Sponsored and scheduled to be there!! Free to attend, and free to show off your stuff on a first come first served basis. Lots of sponsorship options to secure a table of your own, let me know if you want that info, but I also have a bunch of room (up to 4 tables) to share if you wanna hang with me! Who’s coming?!
I will keep updating this as we go.
Hello from Justin, Mike and Zach!
We would like to invite you and your company to the Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival for 2023 being held at the Ranch Events Complex at 5280 Arena Circle, Loveland, Colorado, 80538. Specifically it will be at the FNBO Exhibit Building North Hall.
It will be held on April 22nd and 23rd, 2023, with the setup/load in day being April 21st, 2023. The event closes to the public at 5:00pm Sunday April 23rd, teardown to begin no later than 5:00pm. Please note there is another event the day after, so we will be unable to keep anything on-site into Monday.
Makers and exhibitors showing off their awesome makes and new projects will get to choose their table on a first-come, first-serve basis on the setup day. We welcome, but do not require any financial donations to the event using Paypal to rockymountainrrf@gmail.com.
We are working with some of the hotels in the immediate area to offer a group discount code for everyone for this event. There is an Embassy Suites hotel within a short walking distance in an adjacent parking lot to the venue as well as plenty of other hotel options and a plentiful smattering of restaurants as well. If you want to book the Embassy Suites hotel, please use this link -https://www.hilton.com/en/book/reservation/deeplink/?ctyhocn=FNLESES&corporateCode=0003097509&flexibleDates=true.
Please see the attached sheet in this email for a list of hotels in the area.
Please feel free to contact us by email at rockymountainrrf@gmail.com or on twitter @rmrrf with questions, concerns or suggestions.
We also would like to invite you to the Colorado Maker’s Discord for event coordination and better communication with us! RMRRF/colorado makers
Something you made with a V1 machine would be cool! You can’t really run a router in a space like that so best I can do is set up one to do a nice drawing repeatedly. Having a few things around to show the work they can do is nice.
I plan on bringing one CNC, maybe a printer as well.
OK, then. I’ll work up some stuff. Have some ideas. I’ll be selling woodworking in March at a week long re-enactment event, so I have less time. Good thing it is a way off.
@stevempotter has a mobile/traveling MPCNC setup, with a water cooled spindle. Possibly a noise/dust ‘proof’ enclosure too? Could a portable MPCNC work, tricked out with LED lights to attract the crowd? Ideally, they’d have an outdoor/noisy section.
Do you setup large monitor(s) playing loops of ASMR content with V1E machines making chips/filament/sand fly?
HAHAHA nope. I have a fancy table cover I have never used.
Outside in Colorado might be pretty chilly! The drawings are pretty fun and super detailed. Not sure about this time though. Sure would be fun to bring a new machine. Probably try to get a printer there as well.
I haven’t made a safety cover or noiseproof enclosure for my MPCNC…yet.
But here if you peruse the photos on my Google maps business site, you can see how the kids were lining up to carve their names with my Handibot at a Dublin Maker fair. It is pretty well enclosed, and I added some extra lucite barriers.
In late April it will either be 70F or 12" of snow. Maybe in the same day.
I haven’t been to a RRF before, but my guess is you will get more people approaching with a nice quiet pen than a noisy, dusty router. Some finished CNC projects would be nice to show off though. And actually have a router there so people can tell it is a CNC router, not a plotter.
Your plate seems pretty full at the moment, but this topic, and the need for quiet at the festival, has inspired an idea for a festival project…someday.
A possible quieter CNC activity could be using a diamond engraver on acrylic to make edge lit signs. A multi-tiered rack with slots filled with LEDs would be an easy build and relatively inexpensive. The rack would get filled out as the festival ran on and the CNC kept cranking out signs. I’ve seen some nice, free SVG files for edge lit signs, plus I could see a few versions of your logo on these signs.
I’d also take it a bit further. Bases with remotes for these signs are cheap on Amazon, but are ugly plastic. It would be a simple CNC project to make a nice, wooden housing and then use the guts from an Amazon base to complete the build. And a wooden base would show how something can be made by combining CNC tools and materials (wood with router, acrylic with drag knife). You could have a couple of these wooden bases on the table displaying your logo.
You are showing them something they might see themselves making to sell or gift. The plastic sign is something they can handle and feel the engraving. And the cost of the plastic is low enough that you could afford to give away some of the engraved blanks. The plastic costs will depend on thickness and type, but if even if you just bought premade, 2mm blanks from Amazon, each blank would run less than $2.00. If you wanted to cut out your own sign blanks, you might get the cost below $0.75 each.
Note I’ve never made these signs, so there may be some issues I don’t know about. Edge-lit signs are on my 2023 projects-to-gift list. Laser projects have dominated this year.
Those would be fun. The materials would be cheap, but I doubt you would want to make 100x of them. Still, maybe make 1-2 the first day, and then have a raffle or contest to see who gets a custom one the second day.
Or, don’t do anything custom and have it just be the rmrrf logo with V1 on it and make as many as you can, and raffle them off the second day. If you make 3 or 10 or 20, you can just give away that many.
The plotting would be easier, because you would just make them in 3mins and hand them out immediately.
It can be hard to say how much time you will have. I can get swarmed and get a thousand questions and stories for hours, then plenty of free time. I think MRRF Saturdays were always so busy it was hard to go to the restroom or even start a new drawing and those only took 30 seconds. Sunday, time to do all sorts of fun stuff.
Barry and Ron have always been a huge help hanging out with me. It lets someone still be around to answer questions or chat while the others get to look around and chat with others about what they brought to the event. I think the last one was so overwhelming I went back to my room for half hour to just gather myself and go back. At that point though it was so crowded, loud, and hot I would lose my voice right away and it could get a bit funky in there. I am sure post covid we will get a bit more room to breathe.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not mean that in a negative way. It is so freaking awesome and I can’t wait to do it again! Just so very different from farting around in my garage alone.
Consider giving away all the V1E logo’d (with website and/or QRCode) speed test coasters (well, the good ones at least) you’re likely to create and accumulate between now and RepRap while tuning/tweaking.