It’s been two years since I wrote about Printed Solid joining our Prusa family. I’ve known David Randolph, the CEO of Printed Solid, for years. He’s a great friend, and joining forces made sense to both of us, so we went ahead with our plan to improve the availability of Original Prusa printers and filaments beyond the big pond. We started with educational, government, and enterprise contracts because David has years of experience in this field.

Over time, the team, the premises, the range of products, and the customers that Printed Solid took care of kept growing significantly. And how does it look now?

The modest premises in Newark, Delaware, are now bustling with people, there are new spaces for filament manufacturing lines, a print farm, a service area… And the latest additions? Brand new high-speed Prusament lines and workstations for the assembly of our Original Prusa MK4! And we’re not stopping. We’re planning to become the largest manufacturer of 3D printers and filaments in the USA within a year.

PR(int) USA?

Back in the early days, when the Prusa Mendel was my latest and greatest addition to RepRap, most of my interactions with the community were just via IRC chat (something like Discord, but simpler and better 😅). Then someone told me about Maker Faire, and how awesome it is, and I decided to go. It was amazing to meet so many new people like me for the first time in my life – MAKERS. But now the fun part: a good half of the people I met and knew my printers thought Prusa was short for “Print USA.” It is funny and amazing, and actually looking at it from the perspective of someone seeing the word Prusa for the first time, it makes a lot of sense.

By the way, this combined with a joke that was circulating Czechia at the time led to the now legendary T-shirt slogan “Everyone is a maker, only I am a printer PRUSA”. I went into more detail in my recent tweet.

Now, jokes aside, it was only in 2021/2022 when expanding overseas really became a serious subject. The US is one of our top markets, so we started looking for ways to make the process as smooth as possible. Enter David and his team!

Assembly, Production, Repairs

At this moment, we have around 30 American colleagues and we’re planning to create more job opportunities in the USA soon. I want to apply the same rule we followed here: keep the growth rate within reasonable limits.

To give you an example: even with so many products in our portfolio and an expanded team, our tech support is still highly praised for their skills and expertise. Instead of hiring a hundred people in a month and then giving them a couple of onboarding videos, we always preferred a steadier, individual approach, so that people can familiarize themselves with the printers. Instead of catching up with the huge demand by outsourcing some parts of manufacturing elsewhere, we instead expanded our factory here in Prague, in the heart of the European Union. This way we managed to maintain the extreme quality standards. We’re taking the same approach at Printed Solid.

First of all, we will start assembling Original Prusa MK4 3D printers in Delaware with the same skill, precision, and tools – the same as here in Prague. All the workbenches, testing tools, everything is the same. Whenever you buy one of the machines assembled in the USA, you will get the exact same level of quality. And we’re looking for ways to include local American component suppliers!

Next is the Prusament production. David and his team were long known for their Jessie filaments, so they had long years of experience to build upon. They now have the same filament extrusion lines as we do here in Prague – down to all the tiny little tweaks and changes we made ourselves. They will start manufacturing Prusament, with the identical production process and level of quality that you are used to.

And finally: we are expanding the official Prusa Research repair center in Printed Solid. So you can get our expert services for Prusa 3D printers directly in the United States

Born in the USA

I said it in the previous blog post and I’ll happily say it again: working with David is a joy and it’s awesome to have a team with an extensive background in 3D printing, so we don’t have to build everything from scratch! Now, we’re opening a new chapter – and I couldn’t wish for better colleagues!

Happy printing!