Over the last few months, we’ve had a lot of folks build their own Mill Ones from scratch or buy some parts from us to complete their builds. We want to support anyone and everyone who wants access to affordable CNC machines, and we’ve done our best to provide the resources and tools to do that through the Mill One project. One of the members of the Sienci Mill One Group asked if we were able to provide more options with the kit, to pick and choose which components the kit includes. In a perfect world, that would be the most ideal. People can just get what they need and nothing more. However, things are a little more complicated than that. This is my response:
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It’s been something we’ve been considering. However there’s a few reasons we have tried to keep things as simple as possible.
One is that we want to be able to keep a close eye on the quality of all the parts. If we have a customer that made their own parts that don’t work properly or are not to spec, it is a lot more difficult to help them. We’ve made hundreds of each part so we have a lot of experience making sure the quality is as good as possible, and fixing issues for our customers if there are any. I think it is a much smoother experience for our customers to have everything from us.
Second is that we want to make every choice as simple as possible to make it as affordable as possible. Every variation on the kit we add will make it more expensive because we have to pack every machine differently. It’s a lot easier for us to pack everything the same and have only one or two choices, and those cost savings can be passed along to the customer. Sure, maybe they can save some money by only getting what they need, but overall, it will make things more expensive for everyone. We order everything in large batches to keep costs down as well. If we had to make or buy stock in smaller batches which is what we’d need to do if we separated the kit up, that would also greatly increase the cost.
Third and lastly, getting all the parts from us saves a lot of time and effort for the customer, and if you were to source all the components separately, it would probably cost the same or more, not including the extra time it takes to source and manufacture each part.
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What are your thoughts on this decision? Any ideas on how we can support our community better?
Feel free to reach out at hi@sienci.com