Tail End Charlie
We finally have them all under one roof! You know what it’s like to order something online. You find it, click, click, order placed, beep, paid by card, in the delivery box the next day, at your doorstep the day after that.
You know what it’s like to order something
online. You find it, click, click, order placed,
beep, paid by card, in the delivery box the next
day, at your doorstep the day after that.
Well, it wasn’t nearly that simple for us
with our 3D printers. When we were planning
to expand production into our renovated
3D printing workshop in Sedlec, we never
would have dreamed how complicated buying
3D printers would actually be. Unfortunately,
we scheduled the purchase for a time when
the manufacturer, Phrozen, was upgrading
its flagship model and starting to offer
16K resolution printers instead of 14K ones.
We had planned to buy the 14K models, but
we wouldn’t have minded the 16K models
either—after all, they are the latest models.
First, we reached out to our regular suppliers
in the Czech Republic; unfortunately, their
inventory of these printers was either down
to a few units or completely out of stock,
but we wanted to purchase between 10 and
20 units. So in December, we decided to reach
out to practically all official distributors
of the Taiwanese company Phrozen in the
European Union—there are about 15 of them
as of today. To our surprise, however, we
ultimately received offers from only two
of them. With delivery as early as February.
And that’s because even they had only a few
units in stock—or none at all. And since these
3D printers are shipped from Asia only by sea,
delivery simply takes time.
Here, I’d like to take a brief detour to
another topic. It’s unclear just how much the
outbreak of war in the Middle East ultimately
affected delivery times. But it likely affected
our printers as well. What it definitely affects,
however, are the prices of filament. And
significantly so. In the first few weeks after
the war began, our business partners in
China reached out to me, warning that the
price of filament in Asia was skyrocketing,
it was becoming a scarce commodity, and
middlemen were reselling it to Japan, since
that’s where it ran out first. Eventually,
it caught up with us here in Europe as well.
Our latest order of plastic granules cost
about 30% more than the previous one, and
we’ll have to see where prices eventually
peak. When the conflict broke out and halted
operations at several major airports in the
Middle East, shipping costs also skyrocketed.
Fortunately, we didn’t have anything in transit
from Asia by air at the time.
Well, back to the printers. They didn’t arrive
in February, nor in March. By the first half of
April, they were with the distributors, and
our supplier from Bulgaria finally delivered
them to us around mid-April after all the
formalities were settled.
And why did we go through all this,
anyway? Phrozen printers ultimately proved
to be the perfect replacement for Asiga
printers, which, even in the new Ultra version,
proved problematic. To be precise, the
main issue is the projector and its lifespan.
The situation had reached a point where
we finally decided to gradually phase out
Asiga DLP printers and switch to Phrozen
SLA printers. Thanks to rapid innovation
and lightning-fast improvements in print
resolution, Phrozen went from 4K printing
(which was the same resolution the Asiga
printer had and still has) to 16K printing in
just about two years. It’s a huge leap—hats
off to such progress. We couldn’t ignore
this dramatic shift. Our competitors were,
of course, using these printers, and it was
starting to show in print quality—which
is understandable. Given how affordable
Phrozen printers are, it wasn’t difficult for
our competitors to acquire them. What’s
more, any hobbyist can get one for home use;
learning to print or work with 3D designs and
prepare print jobs is also quite simple thanks
to various tutorials on YouTube, so suddenly
everyone around us could be printing at
a higher quality than we could. The Phrozen
defect rate of prints is higher than with
Asiga machines, assuming these work as
they should, but everything else speaks in
Phrozen’s favor. And so we now have 22 of
them sitting on our shelves; a third of them
are printing parts for the Brassin series, and
15 of them are ready to print components for
the first kit in the 1/32-scale Hybrid series,
the Mustang P-51B. To be clear and so that
modelers have no doubts about print quality,
the 3D-printed parts for the 1/48 Avia S-199
were also printed on Phrozen printers. The
print quality was very well received, and we
have taken modelers’ feedback into account.
I consider the most significant changes on our
part to be the switch to a less brittle material
and a change in packaging, where we plan
to pack the parts in transparent boxes like
Brassin’s, which we will secure inside the kit
with the model so that they no longer move
around in the box. So we’ll see at E
-
Day!
WE FINALLY HAVE THEM ALL UNDER ONE ROOF!
Text: Jakub Nademlejnský
INFO Eduard
113
May 2026