they ignored.

They simply had ignored everything we were saying until we told them no we can't afford to do business with them, then they became highly offended and toxic.

Given it was an international contract we would have had to have a lawyer look at the legal document to protect our rights. We explained that their offer would not even cover a small portion of the lawyer's fees to look at the contract and approve its legitimacy. Averaging around 200 to 600$ an hour in lawyers fees. I have learned the hard way that you get a lawyer to look at contracts before you sign them or go into business. It does not matter if it's art, design, whatever. Get a lawyer to look at your contracts. You don't want to end up like the McDonalds brothers. Pro tip watch a movie called the Founder, very eye-opening. And why you should avoid selling on other people's property.

After they got upset because we had told them it was laughably low and would not operate at a loss. . They grew upset when we gave them a hard line no, this deal will cost us money, which they replied with threatening the future Kickstarter we have planed sometime in the new year claiming they would copyright strike us, which again is laughable we make original historical miniatures. Simply because we told them we did not want to lose money and our time was worth more.

I have spoken with two such companies before then trying to outsource a few STL files. But None have offered us what we feel is fair compensation for our time.

So Id loves to know which companies are offering loads of money to resell. Are the few companies simply outliers and there are actually people willing to offer fair compensation for your time then please let me know via PM.

If you're referring to commercial sculpting/art/illustration and buying copyrights well that's a different ballgame than the right to resell. At least I think anyways from my experiences. I'd love to know more about the subject honestly as we plan to sell our own products on our website only, given the few bad experiences we've received and are not wanting to go with a Patreon business model.

Unless 20$ a month is loads of money you're talking about. This might be alright for a Patreon business model given it's already selling, but not so much for the right to resell commercial products at least in my experiance.

It can be really hard and getting harder as the market saturates itself with sculptors and print resources. I know the design and sculpt work is hard and almost forces you to look at it from the aspect of, "Hey, I can make some money doing what I really love to do", since working it from, "This is my livlihood and job and I need to support my family doing it" is tough nowadays. I feel for all of you in this boat.