How To Start Your 3D Print Farm - MTM #25 Gilgarips 3d Printing

In this episode of Meet the Makers, we chat with Joe from Gilgarips about his journey into the world of 3D printing. Joe shares how he started with an Ender 3 printer and transitioned from creating tabletop gaming pieces to selling cookie cutters online. He discusses the growth of his 3D printing setup, the challenges of maintaining multiple printers, and his strategies for selling at craft shows and on platforms like TikTok Shop and Etsy. Joe also offers valuable insights for anyone looking to dive into the 3D printing business, highlighting the importance of reliability, design flexibility, and customer focus.
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Where to find Joe
Tiktok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@joeripari?lang=en
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justacertainjoe/
Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/gilgarips/?etsrc=sdt 


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Come be a guest on meet the makers: https://forms.gle/wTqzxqGpsu9hZ39F6

Follow misfit printing on Tiktok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@misfit_printing
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Chapters 
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:20 Joe's Journey into 3D Printing
01:15 Scaling Up: From One Printer to Seventeen
02:04 Challenges and Maintenance of 3D Printers
02:51 Transition to Anycubic Vipers and Show Experiences
05:08 The Benefits of Direct Drives and Solid Bed Spacers
05:47 The Struggles of Multicolor Printing and Airbrushing
09:33 Selling 3D Prints at Shows and Markets
16:56 Permanent Maker's Market Setup
18:53 Vendor Variety at Craft Shows
19:18 The Appeal of Diverse Markets
20:18 Exploring TikTok Shop
22:02 Managing Inventory Challenges
23:51 Lessons from 3D Printing Ventures
26:58 Balancing Full-Time Work and 3D Printing
34:19 Future Aspirations in 3D Printing
36:46 Where to Follow Joe Ripari

Transcript

riverside_joe_& kate _ jul 20, 2024 001_misfit_printing's s 
[00:00:00] Hey everybody. And welcome back to meet the makers today. Another great guest with us on the 3d printing side of things. I have Joe from Gilgoreps Joe. So excited to have you here.
Thank you again for coming on. Meet the makers. Oh, I'm excited. This is going to be great. This will be my first official podcast. Oh I'm excited to break you into the world of podcasting. I'll start you off with a question that I start everybody off with. How did you get into 3D printing or just making things in general?
I've, I'm a techie guy. So I've always had like a passing interest in 3D printing. Just any of the cool tech. A buddy of mine had a 3D printer and he'd been using it to make just some things for our gaming table where we play our tabletop games 
So one day for Father's Day, I just, I asked my wife, I was just like, I was, she's what do you want for Father's Day? And I was like, Oh, a 3d printer. And this is when the Ender threes were 99, so they were cheap. So I got an Ender three, that's where I started. And I had these grand plans.
I was going to print out all these like tabletop things and buildings and miniatures and all that other stuff. And then [00:01:00] working on an Ender three, that was, I was definitely working on an Ender three, so it was a lot of maintenance, a lot of learning, a lot of, I think on that, on my initial printer. I printed one set of things for the gaming table and we never ended up using them.
And then so what got me into the selling of the stuff is we started with cookie cutters, actually. my wife asked me, Hey, can you make a middle finger cookie cutter for my mom? And so I was like, yeah, sure. We'll do that. So then we went up north and when we go up north, we're like six and a half hours north from where we are.
my in laws live on an Island. And so there's no internet, no cell service, nothing like that. We get spotty service. So when we were in town, my wife got the idea. She was going to post Those cookie cutters on Facebook marketplace. She 

did and went over the weekend and we ended up selling like 40 of them. 
And here I was with one under three. So we ended up going to a micro center. Long story short one printer, Turned into three, three printers turned into four. And I think at my largest, I think I had 17 [00:02:00] Ender threes in my fleet. Yeah. That's a lot.
That's a lot of maintenance right there. For anybody who's never printed on an Ender three that hearing that just gives me nightmares right off the bat. I similarly to you, I started an Ender 3v2 and very similarly, I had a small houseplant shop at the time. I thought I was going to print like pots for the shop and yeah, instantly after I loaded my first print and saw that it was going to take 24 hours to complete, I was like, okay this is not practical here.
Yeah. I ended up taking after. I think I've been doing this for almost four years now. After the first couple of years, I took a six and a half to seven month break because I was just burnt and I didn't print anything at all.
I had a whole room in the house, just silent with no printers or anything like that going. Cause I just couldn't do the maintenance and cause it was almost four hours worth of maintenance every night. I believe it. It was a lot. When you got up to those around 17 printers, were you running all Enders at the time, or did you have a mix of things?
What did that setup look like for you? I did, I had 17 Enders, and [00:03:00] then I started I sold off a couple of them. And then I started replacing them with the Anycubic Vipers. Cause those were the that was like the next best thing. So I slowly got those. And I think the most the busiest that I had, I think, when, after I sold out those Enders, I think I got down to twelve printers total.
 and those were pretty much running constantly. And that's when I had a pretty rough show schedule that year. I ended up doing Motor City Comic Con one year. That was pretty fun. Do miss like the, being able to do 14 different prints at a time, but that's one of the things you get.
You get the print diversity when you have all of those different machines. So I could run 17 different prints at a time. It would just, Take me just to do it. Yeah, that was, that's, it's funny you say that because when I got my first P1P, or my only P1P, I that was like a calculation I did in my head because at the time I had two Unders, I, and then I had two Stat Makers as well.

