Why the mp22s went away

I've had numerous people message me asking why I took down the files, and in the interest of maybe changing things for the better I will just answer this publicly.

I want to say first of all that I spent about 80 hours on the design, and about 3-5 hundred dollars doing the R&D. 90% of that was developing the DIY tools and process to be as user friendly as possible. And the reason I did it is because I was pretty jazzed up about how mine performed (it was noticeably quieter than my factory integral, that is widely recognized as being the quietest at 115db). Needless to say, it was a lot of work, and I think the results reflect that.

Now I know how people feel about selling STLs, so I made the whole thing open source and put all the STLs and even the original native files in a zip, and provided that free of charge. My plan was to create a step-by-step guide for making one, put it in ebook form, and then sell that. I probably put more work into that guide than I did the actual models. It's 25 pages and has 35 photos and diagrams. Is it a masterpiece? No, but this CAD monkey isn't a photographer or writer or graphic designer, and the end result served its purpose in that it held the maker's hand and took them through the process and didn't leave them clueless and frustrated.

But despite having released the highly polished, highly effective design for free, I received hateful messages basically insinuating that I was a capitalist pig and had no right to profit from my hard work. Despite literally nobody else going to that kind of effort to support their guncad files, it was explained to me that I was violating the guncad ethos by not making that free, as well.

And before you say tips, NOBODY tips, ever. In five years, I've received exactly one tip, for files that had lots of downloads, makes and good reviews. Like nobody complained about the utility of the design, quite the opposite, but despite that nobody ever tips. The same held true for the mp22s. Despite lots of downloads and a lot of praise and compliments for the design, nobody tipped a single cent. Which I already knew would be the outcome beforehand, which is why I had arrived at the model where I would make some money from the ebook. So stop gaslighting us with the whole tips nonsense; it just doesn't happen in real life. I think the main reason those sites even enable tips is just to gaslight everyone, creators and consumers alike.

And before you say sell parts kits, you need to understand the actual reality of that from a MECHANICAL DESIGNER'S perspective. People who are good at CAD and mechanical design are creatives, and typically don't have access to machines or have ecommerce websites, much less the time and energy to actually do that even if they did. Like you don't realize the legwork and investment of doing something like that for the average CAD monkey, not to mention the time. Like you want the creators to be CAD monkeys, businessmen, ecommerce entrepreneurs, machine shops, fulfillment and shipping, etc. Like we're already doing multiple roles as it is, being the idea guy, the CAD monkey, the mechanical designer, the R&D guy, etc. That's a lot to ask of one guy in his basement to begin with. The worst part is even if I were to go that route, someone could undercut me by at least half. Some machinist would stay an hour late at work and pump out a thousand tubes on a two million dollar swiss lathe with a tolerance of +-.002" and sell them for less than I can buy the tube stock for. So the person selling the supplies for these guncad projects is typically not the person doing the original design work, it's typically someone who just took their IP and capitalized on it. Moral of that story is the guy who creates this stuff in CAD is NOT going to be the guy who successfully manufactures and sells parts kits.

CAD monkeys are also not content creators, for the most part. They do however create the things that content creators use to make their money. Like someone designs something, and then a youtube channel takes that thing and makes a video about it and profits off the ad revenue, and the designer doesn't see a penny of it. Because CAD people are CAD people, not youtube content creators. Creating content is HARD, it's a whole thing in and of itself.

The thing you have to realize about open source based ecommerce (like Prusa) is it takes the involvement of a lot of people. They have CAD monkeys who just sit there and model, mechanical designers who do design and R&D, they have businesspeople in marketing and sales, they have machinists to run the machines, content creators to create tutorials and such, etc. You can't expect that model to work with guncad where you just have some guy in his basement being a one man show.

You've created an "ethos" where everybody wins except the people who are actually doing the work and creating the original designs and coming up with the original ideas. You fully support the content creators on youtube, and the machinists and ecommerce people selling supplies that exploit those ideas, but you literally as a matter of principle will not buy a CAD monkey a cup of coffee regardless of how much work he puts into something.

This "ethos" needs to change. It's created a system where everybody but the people actually doing work get to profit, and the guy actually doing the work is specifically prohibited as a matter of principle from profiting from his labor, or even just getting a few bucks here and there to pay for his expenses for crying out loud. Like you'll spend days of work building this stuff, and maybe 100 dollars on filament and supplies, but you won't buy a cup of coffee for the guy who spent hundreds of hours creating that thing? In a society where we tip a guy 20% for shoving a bag of takeout over the counter?

This community also desperately needs to understand how much work it is to bring any design to a highly polished state of completion. This lack of understanding is why this space (STL sharing in general, not just guncad) is plagued by half-baked designs that have lots of bugs yet to be worked out. And that's why most things inevitably get abandoned.

What happens is the developers bring something to a state of completion that works for their needs in their specific use case, then just dump those files and ride off into the sunset. Like for example, if I just eek something out for my own use and it's not a perfect fit, I don't go back into the file and adjust the offsets by a thou at a time until it's perfect. I get out the sandpaper and make it fit and move on with my life. But if I'm doing something for other people, I don't want them to have to struggle with that kind of thing, so I go back into the file and reprint that thing until it's right. Bringing something to working prototype in hand is 10% of the work, and then polishing that into a finished product is the other 90%, and 90% of the utility of something to the end user exists in that remaining 10%. The moral of that whole story is if creators can't make any money from their work, ever, then they're not going to polish the designs. They'll get it to their own personal satisfaction, then abandon it.

If you want highly polished designs then you have to give designers the incentive to go that extra 90%. It's hard mentally, too, going that extra 90% because that's where the fun ends and the work begins. By the time you have a working prototype in hand, all the novelty has worn off. Then going back and perfecting it is tedious and arduous, and involves a lot of repetition.

To summarize, the one and only way a CAD monkey is going to profit from his hard work in this space is if you pay him for STLs. Paying someone a few bucks for their hard work isn't going to hurt the guncad community, but leaving the very backbone of the community out in the cold as a matter of principle will absolutely kill it. I really do hope things change because I like doing this as a hobby for my own personal satisfaction, and I enjoy sharing my ideas, but I'm also a guy who thinks people deserve to be compensated when they work hard to bring something of high value to the community. Like if you see enough value in something that you would spend 50 dollars on supplies and a 200 dollar tax stamp, for crying out loud the person who made that thing you see so much value in, that guy deserves a few bucks, don't you think?

P.S. the vast majority of the modeling work for these files is done in Fusion, which is not open source FYI. Like the name "free open source software"...yea hardly anyone is actually using open source software. Fusion is free because it's a stripped down version of Inventor (i.e. if you can use Fusion you can by default use Inventor), which is a strategy to get market share over Solidworks (Inventor's main competitor). Actual open source CAD software is virtually impossible to use. So if you're okay with like 90% or more of your models not being done in an open source format, I think maybe we can, perhaps, reevaluate how committed we are to this ethos that leaves the people doing the actual work out in the cold.