From the heady days of RepRap to today’s $200 printers, hundreds of firms have tried to develop and sell 3D printers. Hundreds more have resold 3D printers or made filament. Comparatively little entrepreneurial attention has been paid to the 3D printing aftermarket, however. Why has so little effort gone into the 3D printing aftermarket? What is happening and what are the opportunities?

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Replacement Parts

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There are many vendors offering nozzles and other replacement parts on AliBaba and other platforms. It wasn’t easy to find suppliers who could scale in the production of the brass nozzles initially used by desktop printers. There were, however, very many job shops and manufacturers who had the right turning and milling equipment to make our butter-soft printing nozzles and heads at low volume. This meant that companies in the midst of insane hyper-scaling, such as Ultimaker , Prusa , and Makerbot , could discover […]

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