Refining our work

Today I had another great meeting with my first client. It was a great success, however it made clear to me how much I can improve the way I handle my presentations.

The reccomendations need to be closely aligned with the goals and preferences of my clients. This is obvious, but I suppose the lesson is to avoid talking about things which aren't ideal for them. They clutter the presentation and distract from the highest-value implementations I can offer.

I was advised to avoid using too much text in a presentation, however I still managed to make walls of text. While these did prompt good discussion and kept me on track, I think PowerPoints are best served as a visual format for images like print and part examples. In the future, I'll keep my scripts to myself and use the PowerPoint as a more visual tool.

The past two meetings have highlighted some important skills and knowledge with people will need to use 3D printers. Yesterday I mentioned measurement as a key skill, but today I thought more about things like quality control.

My client revealed to me that their latest shipment of material is different from the last. They have to recalibrate all their settings in order to produce the same high quality part.

I also found out that Bambu 3D printers, once updated, cannot be reverted to old firmware. Frankly, this is ridiculous, and my clients machine is now an inoperable paper weight which worked before the update.

However, this annoyance hasn't changed our mutual excitement about Bambu labs. In Q1 this year, they are expected to release a new machine with "features completely new to the consumer market". What could this be? Perhaps non-planar printing, a multi material system, heated chamber, tilted nozzle or a magnetic motion system.

The past 2 days has been a great test run which will surely improve my future work. I'm excited to see the results of my suggestions which will form a case study for you to read. I expect that the implementations will save a lot of time and most importantly - minimise the frustrating tasks which annoy us all (e.g. support removal and filament changes)

Thanks for reading,

Simon