What 3D printer would you suggest for purchase?

[Dan Flemming]

I have 25 inventions for billiards.

I have an Ender 3 V2 with many upgrades, but it's like watching grass grow.

I can speed it up a bit, but just don't really have time for experimentation.

I've already prototype'd most of them and now thinking about purchasing a really good 3D printer.

One of my inventions has 7 parts, and the costs to injection mold is staggering!

I'm trying to decide if a reliable & fast printer would be a good option.

Everything I've done so far was PLA, which works ok, but I think PETG would be my choice for the "Final" products.

Any suggestion?

1) Speed

2) Quality

3) Reliability

Is there such a beast?

Thanks,

D

[Jody Harris]

After two years of optimizing and tweaking for faster prints, Ive found: The easiest, cheapest, fastest, best way to increase printing speed is..... add printers.

Just a heads up: if you're going to go to PETG, which I do recommend, you are going to find your print times increased dramatically. The thermal properties of PETG just make it print slower.

[Joseph Larson]

I would prioritize reliable over fast.

Prusa has a proven track record of being reliable. I have one. It's okay. 

Flashforge Creator Max 2 (Pro 2) is an IDEX, so if your parts are small enough you can double your output on one printer, and it too is super reliable. I have been and am currently using this one quite a bit for this exact sort of thing. Plus, because it's enclosed you can neglect it for months in a dusty shed, fire it back up, and it'll still work no problem. I know this personally.

There are a couple of new printers with a focus on speed, but they're not proven reliable. Heck, one of them isn't even out of kickstarter. Not the sort of thing I'd pin a business venture on.

On Wednesday, June 15, 2022 at 8:21:18 AM UTC-6 newmi...@gmail.com wrote:

[Tim Keller]

This seems like the optimum use case for a belt printer.

"Oh, I need 300 of these.. let me hook up a 25kg roll of filament and let her rip."

Tim.

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[Alan B]

I don't care for the 45 degree layer lines of the belt printers -- for my designs it doesn't work well. Any production situation requires backups and buying two belt printers plus spare parts is pricey. The reliability and longevity of belt printers is ??

A reliable, serviceable and affordable printer in a small print farm would be my choice. It is going to be running near 24x7. It has to have all the usual safety features and not be prone to failing or starting fires. It has to be affordable because you are going to need a number of them plus spare parts to meet the demand. Print quality should be good and speed should be adequate but not sacrificing quality, reliability or safety. Arrange enough parts on the printbed to get convenient print times to fit your schedule, typically 8 to 12 hours per cycle. Perhaps add low cost cameras to check on them remotely. The lower quality the printer the more you have to buy and the more time you spend upgrading and rebuilding them. I wouldn't go for less than a Prusa MK3, those are employed in many print farms. You may want an even more industrial grade machine, but needing several drives the price function quickly.

For my (small) production work I've been using an original Prusa MK3, from when they first came out. I have upgrades on the shelf and a second one still in the box in case the primary goes out. I've been running that way since the MK3 came out, and I have not needed to tear it down or take it offline so the upgrades and spare are still sitting on the shelf. It has needed the occasional cleaning and lubrication, and now and then a cold pull or nozzle replacement to clear a clog, but only very minor attention. Very impressive reliability. The firmware and software updates have improved the print quality since I got it.

-- Alan

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[James Fackert]

Reality cr30 belt printer is getting lots of good feedback, and some good third party updates like better motor mounts and wall mount and parts bin.

There is a lot to be said for sequential self removing parts, building all day and night...  

 and the diagonal layers is often good for higher strength, often not an issue, plus you can build on an angled raft if needed.

Parts self removal works pretty reliably on all but tiny parts.

Having to stop, remove part from bed, and clean prep and restart DEVOURS time and attention.

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[LukeH]

This would certainly seem to be the ideal use case for a belt printer, but agree that you will likely spend a lot of hours up front tweaking new units to get the right. Time you would rather spend printing.

Any printer built from the ground up for performance and reliability isn’t going to be cheap. You can’t get around the fact that good design costs more than bad design (because of the skills and experience of the designer), and quality parts are more expensive than low quality parts, because quality control costs money (you have to pay for the costs of inspections, plus the amortised costs of the materials and manufacture of all the rejected parts that didn’t make the grade).

That doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice performance. While the Prusa printers are plenty reliable, based on a refined design built with good parts, it is most definitely an older design, which prints slow. Something to consider.

