The coaster looks simple. It is white with a red rim. Across the middle is a name in red, and under the name are four short words, each in its own color. Five colors in all.
A coaster like that is easy to look at and hard to make.
Our printers load their colors from a unit called an AMS, and one AMS holds four. This job needed five. There is no unit that holds five, so I bought a second AMS for each of our two Bambu printers. That gave each printer eight slots, for a job that needed five. Capacity comes in chunks, and I paid for the chunk.
Then the filament. Every printer needed every color loaded before it could start, so I bought filament to feed both machines, including the brown, yellow and blue that this job hardly used. A spool comes whole. A thin line of lettering still costs a full spool, twice, one for each printer.
Each run made four coasters and took about seven hours, as I remember it. Seven hours is a long time to trust a machine. Filament ran out. The printers jammed. Each time, I got up and fixed it, because a five-color print that stops halfway is just plastic.
That is why I did not sleep.
When I hold that coaster now, I do not see five colors. I see the second AMS on each printer, the spools I barely touched, and the night I spent beside two machines. Nobody who picks it up will know that. They will see a white coaster with a red rim and a name on it, and it will look easy.
That is how we like it. The work should show in the result and not in the price tag.
We make things to order, one at a time, at our desk in Northern Virginia. If you have an idea that sounds hard, ask. We like the hard ones.