In my experience selling it as a whole never happens outright. Buying someone out goes the other way around. I've owned my own business twice.

You will honestly be better off holding your accounts if you ever change your mind or direction. You will get stuck with junk or make selling off stuff your career for a time. If you cannot keep your tools, make some impossible to pass up deal in bulk lots divided so that there is a good distribution of value.

If you placed everything on eBay piecemeal, you will never sell your last item before you die. That is the case on any single platform. I was the buyer for a chain of bike shops for several years. I have sold over $136k on eBay, and I used swap meets to offload overburden too. If anyone consigns for you, if their business model is viable, they will take at least 40% out of the gross margin.

All of eBay's fees, shipping, taxes, all combined with an account in perfect standing came out to 39-42% of the total sale price. So with consignment, you will actually get around 20% of the total sale price or a little less. It is not at all sustainable and why no one runs successful businesses doing eBay consignments. eBay should be less than half their present fees, especially considering the poor quality of service.

Think of offloading stuff from the perspective of the interested individual, not like a business. Part out and sell your excess tooling while still running your business with what you have.

Personally, I don't paint cars any more and if I could physically do the work, I still wouldn't want to. However, many of my tools and stuff are still kicking around and something I do not regret keeping. Quite the opposite, I really wish I had kept what remained of my mixing system, and all of my welding and polishing gear.

So you're saying you have a worthless business you want to sell?

You can probably blame the people selling 3d printed dragons and other slop at conventions for your sales drying up, assuming you don't sell those. That fully made people think that 3d printing was a novelty, unfortunately.

I'm an engineer not a business person, but it sounds like the business itself isn't worth anything. No sales means I have no reason to believe the IP is financially worth anything. Registering an LLC is pretty cheap. The hardware and filament could maybe be sold for a few grand, but it doesn't sound like you have a massive print farm or much infrastructure. Sorry to be a downer.

I've heard that some people are interested in buying existing companies just so that they can have a company with some tax history. Maybe for slightly sketchy reasons. Almost like some people will buy old social media accounts.

If you are parting things up, I'd consider buying the Prusa XL and maybe a dozen or two kg of filament, but I probably wouldn't go above half the price of a new printer, and the filament I buy is already cheap. You may be better off keeping the printer to just have fun with it.

The only person I ever met that made money printing was ignoring copyright and trademarks. Mostly sports team logos on man cave stuff.