3D Printer Recommendations

Talk to and read through @mishrasubhransu thread on direct drive upgrading. He’s a master at it and has been overwhelmingly helpful to me.

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Ordered my second prusa printer and it will arrive on tuesday

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DIY as in clone kit? Not from Josef Prusa?

I have a Original Prusa MK3S. Bought the MK3 kit, upgraded to MK3s.

Part cooling fan shroud (PETG) would deform while printing ABS. Reprinted in ABS, then later in PC.

Printing PC melted parts of the PETG extruder, so I had to reprint, eventually in PC.

I was having 1st layer troubles, which got a bit better when 7x7 auto bed leveling was added to firmware, but I ended up going a manual heat bed level with locknuts. 1st layer now mostly resolved.

Got the powder coated sheets. PETG is great, but PLA, small things don’t stick well. The PEI sticker sheet actually works better. LOTS of dicking around to get the PC sheet mostly usable.

I replaced the PSU with a slightly stronger one so I can add accessories like lights. The stock PSU is running very close to 100%.

Part cooling fan failures started popping up. Tried rebuilding the cable, no dice. Replaced the fan.

Lots of little things! This is not counting non-repair upgrades. I feel like cheaper printers come with even more fun things to fix/upgrade, but I dunno…

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All you need is an ender 3. Glass bed, and a clone all metal metal dual gear clone bondtech extruder. Nothing more nothing less on the printer. Put your filament in drybox with a ptfe running directly from dry box to the extruder. You can print any filament(nylon, TPU, PETG for me) all day long.

I have it in an enclosure to maintain uniform temp while printing and don’t even have a cooling fan.

I haven’t tinkered with the printer since.

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I forgot to mention 2 things: first, an ultrabase works magic for bed adhesion. If the bed temperature is high enough, every material will stick like hell when printing, and come right off when it’s cooled down.

Second, a direct drive extruder would be nice, but I would want that on a secondary printer only because I would be worried to continue printing at 100mm/s with a direct drive.

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I still have a spare, new & boxed standard ender3 kit in the EU, anyone wanting to get into 3D over the holidays in Europe, €145 + shipping from Ireland

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Only just discovered this thread :open_mouth:

My form 2 (when accuracy is needed), and ender 3 w/direct drive& micro swiss upgrade (when i need to do rapid prototyping). Been looking to get a tevo little monster for even faster prints. Does anyone have it and would like to share your experience?

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Welcome to my hell thread :dagger:

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Ive got the Prusa I3 mk2s, going strong for 2 years now. I am noticing some overhang issues these days. Probably the print cooling fan? It makes some more noise these days.

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Been using Cubicon Single Plus for years, is called ferrari of 3D printers and never had any problem with almost thousands of prints

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That’s a lot of problems. I never had any with mine.
Original Prusa Mk3 kit which I recently upgraded to Mk3s. The upgrade kit included 300gr of PETG to print the parts but the cooling fan shroud was already printed in ABS and included with the kit.

The powder coated textured sheet as you wrote is great for PETG, anything else pretty much will not stick to it.

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Printed 3kg of PLA on the powder coated sheet with no warping and now it starts to warp heavily during the print. Solution was to bump the heatbed temp to 65°C. And it’s warping again.:pensive:

How old is the sheet? My glass beds with a coating have finally lost some tack to them and I have had warping recently. I sprayed a tiny bit of hairspray 2 weeks ago and have had no warping since.

5 months and cleaned with 70% IPA

Try the hairspray. I just used a piece of paper to cover the printer areas. Too lazy to remove the glass plate. I used a very small amount while the bed was hot so it dried quickly

I’ll try it. Thx.

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i do have a question those of you that own printers did you go to school for similar fields like cad, cnc etc. or do you use the printers for business i have some items i want to print off thingiverse that need some modification which i cant even figure out how to alter the stl file so i dont know if 3d printing is for me

Just watch YouTube tutorials on Fusion 360 or similar. You can learn the basics pretty quickly. But 3D printing in general is never plug and play, it always requires time and dedication.

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Learning CAD is easy, fusion360 is free and there are plenty of tutorials on youtube. Once you get a printer and you get excited about the hobby, learning some basic CAD will be worth it.

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