3D printer

[Marek T.]

Hi Everyone :-)

To whom having own 3D printers.
Could you pls write down here what is the type of the printers you have? Considering to buy some and could be good to know which one is good enough or what parameter I should pay special attention to. Good enough for printing the parts we usually use here for pnp machines.

Zero experience with it at my side.
Thx!

Br
Marek

[Juha Kuusama]

I had a Kossel delta. It kind of worked and did produce acceptable results, but it was unreliable and needed constant adjustments. I now have two Prusa MK 2S’s. Reliable workhorses with no issues whatsoever.

If you want to learn about 3D printing and how the printers work, maybe do your own troubleshooting every now and then and will use your own money, get a Prusa clone. If you want 3d printed parts, get a Prusa. If it is on company money or time, get it ready built. Don’t be fooled by its relatively low price; it is the best plastics printing machine money can buy, winning pretty much every test several years in a row.

[Sebastian Pichelhofer]

+1 for Prusa (latest model is the i3 MK3) from our experience also indeed the best choice.

Regards Sebastian

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 9:36 AM Juha Kuusama <ju...@kuusama.com> wrote:

I had a Kossel delta. It kind of worked and did produce acceptable results, but it was unreliable and needed constant adjustments. I now have two Prusa MK 2S’s. Reliable workhorses with no issues whatsoever.

If you want to learn about 3D printing and how the printers work, maybe do your own troubleshooting every now and then and will use your own money, get a Prusa clone. If you want 3d printed parts, get a Prusa. If it is on company money or time, get it ready built. Don’t be fooled by its relatively low price; it is the best plastics printing machine money can buy, winning pretty much every test several years in a row.

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[Marius Liebenberg]

I built my own but I have seen the print shop that supplied most of my components use a lot of Prusa printers for their printing service. Their prints are of the highest quality I have seen. They printed several part for my machine.

[Mark]

+1 for Prusa. I’m only a bloody beginner with my i3 MK3, but even so the results are surprisingly good at the first try. Even using tough PETG.

 

_Mark

 

[Marek T.]

Hi Juha,

Not sure if understood you well. Do you mean to don't buy clone but original Prusa?

If you want to learn about 3D printing and how the printers work, maybe do your own troubleshooting every now and then and will use your own money, get a Prusa clone.

If you want 3d printed parts, get a Prusa.

Yes, I don't plan to buy this disassembled but ready to use.

[Marek T.]

Thx all you Guys,

Could be also great to recall Michael G, Gino, Daren for some oppinion:-).

Have impression you are one of those who're really quite experienced about 3D printing here, specialy in case of feeders.

Does anybody here worked with Anycubic? It's not my choose, just one of my friends have i3 (first link) so I could get some lesson/support from him.

But your oppinion is more important than the fact above :-).

http://www.anycubic3d.com/products/show/1048.html

or JGAurora similiar situation:

http://www.jgaurora3d.com/cpzxCD/info_12.aspx?itemid=415&lcid=5

?

[oliver jackson]

I have had a few different kits from Anycubic. Sometimes missing parts, or they’ve upgraded the kit without upgrading the manual. They’re not bad, but they are ultimately a chinese company doing clones. You get what you pay for. I built the kit, it was adequate. I spent basically the same again upgrading. But for me that’s part of the fun.

Hands down the best option for a ready to go, it just works machine is as everyone else has said above. One thing to point out though, real Prusa printers are in such high demand there is often a lead time

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[Michael G.]

would opt for an original prusa, too.

I had an crappy geeetech prusa i3 from ebay at frist. used that to print another original prusa i3mk2 with the frame made from multiplex wood. have three of them now, work well, but quality could be a little better. but thats because I used wood instead aluminium and print quite fast.

[D.Mouradov]

if you want to spend 1000$  on a 3d printer then original prusa i3 the original does not mean that it will print just fine there are already pre build and kits

or you can buy for this price 3 x anycubic I3 Mega  and 100 kg of plastic  I was lucky and it prints fine but remember 3d printers as lottery

[Daren Schwenke]

I've never bought a 3D printer.  I have a decent machine shop and I'm a glutton for punishment, so I've built them all.

So I can give that perspective on the current 'best stuff'.  

I'm also partial to the linear delta printers as it's easier to get good results once they are tuned.

Go AL, and go oversize on the rails,  Use real AL corners as well.  Put the weight up top as it actually helps to stabilize it.

Use the cheap, but real linear slides and immediately rebuild them.  This can be hard, but it will save you more than half the cost.

Mag balls and carbon fiber rods.  Search for Hayden.

Get a BondTech extruder and hang it in the middle from two key Keybak key retractors.

Use a short bowden tube feeding a 12V E3D V6 all metal hotend. Buy a 24V supply and run it at 19V.  You will need to be careful not to run the PWM for the rest of your 12v system above ~70% or you will burn things up.

Heated bed, run it from mains power, with a dedicated solid state controller daughter board. Regular Borosilicate glass is fine.  I prefer using hairspray or ABS juice to commercial build surfaces unless absolutely required. Cleaning it with a razor blade is very convenient.

I've never bought an actual mainstream controller as I have a box of logic level fets and a soldering iron.  :)

But Duet and Smoothie both have a loyal following and continue to innovate.

Use a proper blower instead of a pancake fan.

