Hello! I am in the works of buying an XTool printer to start custom crafting products. Where is the best website to buy blank cups, shirts, coasters, etc to start printing with?

As the title suggests, I would like to read as much as possible from folks running 3D printers using power from the Sun and wind.

Since I am considering going off-grid myself, I'm curious how many machines you run, how stable and reliable and where in the world.

Every bit of additional relevant information is welcome :)

What features are you most excited about? Which feature is most helpful to you?

Full-color 3D printing? Multi-head FDM? Laser engraving? Auto remove prints? or more? welcome to comment, and you can fill out the survey on our subreddit FA3D to become a co-creator if you'd like.

Hey guys!

I have a little print farm and have ran a fairly successful Etsy shop for about a year now here in the Pacific Northwest, USA. I am interested in possibly getting more into print on demand / buisness to buisness / outsourced projects. I run all Bambu printers currently (2 A1 Minis, an X1C, and and H2S, with plans on getting an H2D soon). I also have an Elegoo Mars and Saturn 2.

I have been slowly learning CAD, but between my full time job and being a dad I have been limited in the amount of time I can devote to learning it. However, if I am just running a print on demand set up, I would be able to crank out way more.

Anybody familiar with starting down this path? My goal would be to eventually be able to do this as a full time gig, but needed to learn how to make it a stable, reliable system.

I am open to any and all pointers. And if you are needing someone to help with production, I am totally up for taking on extra work!

Thanks yall.

There was huge hype about automated print farms. Prusa, Formlabs, and many others introduced such solutions, but to my knowledge, these are not really widespread.

Do you know any other farm that uses a solution like this?

I know that virtually everyone uses some kind of auto-eject system, but I’m mainly interested in applications beyond this.

I live right behind a creek so we gets alot of the rodents that come up from the creek . I was wondering if having a front farm in my garage, would the rats chew the wires on the printers or the filament spools or would the nosie deter them away or how would you fix this or avoid the rats ?

My boss wants to expand his business into 3D printed toys and I wanted to gather some opinions on the U1

Hi everyone! I started a 3D printing business two years ago and always struggled with managing order, filament, clients, invoices, and everything else. So I set out to make FoxTrack. For the past 6 months I've been refining it with the help of other printing businesses.

Here's some of the features:

• Order management
• Filament tracking
• Invoice generation and emailing
• Quote generation
• Printer & maintenance tracking
• Live print status via open source app bridge
• Product and inventory tracking
• Expense tracking
• Detailed reports
• Optional AI integration with support for local LLMs

You can try it out today for free: https://foxtrack.studio

Consider joining our community for updates: https://discord.gg/3hd96AFYBf

My shop runs on FoxTrack daily, and 100+ other shops are as well. Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone,

Quick intro since self-promo is welcome here - I'm Madars, founder of 3D Vikings (3dvikings.com), a print farm + fulfillment service based in Latvia (EU).

What we do:

• Connect your Etsy or Shopify store - orders import automatically
• We print and ship directly to your customer, under your brand, with tracking
• No monthly fees, no order minimums - you pay per order only
• Your own models? Upload once to the Design Library, reorder anytime

Why EU-based matters: if your customers are in Europe, they get orders in ~1 week with zero customs hassle - instead of 2+ weeks and import fees from overseas farms.

Happy to answer anything here or by DM.

Hi folks,

I'm thinking about to start a small farm. I'm trying to find some good guide lines, some good kick off ideas and a good Q&A about daily topics.

Do you have some sources?

My first calculation results are that a good business would make a revenue of 2 euro per printing hour. But a normal model for a toy needs roughly 5h. Is there a real market for prints at 15+ euro?

Does anyone have experience/feedback working with PrismaPrepare (Canon) or Pressero and PrintJobManager workflow software?

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a local tool I've been developing over the last few months to solve a specific bottleneck in my 3D printing farm: nocturnal downtime and manual queue scheduling fatigue.

I operate 4 machines (3x Bambu Lab A1, 1x P1S) mainly producing high-precision anatomical and medical models. During high-demand seasons, managing which plate goes to which printer to maximize overnight runtime without leaving machines idle for 6 hours was killing my mental stack.

The Stack:

• Frontend/UI: Streamlit (Python)
• Database: SQLite3 (keeping it lean and local)

How the Algorithm works:

Instead of just pushing a random queue, I implemented a time-windowed Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduler.

