3D Printer yet?

[Monkeh]

If you're going to modify the printer you may as well know how to modify the firmware..

That said, they probably still don't have bootloaders, do they? Oh well, we'll see what this new 32-bit board they're banging on about looks like.. Meanwhile I have an SKR in the CR-10 (competent enough, shame about Marlin), a fixedish Creality board running the delta (Klipper - because no I'm not doing a delta with Marlin), and a Duet 2 waiting for me to give it something to do.

Can you say anything about the practical differences between the SKR and the Duet? I have a hard time justifying the additional cost of the Duet but I may be missing some crucial differences.

Built-in networking, configurable on the fly (and much easier and more flexible than the likes of Marlin), decently high current drivers if needed (although the SKR can use quieter ones).. Much greater expandability. 5 drivers on the Duet 2, expansion board offers up to 5 more, and I seem to recall there's another two sets of step/dir signals available on a header. Also readily available thermocouple or PT100 inputs which just drop on. There's also a healthy number of outputs to go with that for fans, heaters, and so forth. The Duet 3 gets 6 drivers (quite high current ones) and CAN expandability.

The newest (still beta) firmware offers conditional expressions in gcode to allow even greater flexibility.

These are high end boards capable of handling rather more complex machines than the average desktop printer. One fellow I know is running a custom-built pellet extruder with thermocouples at multiple points in the melt zone (good luck doing that with Marlin) for example. For the average printer, other than the clusterfuck that is driver modules, something like an SKR is adequate, but the firmware on the Duet is very nice to work with. There's always the Maestro, which is less painfully expensive..

[exe]

For example, they might start printing abs, hips or nylon. which is toxic. Or print tpu, which will undoubtedly cause a nozzle clog and make the thing catch fire.

Can you please elaborate why nylon is toxic? I understand why asa, hips and abs are toxic, they release styrene or something.

I Also don't understand about tpu, how can it catch fire?

[mnementh]

The whole material argument is a bit perplexing. The results count and those seem to speak for themselves. Most consider the Prusa print quality an industry benchmark. We could argue about printed plastics until the cows come home but it's moot at that point. All other things being equal I like a good chunk of metal but that condition is vital.

I don't think anyone will claim any FDM printer is hassle free. Even the stupidly expensive industrial models still are far from.

LOL... a benchmark that is entirely derived from fettling by people who know what they're doing, and made possible by the network of fanbois who will gladly spend days helping you get it working. I guess that's somehow a "value-added" proposition...? 

 And NO, it IS about the materials used. In the 3DP INDUSTRY, as in industrial 3DP, they'd fucking laugh you out of the room if you showed up with anything made the way a Prusa is. 

If you're going to try and argue something so patently ridiculous on the face of it... that somehow precision machined metal is not a superior foundation in comparison to printed plastic... I can only assume that you are YET AGAIN trolling me, Scram... and I have no patience for it today. 

mnem

[exe]

This thread becomes hostile and pointless.

[mnementh]

None of this makes a Prusa a good recommendation for a first printer. For a second or third printer, once you know enough to start fiddling around with it, sure. But a first machine needs to be dead-simple to get up and running and producing usable prints, and the Prusa  simply isn’t that.

The printer definitely still has flaws, even the mk3s. I know about them. I own one. But if you look at the overall deal, you're pretty much getting everything sorted out for you. The printer, no hassle with leveling or limit switches, a slicer developed for this printer, a model sharing website and a decent community.
Now, you can be all angry at prusa for not making if out of a milled aluminum slab and using cheap plastic. Tough luck, it's a reprap, and then you should also be angry at makerbot for having done exactly the same things.
For more plug&play printers you'd be going to Sindoh or something alike. But that also doubles the price. I think part of why prusa is selling so well isn't the quality printer but the story and complementary product around it.

I would absolutely not recommend Creality or Prusa to non-tech 3d printer beginners as they may not recognize the hazards an open frame cheap printer may pose.
For example, they might start printing abs, hips or nylon. which is toxic. Or print tpu, which will undoubtedly cause a nozzle clog and make the thing catch fire.

It will still be a while before Karen from accounting will be able to buy and use a 3D printer with the same thoughtlessness as the paper printer.

This IS exactly right. I do NOT recommend ANY "hobbyist-grade" 3DP to "normal" people; that is just going to be an exercise in misery for that person and anyone they rope into helping them (which is probably my self-preservation kicking in; having spent decades being the "neighborhood nerd" and getting roped into everything from resurrecting dead Compaqs to making a TPI 'vette engine run in a '57 Chevy BEFORE they made a kit for dat).

And I DO hate MakerBot for the way they've marketed cheap plastic shit; same with FlashForge (I wonder how much they paid for that product placement in ST:Picard ) and yes, lots of others have done the same...

Anyways... I have learned these lessons the hard way; I STARTED with some considerable experience dealing with and building automated manufacturing equipment, so I figured I could EASILY figure out anything a mere 3DP could throw my way. 

In my arrogance, I bought the cheapest kit I thought had a decent foundation (the Tevo Tarantula); in fact I bought TWO, because I got them for $300 delivered and that just made my cheapass-dwagon gonads jangle.  Even after months of fettling, I never got it to work reliably due to the design's fundamental weakness; cut acrylic parts in critical locations. Eventually in disgust, I sold the one I was working on to a cohort in my hackspace for enough to take my fiancee out to dinner and swore off 3DP for good. 

The other one sat in the back of my closet for over a year; until I saw my nephew over Thanksgiving a couple years ago and he was beating his head against a Mk1 (That's the little one made of threaded rod & jamnuts, right...?) knockoff; I could see it was a really bad knockoff and horribly out of square and the poor kid just couldn't get it to stay leveled, even through a single print. As bad as my Tarantula was, it was better than that... thing. I mailed the Tarantula to him for Christmas, along with a list of replacement aluminum parts I'd discovered that make the Tarantula a workable 3DP. I explained that he had to be extra-careful with the the acrylic parts and that they would still eventually break, and when they did, he should replace them with those parts; his dad bought them as he needed them and eventually the kid got it working pretty well where I had failed. 