And I was like, for the price of these, I could get one printer, but I'm only gonna be able to run one thing at a time, but it's going to print three [00:04:00] times as fast. It was like that exact equation of, is it worth it to just have the one that is way faster? in my experience, having the bamboo just has made 3d printing an absolute game changer in terms of, I'm sure, like you were saying with the four hours a night of repairs and things like that, it's probably not even like night and day. 
even when I went from the Enders to the Vipers, just the difference in maintenance between those, just having that stable bed and just like a reliable auto leveler and then a reliable feeding mechanism and a reliable hot end. Yeah. Just, you don't have to dealI don't think my Vipers, I don't think I ever got a clog.
But maybe a couple of times on that. And usually that was some combination of my fault from doing something wrong. So like putting in PETG and running it at PLA temperatures and trying to get it to work. Yeah obviously I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm having flashbacks listening to you just talk through all the repairs here.
Was, in your experience, obviously you've probably fixed just about everything on those printers at this point, but was there anything that you found to be the most common [00:05:00] issue, or was there anything that maybe you started doing when you had that many printers that helped you not have to do as much maintenance, or was it just non stop regardless?
Direct drives. Direct drives were the godsend for the Ender 3s. it was the direct drives and then putting the solid bed spacers on there. Once I got the springs off of the beds, that was a game changer. Cause then once you get the springs off of the bed, then your bed's one solid thing.
Then the auto leveler actually works and you're not fighting the springs and fighting the auto leveler and everything like that. It's just, those were the two best things. And then I think coming in a really close third would be the dual Z rods. Getting it so that your gantry doesn't tilt, cause that's, that was a big problem with the Enders. Once they got some use into them, some of those the threads would sag and you'd have a slanted gantry. And that's never fun. 
I went almost a step farther, and I, at the time, it was my first 3D printer, and I was just excited to upgrade stuff, I think there's like upgrading that can help your prints, and then I just got to the point where it was upgrading to being not 

beneficial. It was just making [00:06:00] things run worse, and I think that's always my caution for people getting into new 3D printers. 
Which I always say stop. Springs, easy couple dollars to upgrade. But yeah, after that, I say we did have it a little bit before you go crazy, because there definitely is the world of over modifying your printers too. and I went through that too, cause I was convinced at one point that everything needed to have the biometallic heat brakes and all that other stuff.
So I was buying parts and swapping things out and then It got to be like a second full time job at that point in time. And I'm like, I'm supposed to like doing this. This isn't supposed to be causing me stress and making me like want to throw things across the room. Yeah, I think especially with 3d printing it was one of the reasons why I'm thankful that I didn't get into selling is I think there's a level of stress that comes with the fact that you know You can start that print and you think it's gonna go great and everything's gonna be fine You walk away and it seems like printer issues are ten times more likely to happen when you're not watching the print 
I remember there was one morning that almost broke me because I had started, [00:07:00] I think I had started like eight prints and I had spent a couple hours in there getting everything all leveled, all the beds tuned in and all the settings dialed in, even did like E step calibrations and all that other stuff.
I woke up the next morning and. Every single one of the prints, I was printing in the air on every single one of them. And I was just like, I'm done with this room for today. So, yeah. I can't even imagine as somebody who's trying to prep for shows or trying to get things out the door that's gotta be a rough one now.
More recently, I can see behind you, it looks like maybe we've got some K1s back there, but right now I have five printers in my farm I've got the two K1s that you see there, I've got an A1 mini, and I've got an A1. Both with the AMSs. Nice.
Oh, and I have a CR30. But the CR 30, that's the belt printer from Creality. Oh, okay. Those ones, I've been curious about those. I'm not sure if there is much of a novelty or can you just run, let's say on that printer, could you run five files at a time and just have them go and go?
It's great for batch printing. [00:08:00] I actually have a SonicPad on that as well. So I can get it to run it, it doesn't run quick. Yeah, it runs about, I can run it 

at about 200 percent reliably with the the sonic pad. But admittedly, since I've rearranged my office, the CR 30 is pretty much a shelf right now. 
I need to get that one back into production so I can start doing some things, but it's definitely fun to print with. Pain in the ass to calibrate though. I've seen that printer in your content But yeah, I always wondered that if it was something where like maybe you could only load one at a time or if it was something where you could really just let that bad boy go and just keep cycling prints off of it, which the largest thing that I can do Is, I don't know if you're familiar with the Matt Meyer ball python, or the snake that Cinderwing has, but if I do that, I can get that up to 10 feet long, and it would be about six inches in diameter.
Damn, that's gonna be like, how many, do you know how many spools off the top of your head would fill with that? 3000 kilograms of filament. Okay. So it's three, three rows of filament. So yeah, that's a big snake. I don't [00:09:00] trust the printer enough to do a print that long . 
 I think that's 14 days of solid printing. So yeah, , I feel like there's just un listings that could go wrong in that scenario. So yeah, I don't blame you for that. But I will say a 10 foot long flexi sounds like right up my alley of something. That would be fun. 
I've gotta do, I gotta, I'm there, I'll run this close to getting it reliably. If I can run, if I can get about six or seven prints off of it before I have a failure, then maybe I'll run the gamble on it. If I can find some cheap filament to run it through. Yeah, for sure. Now, that kind of comes into something interesting.
Again, I know you do a lot of shows where you're selling in person, and in seeing that I see a lot of people who sell in person, and I always find it really interesting what they stock at their table. For you, obviously, as somebody who 3D prints, the idea of this like super massive print is really cool and really fun, but how do you decide what, out of all the files out there, how do you decide what you are and aren't going to stock at your booth for shows?
The markets that I do are generally, they're like family things. So I do the [00:10:00] things that are going to catch the kid's eye. I'm the person that the parents hate because I always have the cool things at the table. So I try to gear the stuff towards the kids.
So I like the fidgets and things like that. And I usually, I have three or four 

different price tiers. So I have a 5 section, a 10 section, 15, 25, and then everything that's over that. And I usually split it up into a fidget and like flexi section. And then I have a tabletop, like D and D section and stuff like that. 
As far as deciding what to print, it's cinder wing and flexi factory are what I print. I've started recently though. Breaking out into I do have a few designs that I do on my own, but I'm not like a great designer. I've got a pixel chess set that I designed And I have a couple of dice holders out there.
I did a collab with a dice tower with Steven Lightspeed. Oh, okay, yeah. I don't know if you saw his castle dice tower. He has a castle dice tower with a dice holder on the top. that was his first dice tower that he did. And him and I worked on that one for about three days.
So that was a fun project. I try to do the fun colors the [00:11:00] quick change rainbow sells really good. And then I try to do a lot of the color change filament and stuff like that to get those cool colors out there. I always think back to right before I got my 3D printer, and I know leading up to it, that was the thing that I was the most excited about, was printing with rainbows and printing all the crazy glitter filaments and all that stuff.
So it makes sense that, especially for little kids that they'll see that on the shelf and be gravitated to it. As I get more into printing, I definitely, again, as somebody who just prints as a hobbyist, I find myself, everything loaded. My AMS right now is boring. It's like black, white, and.
Brown inside of there now. So I've gotten away from that as a hobbyist, but yeah, for sure. I can definitely see from a standpoint of selling it's those rainbow filaments. Yeah, I actually it's funny you say that. Cause I don't think I've actually ran any rainbow or like dual, all of my AMS has been solid colors.
I think I have a polar filament. Yeah. I have a Martian blue, which is like a little sparkly blue. I was doing some [00:12:00] like Detroit lions theme stuff with. but that's it. Other than that, it's been solid colors. I think with the a MS and the ability to do the multicolor, you don't really need it as much.
But my K ones, they run the multicolor stuff all the time, interesting. I think I actually have rainbow loaded on the one with the circle on it there. Between the K ones and it sounds like you have the A one money and the standard A one. Do you gravitate towards liking one of those printers more, or are they pretty comparable for you?

To be honest with you I haven't had any issues really with the K1s since Creality has fixed the problems from launch. When I first had my K1s, they were A nightmare. But since the upgraded parts have been on there, they work just as reliably as the A1s do. 
Those are the ones that I do my prototyping on. Those are the ones thatran my pixel chess set here. But yeah I really liked the K1s, they're great. And with the updates that Creality has done to their Creality print software, I know everybody hates on it, but I don't mind it.
It works for what I needed to do. it works pretty much just like the bamboo [00:13:00] slicer does now. what I really wanted to get is I wanted to get away from the SD cards. I can't stand the SD cards and just the ability to send the print Directly to the printer was just great without having to deal with swapping out memory cards 
I just I'm just giving you flashbacks to having memory cards that are labeled for which printer they're going to. So I knew which files were on them. I cannot agree more. That was, it's such a small stupid little thing, but it's the, for whatever reason, it feels so good. so much work to have to put it into my computer, load up the file, bring it over to the printer.
I lose them. I misplaced them. I can't find the SD card for the printer I need to run. So yeah, it's huge. I will not print something if I have to change filament. Like it's so stupid. Like where you get that, where that executive dysfunction kicks in.
You're just like, Oh, I would, I want to print this dragon. Oh, I have to change the SD card. Nevermind. That's too much. When in reality, it's an extra 30 seconds, like honestly hitting the change filament button on the K ones. It's going to take it 45 seconds to heat up and spit the filament out and then another 10 seconds to change it.
I'm so [00:14:00] glad that's not just me, because I can't tell you how many times I've either needed to run a print or, I've been waiting to run a print. A week will go by because I have to swap out filament, which sounds so simple and so crazy.
But it is the dumbest, it is the dumbest thing and the dumbest excuse, but it's just, it's one of the hardest things to get over is to swap that film. It's one of the other things that I like about the AMS. In my brain, the AMS, I can queue up 

four prints because I have four different things to film it on there. 
Yeah, it's funny you say that, too, because I honestly, on my AMS, I've probably run multicolor prints five times max. I almost never run multicolor, but Exactly that being able to have four different colors in there at once. And just, I never have my Bamboo Studio color coded correctly by AMS settings of what colors in there.
So it's a gamble and a guess, but if it doesn't matter what color I'm running too much, I like that. I could just have a couple in there and just send it. And I'll usually, I'll keep sometimes like a PLA, a Apache couple of different types of filament in there, just so I can get away with all my projects without having to do a swap in [00:15:00] there.
 slots one and four on my AMS are generally for gray and black, almost exclusively, unless I'm doing a multicolor thing. And honestly, I haven't really done, I think the most multicolor thing that I've ran Was the Flexi Factory's chess set.
That's the biggest one of multi color stuff that I did and that was To get two of the whole, two of the chess sets done. It was it was two full days of printing. Wow, that's that's the downside to the multi color stuff is it takes a very long time. Usually I'll use it to color like the eyes on a dragon or something like that and that way I don't have to paint it because That's another thing that just holds me up.
It's just I have to paint the eyes on all these dragons. Oh, nope. These dragons just aren't getting their eyes painted. Yeah, I'm the opposite. I, because I hate running multicolors so much, I always tell myself, I'm just going to run it in one color and then I'm going to paint everything else on.
But, Then it comes time to painting it and exactly that it's a whole other additional stuff that has to take place. You got to prep your work area, then you got to get your water cup to wash the brushes and you got to open your paints and then you got another whole process of things.
I was [00:16:00] going to try to do airbrushing, but my airbrush sat in a box for a couple of months. So we just ended up returning it. Yeah, my airbrush it's really is a love hate relationship with it because anytime that I use my airbrush, it comes out great and the results are unmatched to anything else that I'm going to use it for, but the downside is cleaning the airbrush is, between every 

color that you do, you have to change it out and it's a process. 
So I, in the future, I would love if either. Somebody could figure out some way of maybe like a quick change pot on airbrushes where you could just easily swap out the colors. That's the biggest thing that I think for me is the biggest frustration with using those. And then it's like all, again, coming back to the unders, it's like flashbacks because my airbrush is getting clogged.
I'm getting frustrated and like ready to throw it across the room. So as much as I like the results of the airbrush, I just I don't use it as much as I thought it was going to. It's the maintenance. I need to come out with an AMS for the For the airbrushing. Absolutely. Now I see, and maybe I was misunderstanding what it is, but it [00:17:00] looks like, cause again, you do the in person like events, but it looks like maybe you have a dedicated market that you sell out of.
Am I seeing that correctly? Yep. So we do have what's called a maker's market and they have it's like a permanent craft show is what it is. There's, 25 to 30 other crafting tables that are in there. She was specifically looking for a 3D printer because her last 3D printer, went away.
We met her at, I was doing another show and she had actually had mentioned that she had she was looking for 3d printer and so we we went there, scoped out the booth. We've got a little thing there. So yeah, we have a permanent shop set up. Inside of there is like a little maker space. Plus she has like a showroom where we can set up a table and we can host an event if we wanted to host like a 3d printing event and stuff like that.
She lets the crafters do that. Yeah, that's it's something I'm sure a lot of cities have it, but I don't see a lot of people who have access to those spaces. So I was curious how you got involved with that, but yeah, maybe it's something where people at shows just need to keep their ear to the ground and look out for something like that.
Cause that's. That's a [00:18:00] cool it sounds like a cool opportunity to have that just like ongoing place to sell out of. Yeah. And it, this is actually the second one that we were at. The first one we were at was a little closer and a little busier, and a lot bigger, but we have a lot of those around here the problem is they fill up really quick, so you've got to make sure you get in there, get on the waiting list and things like that.
But yeah, there's a bunch of 'em around here. I'd be curious to even just go 

