New London — Mike Molinari’s adventure in entrepreneurial poverty that led him to quit a stable job in the engineering department at Electric Boat all began with a frustration he constantly faced while tinkering with projects at Spark Makerspace.
“I was tired of fixing the 3-D printers here,” he grimaced.
One minute, the alignment would be off; next time, it was the calibration or the settings that needed to be adjusted.
“I had to fix the machine all the time,” he said.
The problem with smaller 3-D printers, he added, is that there is no mechanism to whisk one project out of the way so the next can take its place. This means that the person who printed the project must pick it up — no one knows exactly when — and then remove the item without messing with the temperamental printer before anyone else can launch the next job.
“Imagine a standard office printer if it only printed one…
