Hello everyone,

finally, our 2 weeks (per year) vacation are on the doorstep and I am happy to look back 12 months.

I don’t consider working for PP exactly special, it became just a normal job after all, just with the usual extra efforts of being competitive and ahead as entrepreneur. However, I will just throw the numbers and some little details into this post :

Work, work work

– in the last 19 months I have been most of the time in the workshop, nearly 10+ hours each day. Welding, lot’s of manual lathe & milling, plain metal work. Noteworthy was that studying books rather than youtube paid out better. I will write sometime more about (again 🙂
– my wife Anne does around 30 hours each week administration stuff, client support, sales, etc.. and the rest of the time also in the workshop. Without her, this rather volunteer like ‘activity’ won’t happen – luckily we had both a career and some savings – with c19 and a loss of 80% in sales, this savings have been our rescue.
– Beside metalwork, there was a lot of prototyping, community support, software development, networking, adding each day another 2-4 hours

Money

As you might noticed, we always provided a good price / value ratio – much needed also to survive outside of PP with competitive products. However, after all, we figured we’re working for around 5 – 25 Euro the hour but still, no proper insurances, retirement, etc… most of the margin goes back into development,  better tools, etc …

Having that said, we figured it’s indeed good idea to invest machines and services outside of the usual PP box. After thousands of hours in the machine shop, you can trust on that you don’t want to do this for very long 😉 First contacts and clients with industrial clients & partners showed there might be a better long-term prospect, soon more about with a case study.

Results
– hundreds of folks received support – that’s indeed not always the more thankful job btw.
– the wiki/library still helps thousands of users – there is a major rework in progress and we hope sourcing parts and providing access to open source machinery will become much easier
– upgrades : we’ve updated the v3 line as best we could have done in this short time, among safety upgrades – mechanical and electronic wise; we also provided the plans for a more safe and ergonomic injection (arbor). there are are now hundreds of builds, copies and variations out there. For v4, we managed to design a much cheaper, easier & forgiving v4 extruder, at the end it’s just a bigger screw with more support for axial load – go for it :-). For the sheetpress, we also have some updates but we wait another 2-3 months for more iterations. However, as you can see – our machines lead the the top 10 in the bazar (traffic wise)
– with a few hundred machines from us out there, we estimate that we own around 20% of the non PP workspace model user market , in the EU at least 🙂

What’s next / trends
– we noticed increasing interest from SMEs, labs and universities, mostly for custom builds, more automatic & complete systems as well consultations – I guess it pays out to try being the ‘best’ 🙂
– there are new and interesting partnerships with OSE and similar maker oriented projects, more about soon; there’s significant progress happening. New government regulations also make new space for niche markets to help polluters to stay within limits – also there we have a new machine coming up.
– in Sept. we might finally have our factory hall, with 12 months delay but also there I am kinda happy to put now all the new knowledge and experience in there. We don’t know exactly what to put in there but it will be for sure a CNC lathe with live tooling and an extra spindle, a Haas VM2 (CNC mill for mould making) and some new manual machines as a shaper, surface grinder (I still love it) – possibly also a plasma table to pay the bills. However, we think we should invest in mould development which turns out to be the biggest bottle neck in Precious Plastic. We have also investigated a number of possible products and it seems perfectly doable to provide moulds for more requested products as you can find in industrial catalogues.
– there are major upgrades for ‘Elena’, ‘Zoe’ coming and a smaller sheetpress should see the light in Nov. (i hope 😉

Conclusion

Work harder, learn your trade, extend your horizon, never give up – it’s brutal hard sweat and bloody work – again – welcome to the worker class – nobody said it’s gonna be easy 🙂

godspeed