check one out, just to go shopping there and see what other people have there. they're actually, like that thrift store that you go to where it has like the area, except they're sectioned off and have these numbered booths each booth is like a separate little storefront and then you go in there and shop around. 
That's cool. Now, I know you said that, she had approached you because she was looking for another 3D printer. For you guys once you're in there, do they not really have other 3D printer vendors come in there, or is it just free for all of what they have in there?
The nice thing is When you go into these places, they have a genuine interest in wanting people to come in. So they don't want to have 30 of the same thing. So the larger ones will usually limit it to one or two of the same type of vendors. This one's a little smaller, so I don't think there's [00:19:00] any overlap on the vendors.
So it's like one of each type of thing. There's 25 different crafts that are in there. So there's not going to be another 3d printer there. I'm the 3d printer. There's a woodworker. they have the tumblers there. there's a couple people that do their stuffies, t shirts and things like that.
Jewelry, Yeah, no, that's cool. That's like I said, like similar to going to that antique mall that I like to go to. I love just going places. There's a wide variety of selection and I have a diverse variety of interests. it's fun to poke around at all the different booths and see what's going on.
No, that was cool when I saw that. And what we like about that is it's, we don't, it's not as much money each month as the show, but it's a lot more consistent. And what we don't need to do is we don't need to tie up a weekend. Like we can maybe go out there early. We usually go out there early on a Saturday.
We'll go get breakfast and then we'll go stock the shelves there and then go from there. So I would love to get into several more of those places like that, where I just have to run a bunch of stuff here and then just do a route and then just go stock everything up. Yeah, no for [00:20:00] sure. Something I always in the back of my mind thought would be really fun and I don't know how practical it would be but like, either the old school vending machines or the old school claw machines just exclusively filled with like dragons or some kind of 3D print in there I feel would be a fun attraction if you could get some kind of small business to let you put it in there.

Yeah. Now the other place I think you've recently started getting on and selling out of, do you guys do TikTok shop, right? Oh, yeah, we've been on TikTok shop for who, when did we start in TikTok? Have we been there since it came out? We've almost since the onset, we've been on TikTok shop. 
So we've been on Etsy since we started about four years ago. We do a little bit on eBay and then TikTok shop, but TikTok and Etsy are our two main two main venues. You Nice, nice. Yeah, TikTok shop, it's I know for a lot of people it's really been a game changer from the 3D printing side, and I feel like for 3D prints it's great.
I think it's great from a price point. It's something that a lot of 3D prints aren't, crazy expensive where you can get that person looking either for the impulse buy or just it's not too cost [00:21:00] prohibitive. But Also, I think the content around 3D printing lends itself really well to TikTok shop.
So has it been like for you guys, have you enjoyed being on TikTok shop so far? Up to this point? I love TikTok shop. And it really, what is nice, it's not necessarily just like the TikTok, you have to take that, the TikTok shop and TikTok together because, Yeah. It's really what makes it so great is it gives you the platform so you can, self promote, you're not reliant on what. Traffic Etsy pushes to your shop or anything, you can actively say on this platform. I'm going to push my shop Here's a link to the video. Let me show you my cool little doodah or this is my new dragon Or here's a chess set that I'm doing You know those kind of things and then the ability to do the lives and then put the shoppable links in the lives like that's Huge When we would do the lives we were, selling a hundred to 200 during the lives on the stuff.
It was especially, and then Christmas time, it was crazy. There was one night, I think we did 600 worth of stuff. I was like, I don't know how I'm going to print all [00:22:00] this. Yeah. So that's the thing for you. So do you just for like those orders, do you just do print on, print on demand would be the word that I'll use for that.
Do you, you don't have them like maybe necessarily always stock. You'll just as the orders come in, you'll print them after the fact. So to do the listings, I always have at least one or two, depending on the size of the item. If it's a dice tower, I generally will only have one. If it's a dragon, I'll usually print two dragons.
Cause I can get two on the on the A1. Just depending on the item. But most of 