If I was setting up a print farm from scratch in 2022 (full disclosure, I don’t have a print farm at all), I would be looking at decent quality CoreXY machines, simply because they fit on shelves nicely, comfortably print twice as fast as Mendels for the same quality output, and ultimately time is still important in a print farm. Problem is, there is no reliable, large off-the-shelf supplier of them like Prusa. I would probably build Vorons with as good quality parts as I could buy, since the design is well tested and is solid.

Delta printers are mechanically simple, with only three moving parts that all move in the same direction, and don’t have a moving bed, which means you can make the bed thick and heavy and it will be flat, and never need levelling for the entire life of the printer (I have a Delta that doesn’t even have levelling screws, and it has never printed a bad first layer). Decent Deltas with linear rails and quality electronics are generally very reliable performers. They are fast as well. They are the sort of printers where you send the job remotely and could not even look at the printer until it is time to remove the finished part. Problem is that they  are round, so there would be lots of dead space around them next to each other in a print farm, plus they are very tall, so wouldn’t stack well.

[TobyCWood]

I have had a brand new built by Prusa MK3 right next to a stock Ender 3.

I got the exact same quality, speed and reliability. Zero difference. Except that I could go a bit faster with flexibles with the dd mk3. Other then that no diff… except cost…

[Alan B]

Some folks have run print farms with Enders. Perhaps consult with them or look for their videos on running a farm of them. They generally seem to have a higher percentage of printers offline for maintenance, but they are low cost. They have reported more issues than with MK3's under heavy use, but it's hard to get really good data without a good sized farm, and it's hard to get comparable data because who has both. There are how many versions of Ender 3's now? So it's hard to know which is even being talked about. Many lack a lot of the MK3's standard features. But most experts don't think that plastic v wheels compare with linear ball bearings for extended heavy use. I have one v-wheel printer. Out of the box it required adjustment, but it has been ok otherwise. But we don't have a farm of them, and we don't run it nearly as hard as the MK3 or have had it for nearly as long. So I don't have data on the Artillery to the same degree as the MK3. Lots of MK3 farms out there to get data from. Probably quite a few Ender farms as well.

DD's usually need less retraction and are easier to tune. Extrusions and V wheels aren't quite as precise as linear bearings, but how much does it matter? So many things go into print quality.

Lots of choices.

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[TobyCWood]

There's a guy I know just South of here who has a printer farm using not Ender 3s but even cheaper Mendles.. no name Mendles he bought from AliExpress. He's been running them (dozens of em) for full production runs for a couple of years now. I really doubt that it matters that much unless you are not skilled enough to get them running well and keep them running well. In that case... yeah, you have to buy a machine from a company that will support you although don't expect an "Original" Prusa support tech to come a calling.

All machines need adjustment. Some more than others, but in the end if you don't plan for maintenance than it's on you no matter what machine you buy.

If it were me... and I had to ensure I met my production contracts... I'd build the dang things myself! Like the guy in San Diego did.

[James Fackert]

The cr30 is a corexy as well as belt...

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[Luke Hartfiel]

If it was me, or someone I knew to have deep technical skills, I would definitely be looking at belt printers, since this is the task they were designed to do, but I would be building my own, with known quality components, and building as much reliability into them up front as I could. I’d probably use the NAK3DDesigns White Knight as the starting point.

Of course, it all depends on volumes. We seem to be talking about producing parts in volumes that don’t warrant tooling up for injection moulding or die casting (which sometimes isn’t as expensive as you might think). FDM for large-scale mass production is crazy expensive compared to either of these options, and is only good for short runs (tens/hundreds/thousands of items, not hundreds of thousands or millions). At the lower end of the scale, it probably isn’t even worth producing them in house - there are lots of people with print farms, especially in China. Sometimes it is better to make printer reliability someone else’s risk/problem and free up small business resources to focus on everything else (product design, marketing, sales and inventory management, assembly, packaging, tax, warehousing, distribution, etc.). 

For low volume runs there is also other options, such as vacuum/thermoforming, or urethane casting. You can even do 3D printed moulds these days for injection moulding, which are cheap, but wear out fast. Good for short runs though (they use them for initial short production runs before they finalise the moulds for high rate production).

On 17 Jun 2022, at 8:04 am, James Fackert <jimfa...@gmail.com> wrote:



[Luke Hartfiel]

Here we go:

https://formlabs.com/asia/blog/diy-injection-molding/

On 17 Jun 2022, at 10:07 am, Luke Hartfiel <lhar...@gmail.com> wrote: