Part Count Comparison to Other Printers

Introduction

The Lulzbot 3D printer is an open source, production grade workhorse 3D printer that serves as a good benchmark for 3D printer extrusion rates. The Lulzbot Moarstruder is a fast-printing toolhead option for the Lulzbot line of printers, and it serves as an interesting benchmark for analyzing the part count of 3D printers.

The Lulzbot Moarstruder exemplifies most closely the type of printer that OSE intends to offer: an effective production printer for making quality parts as fast as possible. OSE intends to go even further, with its development of a high temperature build chamber that is stable for up to 178C continuous print chamber temperature. This would take open source printing to the next level of performance

Part Count Analysis

The case of Moarstruder, and of Lulzbot in general, is a fascinating study that emphasizes the utter simplicity of OSE design. OSE's goal is to make the simplest, lowest part count machines in the world - as we believe that the best designs are as simple as possible. Simplicity has a high impact on lifetime design: simple things can be maintained or repaired easily - thus contributing significantly to lifetime design.

The Moarstruder is a case where 117 unique parts are found in its Bill of Materials, with a total of 176 parts. See File:MoarstruderBOM.ods. For comparison, the D3D Universal extruder BOM (D3D_Universal#BOM) has 22 unique parts, and 28 parts in total. This is a 5x lower unique part count, and a 6x lower total part count.

Point: OSE's printer is simpler to build by a large margin, and thus offers a realistic option of a lifetime design - because it is easy to build, robust, and simple.

Now let's take a look at the master BOM for the Lulzbot enterprise across product lines - which emphasizes the part count bloat of a quality product. There are about 4000 parts in the Lulzbot Master BOM ncluding parts, shipping, supplies - essentially the entire business across product lines - with 161 unique part count for fasteners alone! See File:LulzbotmasterBOM.ods. In fastener types alone, Lulzbot has about 3x more unique parts than the D3D Universal overall unique part count. Overall, the current OSE unique part count is about 70 for its total 3D printer product line. The Lulzbot BOM includes packaging, while ours doesn't, but the point remains: Lulzbot has to manage a 57x larger supply chain than we do, for a similar product line. Ours is a no-frills design. Now we aren't selling the volumes of printers yet (Lulzbot - thousands per year, OSE - dozens per year as of 2019) - but we don't foresee our unique part count expanding much even when we reach volumes of thousands of printers.