the time I usually have at least one of everything that's on the shop in stock. And then if somebody orders it, I'll usually print another one and then ship off the other one. Gotcha. Have you found like they're looking to get into Selling 3d prints. 
Do you find like managing inventory or deciding like what to have as inventory? Just like on hand ever difficult and have you ever had a scenario maybe around Christmastime or Black Friday or anything like that? Where it's just you had some crazy scenario where you had to expand It sounds like your initial cookie cutter was that scenario, but any other ones that come to mind?
So yeah, there was a, we, for whatever reason [00:23:00] I want to say this was, it was either last year or the year before, but for whatever reason the cinder wing butterfly dragon, I posted a video at one of them during one of the shows that I was doing and it just went, and I got 50, 000 views on it. 
I just, I hit the algorithm. The algorithm gods were in my favor that day. And so it was just like one after another. So I had. I had the two K1s dedicated to those and I think they ran for a week straight. Wow. just those ones. But yeah, there's been times where it's, where we've had.
Just like that panic moment where we get like six orders in of something and I've only got a couple of them printed. So I'm like, all rightlet's get these queued up. Let me look at the, what's the SLA on these? Let's see if we can get these done in time. 
That's definitely one of those scenarios where I guess you have to push through the SD cards and the filament loading and all that stuff to get those out the door. Yeah I guess like on the flip side of that, has there ever been any scenarios with Prince where you thought to yourself, you're like, this is going to take off, people are going to love this, [00:24:00] and then just it didn't work out?
Yes, I'm trying to remember what it was, but I've had this exact feeling whereI would spend a bunch of time on it. Yeah, actually it was the Halloween monsters. I had, this was back when I was still with STL flicks. I had printed some of the Halloween monsters and I was like, Oh, this is really cool.
And I had set everything up. And so this is when I was still running that Ender farm. So doing multicolor prints on the Enders, I'm sure you know how fun that is. but these ones were all multiple parts. So I printed like a bunch of all these 

little parts and I had Five or six printers dedicated to all these things and I put in just a ton of work on these things and I got Them all glued together and put up and I was like, oh, these are really cool Cuz they were all the old classic monsters like Frankenstein the mummy the creature in the Black Lagoon Dracula and they looked really cool. 
They were cute and I Still have them left to this day and that was three years ago I guess it's right around the corner again, so yeah, maybe this is your year I know I just sold the Frankenstein at our booth and then 
I think I have the mummy and [00:25:00] the werewolf left Took me three years to sell through that, I thought for sure those ones were going to be great. I liked them, I thought they were really cool, yeah. 
It's I think one of the hard things that hard lessons I've had in different online shops is I always, there's always something that I think is just so cool and everybody's going to love and it seems to be only me who thinks that thing is so cool. Yeah, I've certainly run into that before.
Oh, and I did another one too. there's a tabletop gaming table that I have too, that I spent two weeks Printing the parts for, put it all together. And I was like, Oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to showcase the shows. I'm going to do a couple of TikTok videos on these.
I'll host a couple of lives where we played D& D on it and everything like that. I did all that. And crickets. Nothing. Yeah. it's always tough when it intersects with like your other interests and intersects with something you're like really passionate about.
It's Oh man, that one hurts a little extra. Yeah. This is stinging a little bit. I thought this was really cool. Yeah. For sure. Now when you guys do shows in person, do you run your 3D printers at the booth or do you like have them there with you? So it depends. A lot of the places that [00:26:00] we go, they don't have power available because they're outdoor shows.
So if power's available, I'll, if I've done the show before and I know it's going to be a busier show, then yes, I'll bring one. But yeah I, it's been a minute since I've actually brought a printer to a show. But right now we're not really doing We just did a show that I had committed to last year.

I've got a couple more. I've got another show, I think, with the same person that I committed to last year that I'm doing. And then we've got our normal Santa shop ones and Christmas shows that we're doing for the high schools that are around here. But we've taken a, I've been doing more of the online sales and things like that, as opposed to the in person shows, just cause it's a little much to give up the weekends and everything like that. 
And I was a psychopath last year. I did four shows in a week. And that was I did a Sunday show, it was a Wednesday show, and then I did a Saturday show, and then I had another Sunday show, and I was, I'm like, yep, I don't want to do another show ever again. Yeah, no I feel like things like that are easy to get burnt out from.
Are you guys, is this like your full time thing [00:27:00] that you are doing right now? Or no, this is this is part time. So this is just like a side hobby thing that generates a little bit of extra revenue for it full time I'm I'm a software integration specialist for a construction company.
I have a tech job during the day. So I get corporate Joe during the day, 3D printing Joe at night. Yeah, no I'm similar to you. I have my nine to five, but I work from home. So either way, I just sit here all day and either, I'm sitting here, 3D printing, making videos, or I'm sitting here.
Doing less, less exciting stuff, but yeah, it's no I feel you there, but yeah, especially when you have, your full time job going on. I have to imagine going to four shows in a week. that was a rough week. Yeah, absolutely. It was actually after that week, I was like, no more during the week shows.
that was doing a show during the week was a little rough, because we had signed up to do a couple of Wednesday or Thursday shows, and we did it twice, and we only ended up doing like 300, and I'm like, it's not worth the 300 bucks to drive, take off work early, drive out here, set everything up, pack everything up, and then get home and, essentially die for the rest of the night. [00:28:00] Yeah, I feel like we think shows are hard too just because like everybody else is working for the most part I feel like those shows are probably a little harder and that's From a lot of people I talk to It seems like you have to almost be selective and it's a little bit of living and learning of, what shows perform well and what shows don't perform well over the years, we've even gotten to the point where if we're going to sign up for a new show, we ask if they juryhow many of each vendor do they allow?

