Re: [rp-ml] Zcorp!?

On 22/11/11 15:29, Marshall Burns wrote:

> Adrian, can you (or others) put some numbers behind your comments about the
> number of RepRaps and its derivatives, as well as the number of proprietary
> fabbers sold? (I used to keep such statistics, along with Wohlers, but that
> was long before RepRap existed.)

Hi Marshall,

No - it's only a guess informed by this a couple of years ago:

http://thesis.erikdebruijn.nl/master/bit.ly

Terry Wohlers tells me that 42,541 proprietary AM systems have been installed
since their inception; I had thought the figure lower than that, so I may be
wrong (which is why I was careful to say, "We think..."). Terry puts a figure of
just over 8,000 on the RepRap derivatives out there at the end of 2010.

But since then my family has distributed over 300 sets of RepRap printed parts,
almost all to private individuals (not all of whom will have built them into a
working machine, of course) and we have three or four friends who have sent out
a similar number. My daughter and I are currently making sets at the rate of 15
per week (whilst both also doing real jobs). Of course, I allow that we are a
tail of the distribution, and so must not wag the dog...

But, she, I, and Jean-Marc Giacalone of eMaker Ltd have just established a new
business:

http://igg.me/p/48972?i=shlk

wherein we pay friends and some previous customers to be our manufacturers of
RepRap printed parts for RepRaps. This seems to be working tolerably well. And
our manufacturing capacity has the virtue of automatically expanding at just the
rate that we need it to...

All those kinds of machines are really very hard to survey. Further I would
guess that there are hundreds of people out there who have made a few tens of
RepRap sets for others, and maybe thousands who have made one set. (Remmember
that the strength of Linux is not the few people who submit hundreds of patches,
but the vast number who only ever submit one.)

As a consequence I suspect that there may well be more "invisible" RepRaps and
its derivatives than those amenable to any sort of sampling.

But who knows? Certainly not I.

Best wishes

Adrian

Dr Adrian Bowyer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Bowyer
http://reprap.org
Received on Tue Nov 22 18:52:52 2011