Costs and Time

To Build by Fused Deposition



Costs and Time Benefits

An RP part usually costs a few hundred to more than a thousand dollars and takes days to a week or longer to produce and finish. FDM parts generally cost under $50 and take less than a day or two to build.
Making changes and refining the design as early as possible in the design process reduces cost and improves product quality and time to market.
Such products have been produced at costs hovering about $6 like at Rutgers University in mere hours
Case Studies include a comparison of a FDM processes vs. a conventional molding system, where rubber molds had a comparable costs below $100 and well within a day as well, but rubber molds with tolerances of +/- 1/16 of an inch exhibited considerable distortion. Molds with tolerances of +/- 1/32 comprised of lower dimensional distortion but took up to 3 weeks to produce. Other materials including many plastics and epoxies had price ranges and time ranges well above that of the FDM mostly in the thousands of dollars and weeks instead of hours. Bottom line, was that they were able to achieve our benchmarks for hard tooling, while eliminating nine full days and saving $3,750 per master pattern over their molding process.The superior accuracy of the pattern reduced the need for intricate vertical milling machine set-ups by 10 days.

Another case study

Build Test Preparation Build Time Post Processing Total
Orientation 1 30 mins 63 hrs 30 mins 64 hrs
Orientation 2 35 mins 54 hrs 30 mins 55 hrs

As seen in the figure, times for the part sliced at 0.010 inches are reduced from 34 hours to 12.7 hours
. The times for the 0.007 sliced part are reduced from 57.5 hours to 16.9 hours.

Figure1

Figure 2

For Commerial Producers

Prices are based on prepration, machine time and part cleaning.
Companies such as Triad-plastics bill per hour approximately $65 an hour with their Stratasys FDM2000 model producing roughly an average build time of 3 inches per vertical inch.

The cost of changing the basic design of a product increases rapidly as the design advances through the
development cycle.

CONCEPTUAL MODELING $10
DETAIL DESIGN $100
PROTOTYPE/TEST $1,000
MANUFACTURING $10,000
PRODUCT RELEASE $100,000

Commercial Producer vs. Privately owned Systems

This decision depends on several factors such as the number of parts you need to build regularly. For example, if you are building two parts a month at an average cost of $ 1,000/part, you are spending $24,000/year on prototype parts. This may not be enough volume to justify the purchase of an RP system. If you are building 5 parts a month at the same average cost per part, you are spending $60,000/year. In this instance, it may make sense to consider the purchase of a system. RP systems range in price from about $100,000 to $500,000, while 3D printers are offered at $40,000 to $70,000. Also consider that if you build parts in house, you can potentially turn them around more quickly than having them done outside the company. Plus, you maintain control and keep secrets inside the company.