Is the I3 Mk3 suitable for small scale commercial printing  

Re: Is the I3 Mk3 suitable for small scale commercial printing

First of all - I'm still waiting for my MK3 to arrive so my opinions are based on what I've seen and read up on so far. Owners will probably give a different view...

The fact that Prusa use their own printers to print the parts for the printers they sell, I think speaks volumes. What you also have to remember however is that they have a print farm - so if one printer goes down, there's another couple of hundred more or so working away. They have all the parts they need on hand and the chief designer is sat in the office around the corner to address any unusual issues that may arise.

As a one man band - you only have one printer, maybe a handful if you're lucky. If one printer goes down, you're offline or seriously reduced in output capacity. If you value uptime, keep spares to hand and know how to fault find and change parts quickly. I think this applies to any consumer grade 3D printer. The advantage of this machine is that it's open source and the support appears pretty good. Just a reminder - Type A Machines went out of business last week. Open source means you can keep the thing running more easily, regardless of the company who made it.

Theoretically I can't see a reason why the E3D volcano couldn't be used with some basic modification and slicer settings changes, but I've yet to see anyone make the modification. Converting to 3mm filament is probably not worth it. E3D did an explanation in one of Toms videos recently about 1.75mm.
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Prusa will need to forfil the backorder of PEI powder coated sheets before they concider selling them as a spare I suspect.

Re: Is the I3 Mk3 suitable for small scale commercial printing

I haven't printed nylon so I can't help with that. I can tell you that I, and one of my customers, successfully print hundreds of production parts per month. The key is optimizing the design of the part for printing.
I used to make a part for my customer that cost $20.00 a pair. It took a $110,000 router, a mill and lathe plus an experienced operator. Maintenance on the router would run typically $1,500 for a service call if it went down. I decided to semi retire and get rid of the headaches that went with a manufacturing shop. I redesigned the part my customer was using and actually improved the design for printing. He now makes them on a Prusa Mk2 at a cost of $1.50/pair in materials and no human intervention other than filament change and removing parts. He views the printer as an employee and sees the cost of the printer as insignificant. He bought a spare printer to play with and as backup. In the last 12 months his printer was down once because of a broken cable. It typically runs 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Savings per year is in the neighborhood of $10,000.
Compared to traditional manufacturing equipment the Prusa printers are a steal and incredibly inexpensive to maintain. A power supply for my router was $1,100. Factory support was $150/hour and you paid them from the time they left their shop until they returned to it. I could go on but you get the idea.