printrbot GO – first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait

Today was a momentous day.  The Printrbot GO arrived (aside: I have been struggling with whether  printrbot or Printrbot is more correct, but since I’ve seen it both ways just about everywhere, I’m not gonna worry about it anymore).

It wouldn’t be right to not say something about the difficulties involved in getting to this point.  I have nothing but love for Brook, David and the other Printrbot guys, but it would be dishonest to say that the process of researching, ordering and ultimately receiving the GO has gone as smoothly as I think most folks might expect. Ordering a very early example of a very ambitious kit (more on that later) surely contributed to the problems, so my experience should not be taken as representative of that of your average Printrbot customer by any means.

First off, Printrbot doesn’t want you to contact them.  Not really.  They don’t have a phone number or a physical address listed on their website, nor do they even have an email address.  Just a web form. When I didn’t hear anything back for a few days after submitting a question there, I dug around and found a response from David@Printrbot on the PBHQ Forum to some other folks also asking, “How the heck do you get a hold of these guys?” with a run down of Printrbot’s priorities for inquiries: Broken or missing parts – up to three days, Inquiry on placed order – up to five days, Question on educational discount – one to two weeks, Everything else might be a few weeks.

It started to sound kinda thoughtful to me.  For a small company that can’t hardly keep up with incoming orders for a bleeding edge product that is constantly under development, maybe it makes sense to weed out the least patient folks with an incommunicado firewall of sorts.  And surely it makes sense to do your best to satisfy the customers you already have and make things right when problems arise. And who can’t get behind prioritizing educational outreach?  So I took the plunge and placed an order on January 21st.

Possibly as quickly as the next day I got an email from a “no-reply” address saying that the lead time was about four weeks but that they’d try to do better.  Great.

I had been tweeting (you know, on Twitter?) about 3d printing ever since becoming obsessed a few weeks prior and on February 7th, @printrbot replied to one of my tweets where I mentioned having placed the order (my tweet was actually fantasizing about a DeltaMaker as my second 3d printer, but I digress) saying that I’d have it by Monday or Tuesday.  This was way ahead of schedule and I was of course thrilled. I also thought it was pretty cool that someone had bothered to put my twitter handle together with my email address and connect the dots. I did find it a little weird however that I didn’t get an email with a tracking number during the remainder of that week, and then when Monday and Tuesday came and went with no bot in sight, I tweeted back my heartbreak and then submitted a request for clarification via the web form the next morning (case of mistaken identity? unexpected delays? unknown).

That afternoon I got my first email from a real email address, from David@printrbot. He apologized for taking so long to get back to me and said the lead time for a Printrbot GO would be about four weeks.  I scratched my head momentarily but then realized that his reply was to my original request for information (a few weeks ago at that point) before I had even placed the order. He had clearly been working his way through the queue of questions and had no idea I’d placed an order, received other replies already, had an exchange with someone on Twitter and then submitted a new question that morning.

The good news was that I now had a human being communicating with me (the other web form replies had been signed “Printrbot Team”) and David looked into my order status and started to give me updates about where they were at.  He told me I’d only be the fourth person to receive this particular kit (the GO) and that they were hoping to have the instructions completed before it shipped.

There was quite a lot of information in that last sentence, but the only thing that registered initially was the word “kit”.  You see, and I can’t make sense of it myself, somehow I had convinced myself that the GO I had ordered was a fully assembled bot.  I’ve scoured the Printrbot website to see what possibly could have lead me to that conclusion, but there’s nothing.  Apparently I had just decided in my head that it would be cool if someone else would build it for me and so surely that must be true.

So when I realized that I had in fact purchased a very early example of the single most complicated “kit” offered by a tiny start-up company devoted to an incredibly rapidly developing technology AND that there were not yet instructions available for it, I started to have a little panic attack.  Uncontrollable laughter was the primary outward symptom as I came to grips with the Herculean task I’d bitten off, somewhat (and somehow, inexplicably) unwittingly.  Suddenly I didn’t care how long it would take to receive it.

