Now I’m not ignorant of the interplay of economics, especially when it comes to small/previous model/low volume parts, but when a vendor started insisting that the only way they were going to keep supplying some specific consumable parts was for my company to sign up for a fairly hefty general contract (which contained a ton of stuff we’d never use/had no need for) it looked like we were going to have to replace some fairly expensive equipment that was still working perfectly. The irony being that two of the parts in question are literally mirror-images of the older model parts, new parts are cheap, old parts are not, which feels completely like a money grab.Anyway, after about 3 iterations we managed to come up with some 3D printed parts that in combination with a gentle touch of machining seem to work just as well as the originals though there is a nozzle housing that doesn’t seem to last quite as long. The original vendor seemed very surprised and actually angry that we weren’t going to either buy the contract or purchase replacement machines from them. Seriously I think they believed we had absolutely no choice but to do business with them.Thank you 3D printing! http://bit.ly/2Do4IBt