If you want to go even faster, add compressed air coming out a small tube just below the nozzle.  For scale, the pump you need for that is about 60mm dia.  It's a brushed motor, but mine has been running for 2 years just fine, on my 19V supply.

Do the above, and you can print anything, and do it fast.

Or just get an Anycubic.  It is a crap shoot, but I've gotten good at rebuilding the poor quality rails so..  Usually it's just a matter of cleaning out the end races and putting the right number of balls back in as they tend to overload them.

[Marius Liebenberg]

Hi Daren

Do you use the air tube when printing ABS and PETG as well? I only use my fans on PLA.

[Daren Schwenke]

If I'm impatient and pushing it hard, yes.  By pushing it hard, I mean I can run it at up to 180mm/sec with 480mm/sec rapids.   I run with zero retraction then and let the rapids and 'keep the print head within the part' setting do the rest.  I have an 80w hotend and can push multiple filaments simultaneously, so I can push it pretty hard.  Turning on the 'experimental' part of my printer I can print almost up to my rapids rate, but it has a major flaw in that it will only work if the print head velocity can remain constant, so that pretty much limits it right now to vases and such.  However, I've let my filament stock dwindle down lately so having at least two rolls of the same filament is getting harder now.  :)

Also if I'm printing the 'premium ABS', which seems to behave a lot more like PLA in that it's viscosity drops more rapidly at the higher temperatures, then yes.

If I'm not trying to rush things, then no.  You don't need to.  Going slow is more reliable as I built my own extruders and they are not as good as the BondTech ones.  Going fast builds up gunk in the drive teeth and eventually they slip.

I've only printed a small amount of PETG as I just had a sample so I never really dialed that in.  I watch a 300mmx600mm vase get printed in it though at my local filament supplier, and they had the fans on.  Not sure if that was right or not but I assume they knew what they were doing (and the print worked)

Basically if you are going fast enough that ambient cooling isn't enough to keep things from getting mushy, add air.  If you want the best possible layer adhesion/really strong parts, just go as fast as you can without cooling.

I also have an enclosed build area though, so the air pump provided better localized cooling than the fans did and prompted a change.

The last change I made to my printer actually removed the fans altogether.  I replaced them with a larger diameter (about 5-6mm) feed tube, bent some matching AL tubing into a circle, and then drilled a conical pattern of holes in it with them all converging just below the nozzle. The tube feeding that had to be larger to reduce the drag inside the tubing, but now the pump runs at higher volume/lower pressure. It works beautifully. I had a video of it pushing down a perfect divot in a glass of water for an example but I can't seem to find it right now.

[Marius Liebenberg]

Wow that is fast printing. Thanks for the detailed explanation. Very good info for a learner printer such as I am.

[Trampas Stern]

I have built 3D printers and purchased a mono price i3 clone. It does OK. 

I did some design work for Fusion3, https://www.fusion3design.com/,  and their printer is the best I have seen.  They have spent time and tweaked everything on the design such that it provides awesome prints every time. 

Trampas

[Daren Schwenke]

That's pretty much exactly the internal design of what my filament shop was using.  

Theirs was scaled up a bit consuming about a meter in X and Y and almost 2 meters in Z, but it didn't have that nice enclosure around it.

They had all but the front and bottom covered in that stuff that looks like plastic cardboard to cut down on drafts... you use to make signs I believe.

Sorry, I don't recall the name of it.

[Daren Schwenke]

Ah ha.. I remembered the commercial equivalent. 

Berd-Air.

Their feed tube was really tiny though, and the end also used long, small diameter tubing.  

I thought it the end would be stainless from what it looked like in the pictures though and that would be a lot harder to do, so I bought it.

Nope, it was just soft AL tubing like mine, the holes were uneven, and what I had done worked better in the end..  

Theirs still looks nicer than mine does though..  :

[James Shelby]

Lulzbot has been amazing the past 3 years.  They have some great deals on refurbished ones to help with costs and their support is amazing.

[Jason von Nieda]

I'll second that. If you want something you can order, take out of the box, and immediately start printing with solid quality, Lulzbot is awesome. They aren't the cheapest, but they are completely open source and as James said, their support is excellent. I've had a Lulzbot Mini for 3 years and I love it.

Jason

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[Gino Magarotto]

I use an Ender 2 and a Prusa I3. While both are able to satisfy my printing needs, I think there a few areas where they need improvement:

The Prusa I3 is made of acrylic, which cracks easily when tightening the bolts, so if you get one, make sure is made of metal.

The Ender printer is built using POM roller wheels and aluminum extrusion. After several prints, the wheels develop some play and the printed layer quality suffers. The solution is to tighten everything again, but that's a bit bothersome.

Both have their beds attached with 3 or four bolts and springs to allow for level adjustments. Removing the printed parts will cause the bed to become a bit unleveled each time. If you have a bed level sensor this may not be an issue.

Both take long to heat up.

And they are a bit small in the X/Y directions and are unnecessarily tall for my purposes.

I think building a custom printer could be a better solution. I'm planning to build one fixed bed 3D printer, with a moving gantry and a big X/Y work area, as I mostly print flat parts.

I agree with Daren's post. If you go this route, use big aluminum extrusions and the square rails. The MGN9 or MGN12 systems should be enough. They don't come loose with use, and they have way less backlash than the round linear guide systems.

[Marek T.]

Thank you Everyone for your valuable advices!