Cause we actually stopped. One of the easiest shows for us to do was our local farmer's market, but we stopped doing those because there's two other 3d printers there. So we would have been the third one. We were the first and then two other guys joined. And since it's a city hosted farmer's market, they can't really say no. 
They have the space. so then we were doing decent. Then when the one guy joined, That cut our sales in half, and then when the third guy joined, now we're only making a third of what we did before, so I was just like, we're just like, yeah, we're just not gonna do it anymore.
And then we even checked it out to see if, Both of them were still doing it and they, it's ever evolving with business, but things like Tick Tock Chop coming out are a cool game changer.
And like you said, the way that they rolled out the [00:29:00] platform, I feel like. They rolled it out in a really smart way. It's a very seamless shopping experience, whether, you have the links directly on live, or the links are directly on your video. Even if somebody, I don't sell, but I make content around TikTok shopI will say I feel like they did a really great job with that platform.
Yeah I was, I have been happy with the TikTok shop. I wish they would give us a little bit more time to process the orders. But, it's fair. I know I was skirting the line when I don't have 10 of anything in stock, but I always say I do, but because I know I can print them before I need to send them out.
But yeah, tick tock wants you to have the item, had in hand before you do it, they want you to basically just get the order, box it up, send it out the next day. Yeah, which I mean it's a given intake because I think For small businesses, it's hard to always, have all that stuff in stock and hard to, especially for a lot of small businesses, I think are people exactly like you, who they have their nine to five and then they're doing this on weekends and they're doing this on nights.
It's hard to always, be able to every single time that order comes in and easily drop it. But what I will say on the flip side of that is I think from the consumer side and from the buyer's [00:30:00] standpoint the fact that those orders do ship so fast and do arrive quickly. I think makes it a much more positive buying experience for the shoppers.
I 100 percent understand why they do it. Cause it's a storefront. So the 

storefront needs to cater to the customers. That's without the customers, nobody's selling anything. So you're right. It's the give and take. I would like to be able to say it takes me five days to process the order. 
TikTok's you've got to get it out in two or three days. I'm like, all right, I can make that happen. Yeah. And I feel like maybe over time, maybe as it like develops more maybe it'll go more similar to Etsy. Cause I think on Etsy, they let you say yeah, Etsy lets you give the processing time for the orders on that one.
And I've got that on my Etsy shop, I think five to seven days and I usually ship out within three. So it's under promise over deliver kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. We've talked a lot about different places that you sell out of different things that have been successful and haven't been successful.
Again I think getting selling 3D prints is always something that a lot of people, are interested in. Do you have any kind of [00:31:00] final tips of things that maybe you wish you would have known when you got started or just things that you learned along the way that are helpful for people who are just looking to get into this side of 3D printing?
So for, if you're just looking to get into it just you need to look at the features of the machine, like you need to make the decision on whether you want to be, if you're going to be a hobbyist and you want to know everything about 3D printing, or if you're just looking at it from a business aspect of it, Don't if you're looking to get started business, don't get into it buying an Ender 3 I know there's people that are going to disagree with me on that one, but if you're doing it for a business, just buy a BAM, really any of the new gen printers, because they all have those features.
They all have Wi Fi. They all have auto leveling. They're all pretty quick now. And, reliability is like the standard now because that was always the big thing, like all of the printers. Beforehand, didn't you have the Snapmaker was one of your trouble machines, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was a troublemaker. Obviously you're under threes and stuff like that, but you don't want a machine that's a troublemaker. So get something that's reliable. That's the reliability is going to be the king. That's really what you need on a printer is you need something that's going to work when you need it to [00:32:00] work with very little maintenance.
Awesome. I think whether it's, whether you're getting into it as a hobbyist or 

