Part Party

As you know if you’ve been following LaserSETI for a while, we’ve got 10 new instruments we’re building and there’s a lot that goes into them.

It takes 27 days of continuous 3D-printing to make all the parts for just 1 instrument–assuming the printer ran continuously, which it can’t unfortunately.

After months of printing steadily, the LaserSETI team convened to clean and check all the parts we’ve printed thus far. There’s a lot!

If you’re like me, you like numbers: It took 6 people 4 hours process them all which, with 120 parts, works out to 12 minutes per part. More importantly, this is 43% of parts required for the next 10 instruments, although only 35% of the print-hours it will take. That’s great because there’s less overhead in printing larger parts!