A hint of what’s to come was shown in a Chinese news piece about a rather large 3D print farm.
The story in China.org highlighted the operations of a factory operated by Shenzhen Huafast Industry Co., Ltd., based in, you guessed it, Shenzhen. Shenzhen is the home of several major 3D printer manufacturers, including Bambu Lab.
The story explained that this factory was set up and ready to produce “toys and tools” using the 3D printers. The shocking part was that their 3D print farm currently includes no less than 5,000 3D printers.
That has to be one of the largest, if not the largest, print farm I’ve ever heard of. To give this some size, imagine these machines stacked on racks four printers tall and one metre wide. That would result in a racking system over a kilometre long. It would take ten minutes to walk from end to end, passing by each printer.
The story described how the factory was able to fulfill an order for 40,000 desktop ornaments in only a week.
But if you think about it, 5,000 machines can produce a staggering amount of output. For example, let’s say each print job could print a full plate of, say, four parts in three hours. Over the course of a single day, that 5,000 printer farm could then produce a staggering 160,000 of those parts. That is incredible.
The story gets better. China.org writes:
”Yang’s personal experience reflects this broader trend. When he first entered the field, he and his colleagues managed just 500 machines. Two years later, that number has grown to 5,000. After this year’s Spring Festival holiday, the workshop’s printer count is set to expand to 10,000.”
That doubles the output! For our example above, it means that in a single week, that larger farm could produce 2.2M of those parts. And all that without having to do any tooling changes. This is really an “anything” factory at scale.
Who says 3D printing is for prototyping?
Via China.org