whether you're getting into it to go a more professional route, You will save yourself a lot of time and a lot of aggregate aggravation and a lot of filament spaghetti on your build plate if you get a more reliable machine. 
And if you think about it too, like even all the, so it's great that I know flow rates and I know e steps and everything like that. But honestly, all of that information is so important. So none of the machines are running Marlin, they're all on Clippers. So like the industry has just fundamentally changed.
So all that stuff you're going to learn on the Ender three isn't going to apply. To any of the modern machines. Once you switch over it's just going to be stuff up here. You're going to be like I know what the flow rate is on this machine, but that doesn't help me. It's actually a funny thing you say, because I honestly, for even still, like I do say to people all the time, if you're looking to get started with a cheaper option, like an Ender is a great option. You'll learn a lot. You'll figure out a lot. But that is very true. Honestly, like a lot of the things I learned on my Ender [00:33:00] from it breaking and fixing it every day of the week, they don't really, you don't have those issues really on the newer printers.
So yeah, you look at the bamboos, the bamboos all have linear rails. They don't use V slots. Your P1P or P1S it's a core XY. So same with K1s are core XY. So None of that is really relevant to what you're printing on.
So, yeah, it's a hot take, but it's actually a good point becausethere are always people who will battle me out still saying that the under is the best place to start. But I think you just made a good argument for, I loved my Ender 3s.
If it wasn't for my Ender 3s, I wouldn't be a 3D printer right now. I had a great time with my Ender 3s. It was fun learning how to modify them. It was fun going through and doing all the math and all that other stuff to figure out what the e steps needed to be, and your flow rates and all that stuff.
 do I enjoy the fact that I can just go boop and my printer goes at this point? I do. I don't want to have to do that. Titan belts and all that other stuff. So it's a trade off. I do miss it sometimes, but I do have a couple of broken vipers. If I ever [00:34:00] wanted to go back to those days, I can go tinker with those.
Yeah, for sure. Final question, I'll leave you off here with today. If we fast forward into the future and you think about either just your personal projects that you have going on or your shop and where you see things going Do you have a vision for how you hope for I guess your 3D printing journey to evolve 

over time? 
So what I'm actually working on right now and what I'm hoping in the future is that I can have more of my own designs. I'm working in Fusion to start doing some, more advanced projects and learning a lot more of the designing elements of it. Cause At the end of the day, that's what's going to differentiate you.
If you canin your business, you can have your own designs or you're agile enough to, adjust to customers demands and things like that. Say, Oh, I want a dragon, but can it go like this? And yeah, I can make it do that. You know what I mean? But rather than waiting for the creators that you follow or the Patreons you do and even, you look at Cinderwing, that's like the standard, right?
So when I started printing, she had 600 members on her Patreon, right? And [00:35:00] now she's got, 4, 500 on her Patreon and, thousands more on her tribes and thangs accounts and things like that. So there's just, there's going to be that commonality. I don't know how many times I get asked at a show is Oh, were you at this such and such show?
Cause I saw your dragons there. And I'm like, yeah, they're not my dragons, these are the ones that the 3d printers have. So like your flexi factories, your cinder wings, while they're all great, everybody's got them. So there's not really much different there. So being able to design and do your own things is.
that's going to be the game changer and just being able to adjust to what your customers are asking for, or the ability to do custom orders and stuff like that. no, it absolutely makes sense. And it's funny hearing you say that. she's got quite the following for sure.
People who print those dragons and there's a out by meters, it's like an outlet mall that I go to occasionally, but they, it's an interesting setup, the outside of the outlet stores, they have little vendor booths there. there's this family that they 3D print, but I always see the Cinderwing dragons there and it's just, as somebody who 3D prints, it's funny because you see the stuff there and you know what it [00:36:00] is, everybody else just sees it and to them it's, they probably think Oh, that's their dragons.
So if I, whenever I go to a show and I even did this, cause when I was at Motor City Comic Con, I walked up and down every aisle and every 3D printer I saw there, I would always ask him, I was like, Oh, who's who's Patreon do you 

follow? Who's this model? Things like that. Cause I, I can tell with the style of the design and stuff. 
Oh, this is from Flexi factory, right? Or is this Dell 3D? Or is this print first, cause they're patreons that I followed in the past or I'd see like a Matt Meyers thing. Oh yeah. I really like Matt Meyers thing. Do you have his blah, blah, blah. So yeah. Cool. Joe, I. Totally appreciate you coming on today.
I feel like you've shed a ton of light on different things that you have going on with your shop, all the different places that you sell out of, and it was super great talking to you. So real quick for people who don't follow you already, but would like to follow you, where can they find you online? So I'm primarily on TikTok.
I'm at Joe Rapari on TikTok, or you can search gilderips3dprinting on there. you can go to linktree. com slash gilderips3d. That'll get you a link to all my socials. if you want to [00:37:00] message me any questions about anything, I usually respond pretty quickly.
We do a Facebook page as well. Facebook. com slash deal grips stuff like that. But yeah, tick tock is primarily where I'm the most active. So awesome. Go give them a follow. And with that said, that is meet the makers. Thanks so much for