Let me return briefly to the issue of delays and communications mishaps and try to wrap up this painful but cathartic post.  Again, Printrbot, if you’re reading this, I know it might sting a little, but better to know, right?

I was told it would ship “next week” and when that week came and went I had to reach out again for an update. I expressed my frustration (politely I hope), not at the delays themselves, which were understandable, but at the lack of communication.  When you promise something and can’t deliver (it happens), you absolutely have to proactively reach out to the customer if you want to regain their trust.

David apologized and assured me that if it had not shipped by the following Thursday he would email me at that time to let me know the status. He also offered to throw in some extra filament for me and give me a credit at the Printrbot online store. Nice. On Tuesday of that week, Brook apparently saw my post on Printrbot Talk asking advice about staining the birch panels.  He sounded as excited as I was about turning the GO into a steampunk mash-up and offered to replace parts that might be ruined during the experimentation and said it would ship tomorrow or Thursday.  Awesome.

Then I got an email on Wednesday evening from David saying he didn’t think it was going to ship that week at all, but hopefully next week.  The poor guy was doing his best to fulfill his promise to me to proactively communicate about delays but didn’t know that Brook had already reached out to me via another channel.  Oy vey.

Well, it turned out that David was right, and it did in fact ship the following week, which was last week.  The guys changed out the silly stuff I’d ordered (wrong size printer bed for example) and also added in some stuff I hadn’t ordered by way of apologizing for the delays (on top of the extra filament David had promised) AND they upgraded it to Express shipping. I didn’t ask them to do any of that extra stuff and I very much appreciate the gesture.

Since it’s not at all relevant to would-be 3d printing enthusiasts, I won’t bore you overmuch with the  ways in which USPS dropped the ball on their end (in my neighborhood, if I get a package notice at all it is frequently the “Final Notice”, and this is usually left in my box even if I’m home at the time; in fact, the guy in front of me in line actually tried to get the Supervisor-on-duty to take down his lawyer’s number for the same reason!), but yesterday found me dragging the bot-in-a-box back from the local post office, NYC-old-lady-grocery-shopping style.

If my post office was more than two blocks away, I might have picked it up in a more glamorous fashion. Like in a cab.

So here we are now in my itty-bitty workshop about to get our hands dirty. I have the box on my “dirty” watch bench ( for cutting, filing, grinding and sawing mostly; but I also usually have a microscope set up there) and you can see my other watch bench in the foreground and my Sherline lathe/milling machine set up on the other side.  It’s pretty tight (there’s a computer desk, a book shelf and various storage boxes large and small filling up the unseen portions), but quite a luxury to have a separate room for a workshop in Manhattan at all (it’s possible where we live in Inwood) so I can’t complain. The point of showing you this is so that when I’m kvetching later about being overwhelmed with fumes or my resistance to laying out all the wood panels on newspaper to spray them with polyurethane you will perhaps be more understanding. Or not.  Whatever.

I actually filmed an unboxing video.  In case you’re not familiar with the meme, this is a type of video where someone films themselves opening the box.  No, really, I’m not making this up.  Tech gadget geeks mostly, film themselves opening a product (the latest cell phone is a common subject choice) that most of the internets is still very much waiting to get their hands on so that folks can see what comes in the box.  It’s a real thing, check YouTube.  To do so for the GO was one of those ironic ideas that spun around in my head until it seemed like a real idea, but then by the time I’d filmed the thing I remembered that unboxing videos are, as a genre, um… indefensible?  Not sure what the exact word I’m looking for here is.

I did take an unboxed picture however that I will share (after squirreling away the filament in a cardboard box with a dehumidifying gizmo in it). Also not pictured is the heated print bed. It looks like a big red square.

 

Brook has assured me that he’s working on instructions, and I’m OK with a little more waiting (UPDATE: The instructions are now online here. Thanks Printrbot!).  I put together the Filament Spool and Filament Spool Stand already after experimenting with how best to treat and tint the wood.  That’s something that will keep me busy for a few days and will be the subject of another post (what to do with the birch ply panels).  Exciting (for me at least; for you? thanks for reading!).