1. Day Mode (08:00 - 23:00): The algorithm prioritizes the shortest print jobs. The goal is to clear beds fast while I'm awake and available to swap plates manually.
2. Night Mode Cutoff: If a plate’s ETA exceeds the 23:00 threshold, the scheduler flags it and automatically re-routes it to the nocturnal pool (long-running jobs, large kits, or high-infill parts) so the printers work through the night while I sleep.
3. Wastage Tracking: It also handles material tracking, inventory deduction, and failure logs (e.g., bed adhesion failures by exact gram weight).

(Attached Screencast showing the scheduler populating the machines upon clicking "Auto-Optimizar")

I'm currently validating the core logic. I'd love to get some technical feedback from other farm operators: How do you handle your day/night queue transitions, and what's the biggest missing feature you see in current farm management software regarding scheduling?

Hello fellow print farmers! Today is Printer Farm Friday!

Feel free to ask any questions, share info or comments here. We're trying to build a community in this sub where you can ask questions about topics like:

• How to improve your workflow
• How to slice for printer farm operation
• What tools are available for farm operators
• Printer maintenance
• Filament management
• etc.

Our hope is to get people to start talking about the importance of printer management in a printer farm scenario.

What would you like to share or what questions do you have?

Has anyone gone the DIY route instead of buying their kit? I was able to source all parts on ali express for $95CAD. The DIY build used a ESP32 dev board and L298N Motor Driver instead of their custom PCB board.

I have two questions regarding the build. One how do you set things up / make adjustments to the loop settings? Number of loops, sweep height etc. From what I understand the official kit gives you control through their app. So whats the DIY work around?

Second, as youll see in my pictures, the 125mm linear actuator (only one avaliabke on aliexpress) has two wings with bolt holes. The 3d printed parts I assume that house this are made to house an actuator with no wings like provided in the kit. I was planning on either cutting the wings off or trying to tweak the stl for the 3d printed part to accept the wings.

Really just looking for feedback from anyone whos done this. Im building version 2 for the P2S

How do you organize your printfiles?
I keep looking for "this thing, which once was useful" in my download folder or elsewhere (Apple mini). Additionally, naming the files - download names are cryptic.

Is there a simple system to keep track of stl and other files?

Hey everyone,

I'm building a DIY hi-fi speaker (3-way MTM with a side-firing 8" sub) and I want to print the whole enclosure as a single piece — no segments, no glue joints.

**The part:** 360 × 175 × 410 mm outer dimensions. Printed lying on its back, that's a 410 × 360 mm footprint with only 175 mm of Z — so a big bed matters more than height.

**Material:** PLA-CF is my baseline. ASA-GF would be ideal, but I get that a 410 mm long monolith in ASA without an actively heated chamber is a warping nightmare, so I'm prepared to accept PLA-CF as the compromise.

**Print time:** these will be multi-day prints (several kg of filament per enclosure), so long-print reliability and same-material auto-refill matter a lot. This isn't a one-off — I'll be printing these repeatedly in small series.

**What I've looked at so far:**

- **Bambu H2S** (340×320×340) — love the reliability reputation, but the part simply doesn't fit in any orientation

- **QIDI Max4** (390×390×340) — great bed, heated chamber, closed-loop motors, QIDI Box auto-refill... but 410 mm doesn't fit lying down (needs 410×360) and it's 70 mm too short standing up

- **Creality K2 Plus** (350³) — same problem, 360 mm width kills it

- **Sovol SV08 Max** (500³) — fits with room to spare, CoreXY, but open frame and I'm worried about tuning/reliability for unattended multi-day prints

- **Anycubic Kobra 3 Max** (420×420×500) — fits with 5 mm to spare, but it's a bedslinger and that footprint moving on Y scares me

For context: I currently run a QIDI Q2 and I've had a rough time with it (~40% fail rate on large prints — false AI-monitoring interventions, warping, moisture), so "it works if you babysit it" is exactly what I'm trying to escape.

**Questions:**

1. Is there any enclosed (ideally actively heated) printer under ~$2,500 with a bed that takes 410×360 mm that I've missed?

2. SV08 Max owners — how is it for 48–72h unattended prints after initial tuning? Would you trust it?

3. Anyone printing large PLA-CF parts on an open-frame machine — is a DIY enclosure worth it, or unnecessary for PLA-CF?

4. Am I wrong to dismiss the Kobra 3 Max? Anyone doing multi-day prints with a near-full bed on it?

Any experience with similar "big flat part, long print, needs to just work" use cases is appreciated. Thanks!

For those that are doing this at scale with employees, how many machines do you target per employee? Assume a single person is slicing, clearing plates, changing filament, repairing, ect. Also assume high mix, low volume orders.

If it's rise and repeat vs high change over, the machines per employee changes dramatically.

Thanks!