What a failed print actually costs

A failed print looks cheap from the outside. The plastic in a three-inch figurine costs well under a dollar, so a ruined piece should cost well under a dollar. It does not.

Where the money actually goes

• Machine time. A printer occupied by a doomed job is a printer not making anything else.
• The cleanup: scraping a failed blob off a build plate can take longer than the print itself.
• Scheduling. One reprint can push a whole day of orders back by half a day.
• The piece we already packed and then had to unpack when we spotted the flaw.

Why we still reprint rather than discount

A flawed piece could be sold as a second for half price, and we have tried it. The problem is the email that arrives two weeks later from a customer who did not read the fine print. Reprinting costs less than that conversation, every time.

The most expensive thing in the studio is a piece we shipped anyway.

It is also why we watch the first layer of every job. Almost all failures announce themselves in the first sixty seconds, and catching one there costs minutes instead of hours.