Best 3D printers at the moment

[James McCutcheon]

Hey everybody,

I hope it is OK to be posting this message here. Not directly related to the FED project but a topic that I'm sure this group has a lot of views on...

I'm about to buy a new printer. Previously had an Ultimaker 2+ but left it in my old department in the UK. It served me well for the 4 years I had it but thought that maybe there are other machines I should be considering.

The prusa mk3s was getting good reviews on the Neuromethods and is CHEAP. Any others I should look into? If it was worth it my budget could stretch up to $3K or maybe a little more...

OK, thanks, Jaime

[Andrew Hardaway]

Hey Jamie,

Hope you're doing well. The Sindoh 3DWOX1 is one that Lex recommended to me and I purchased. It's been a great printer for what I need and very easy to use. I also bought a Flashforge Adventurer 3 Lite that is very cheap but it has been more troublesome - would not recommend it.

best,

Andrew

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J, Andrew Hardaway
Assistant Professor

Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neurobiology
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine

he/him/his

[Kevin Myers]

Hi Jaime et al.  We have really good Makerspace facilities on my campus so I've got to try out several - Ultimaker2, MakerGear M2, and Fusion 3-F410.  With access to them all, the Fusion3 is my go-to for most of my printing.  Of those three the Ultimaker2 has the best print quality and lots of smart features but it's slow.  Fusion3 has a much larger bed, good quality at faster speed, and some features I love, like it will automatically pause a print if the filament jams/runs out and can resume where it left off when you reload.   Can't speak to the others that have been mentioned, but I'm very happy with the Fusion3.

Kevin

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[James McCutcheon]

Hi, Thanks for the replies and hope that you're both doing well. It's a tough choice to make but I decided to try out the Prusa machine after seeing another couple of good reviews. It has a very reasonable price tag as well. I'll report back once I get printing! Cheers, Jaime

[Matthew Buczynski]

Note: Most of our prints were done using an older version of the print design, but the concepts should apply to newer version. 

Printers: We've tried both filament (Prusa MK3S) and resin (FormLabs Form2), and had success with both. While I'm not sure I'd only want a resin printer, they make nearly perfect front plates every single print. Filament printers generally require some "fiddling", even a moron like me can get a resin printer to work easily. We haven't found the perfect resin (standard black is easier for mice to chew than filament), but long-term I think this may be a good way forward. We had to make minor modifications to design to make them print properly using resin, and we're happy to upload them to Github or provide them to anyone that would like them. Also happy to provide more details on Tips and Tricks to resin printing FEDS if it would be helpful.

Resolving Issues with Frontplate Prints: I wasn't sure where to put this, but many of our initial FEDS had issues with double-pellets (did not detect the first pellet, so it releases a second one), or less commonly ghosting (pellet well thinks it has a pellet but does not) or . We found that double pellets often occurred when the middle pellet-detector was incompletely blocked by a single pellet, and could be easily fixed by adding a small layer of epoxy to the pellet holder (blue arrow). If we added too much epoxy so that it partially blocked the beam when no pellets were present, it produced ghosting that could be fixed by sanding down the epoxy layer. Using this approach, we have substantially reduced the number of "failed" frontplate prints.

[Ames Sutton]

Hi all,

I'm in the market for purchasing a 3D printer and wanted to hear more perspectives from folks now that there's been some time since we last discussed this. Similarly to Jaime's original post, I'm eyeing the Prusa but wanted to see if anybody had updates on what they suggest!

Thanks all,

Ames

[Lex Kravitz]

Hi Ames!  It's showing its age but I still like the Sindoh 3D Wox1. I think it's a very good value for a reliable printer, we've been running 4 of them for ~4 years now with minimal maintenance and upkeep.

I've also heard great things about the Prusa's, you can do interesting things with them in terms of slicing, and they even have a multi-material changer that looks really fun!  So I think both are great options (or buy both, two printers are better than one!)

[James McCutcheon]

Hi Ames,

I would say that we are still very happy with our Prusa and I think it's a great printer for the money. Also, really easy to service yourself and get some knowledge about how 3D printers work in general. However, we print loads of bits and pieces for the lab that come out just fine. But with respect to the FEDs, although we do some prototyping and printing of the less important parts on our printer, we have been having our "real" units printed by Shapeways for consistency (especially for minimizing the risk of pellet jams). The Shapeways prints don't work out that cheaply (if you want to fill your lab with FEDs) so it might be worth considering that when deciding on how much you want to spend.

I don't know how much you'd have to spend to get something that would reliably produce higher quality parts. It's also possible that if we invested the time we would get there with the Prusa. Interested to hear what others' experiences are.

Cheers, Jaime

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[Andrew Hardaway]

Hi,

I've been using the Form3 and Sindoh 3DWOX. I use them for printing many things in the lab and I'm not sure, at this point, I would buy a printer specifically for FEDs (just get Shapeways or another company to print them perfect). The 3DWOX is a very solid printer and you can very easily adapt to open source filament - its a workhorse. The Form3 prints beautifully and I need it for high res very small items we make for surgeries. BUT, RESIN IS MESSY AND SPENDY! If you need to replace tanks those can be expensive to replace also. Resin messes are a PITA.

hope this helps,

Andrew

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[Matthew Perkins]

Getting set up to print some units, bought a pre-assembled one from LabMaker, its nice.

If I go with Shapeways, what printing material do you all recommend?

Thanks,

Matthew

Laboratory of Dr. Ivan de Araujo, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai

[Lex]

Hi Matthew,

We print from Shapeways in Nylon PA12, which printed with an MultiJet Fusion process (MJF):

We select the option for "dyed black" which I think looks better than their default "grey".  I also set up a Shapeways "shop" that has the FED3 parts in it with the specifications we use. I don't make any $$ on these, it's just a convenient way to purchase them! 

BTW there are other cheaper companies for Multi-Jet Fusion Nylon PA12 printing. We've also used HUBS.com (see this review from Michi Wulf on this company for FED3)  The upshot is that HUBS is much cheaper than Shapeways but they don't do as good a job cleaning the uncured dust out of the FED3 pellet chute, and this dust can be surprisingly difficult/annoying to clean out.  At any rate I think both companies make great prints, HUBS is cheaper but you have to do more work to clean out the prints once they arrive.

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