Fun Factoids!

Since our inception, we have printed roughly 9,000 pounds of filament -- that’s over 830 miles of the stuff!  How can we put that distance into perspective? Some factoids:

• People average between .0009 to .0011 miles in height
• Mt. Everest is 5.5 miles tall
• The edge of space is 62.5 miles above sea-level
• The International Space Station (ISS) orbits at 254 miles 
• The Hubble Telescope orbits at 370 miles
• The distance to moon is 238,900 miles

While we didn’t quite reach the moon, we did reach the altitude of this amazing NASA picture! ​

Image credit NASA https://shorturl.at/eQvgI

Gross Cubic Footage

POP Manufacturing has over 18 FDM machines and our gross print envelope is 48.6 cubic feet.  But what does that mean?  Some more factoids:

• If we maxed out the volume for each machine while printing ABS (our most-requested material), we’d yield 3,200 lbs of work!  For context, that’s heavier than a Toyota Corolla, but just shy of Mammoth, the heaviest horse ever recorded (3,360 lbs, born in 1846 in Bedfordshire, England).

Image courtesy of ProHorse https://shorturl.at/k9V3M

Solid bricks of ABS aren’t too interesting though, so let's put things into perspective using a more realistic example.  Print speed varies greatly depending on geometry and resolution, but our workhorse large format FDM printers (Stratasys 400-class) can consume up to ~2kg filament in a 24 hour period.  Put another way, each printer can make four of these 6” bolt circle diameter servo covers in that time.  If we needed to produce a bunch of these in a rush, we could get parts going on multiple machines in parallel and crank 2-4x that amount out daily!