Tail End Charlie

We finally have them all under one roof!

Text: Jakub Nademlejnský

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!