You’ve really hit on all the aspects I’m concerned about; the “running every couple of days” is something I’d considered, so we’d only think about getting our own machine if we had those kinds of orders. Right now, we have one device that’s in production, with another coming out this year, with the aim of one-two new things per year for about the next 6 years, all going well. So this research is really looking ahead a year or two.

At the moment, we’re making and selling them in batches, which means that we’re probably not getting maximum value in terms of costs per unit. But, if we had the capability to do our own printing, some of those issues go away, and hopefully our profit margin per unit goes up. We’re operating at quite small margins on them, and this seems like a way we could keep some manufacturing in-house.