Zip along to the height of the CR10 craze; I started hearing how it was everything my Tarantula wasn't, so against my better judgement I started shopping them. I felt they were still a little raw for the $450+ pricetag, so I looked into the popular clones... I found the Tevo *cringe* Tornado on bang-em-good, and I had enough affiliate points to burn that I was able to get it for $260 delivered. I chronicled my experiences with that printer in the TEA thread; bottom line I had it up & printing in an hour, and MOST of that was taken up with me being anal about cable management and MEASURING everything to make sure it was straight & square as I assembled. If I'd just followed the printed destructions, probably 30 minutes max to first print.

Based on THAT experience... from a clone of a CReality product, and those of helping others build their Creality & other branded 3DPrinters... THIS is what I base my evaluation of a hobbyist-grade 3DP and whether it is a suitable first-time printer. If I, someone with considerable mechanical & electrical engineering and fabrication background has a hard time getting a kit up & printing reliably, it's probably NOT a good choice to recommend it to someone else.

All that considered, the CR6-SE is the first from CReality that (at ~$360 delivered) had enough of the stuff I wanted that it was worth the "name brand" pricetag. I'm a colossally cheap bastard; almost as bad as bean.  This is literally my FIRST CReality printer, and the only genuine CReality product I've ever bought is the hotend/backplate/extruder kit I got for my Diggro Alpha-3. I tend to over-analyze before I buy; if I can't SEE the value-added in a brand-name, I'm just not going to buy it.

Compared against my Diggro and my hands-on experience with both printers, the quality of the CReality product is superior in every way except the extrusion itself; The Alpha-3 frame is top-quality all the way, and so is the touchscreen, but the "bits" are still cheap CReality clones and generic Chinese parts. The CReality bearings/rollers are better, the CNC aluminum is better, even the heater cartridge and the heater block are just better quality.

I don't regret the money spent on the Diggro; it came with a lot of the stuff everybody buys after-the-fact to upgrade a E3, plus the neat touchscreen which is the same one used on the Wanhao Duplicator 9 (and, I suspect, may also be the one Creality tapped for the CR6-SE).  All that plus it was a lot cheaper, and I've had a helluva lot of fun fettling with it while I'm under lockdown. 

mnem
 

[mnementh]

If you're going to modify the printer you may as well know how to modify the firmware..

That said, they probably still don't have bootloaders, do they? Oh well, we'll see what this new 32-bit board they're banging on about looks like.. Meanwhile I have an SKR in the CR-10 (competent enough, shame about Marlin), a fixedish Creality board running the delta (Klipper - because no I'm not doing a delta with Marlin), and a Duet 2 waiting for me to give it something to do.

Can you say anything about the practical differences between the SKR and the Duet? I have a hard time justifying the additional cost of the Duet but I may be missing some crucial differences.

Built-in networking, configurable on the fly (and much easier and more flexible than the likes of Marlin), decently high current drivers if needed (although the SKR can use quieter ones).. Much greater expandability. 5 drivers on the Duet 2, expansion board offers up to 5 more, and I seem to recall there's another two sets of step/dir signals available on a header. Also readily available thermocouple or PT100 inputs which just drop on. There's also a healthy number of outputs to go with that for fans, heaters, and so forth. The Duet 3 gets 6 drivers (quite high current ones) and CAN expandability.

The newest (still beta) firmware offers conditional expressions in gcode to allow even greater flexibility.

These are high end boards capable of handling rather more complex machines than the average desktop printer. One fellow I know is running a custom-built pellet extruder with thermocouples at multiple points in the melt zone (good luck doing that with Marlin) for example. For the average printer, other than the clusterfuck that is driver modules, something like an SKR is adequate, but the firmware on the Duet is very nice to work with. There's always the Maestro, which is less painfully expensive..

That part I can agree with... having just done similar in my own experimentation with different extruder fans. All I wanted was to monitor a thermistor on the transition area of the heat-break *cringe* tube; this to try and evaluate how well or poorly the several different fans I was testing for relative noise level actually performed. Eventually I worked it around to use the predefined "Chamber Temp" loop; though I still cannot figure out why they feel it is such a sin to define a thermistor without the accompanying extruder enabled. The other way around, sure... 

Maybe when I want to make more than the occasional functional part, I'll get into the software nuts/bolts enough to be able to appreciate the more powerful boards. That is actually one of the reasons I finally sold myself on the CR6-SE; the 32-bit controller they were promising at the time of launch. I wanted to see if it makes as much difference as it did with my little acro quadcopters, and I wanted to see if they make a complete dog's breakfast of it as they did the early E3 boards. Worst case, if it sux out loud I suppose it'll force me to spend the bux on a better 32-bit board and do a little "self-improvement".

mnem
 

[beanflying]

None of this makes a Prusa a good recommendation for a first printer. For a second or third printer, once you know enough to start fiddling around with it, sure. But a first machine needs to be dead-simple to get up and running and producing usable prints, and the Prusa  simply isn’t that.

The printer definitely still has flaws, even the mk3s. I know about them. I own one. But if you look at the overall deal, you're pretty much getting everything sorted out for you. The printer, no hassle with leveling or limit switches, a slicer developed for this printer, a model sharing website and a decent community.
Now, you can be all angry at prusa for not making if out of a milled aluminum slab and using cheap plastic. Tough luck, it's a reprap, and then you should also be angry at makerbot for having done exactly the same things.
For more plug&play printers you'd be going to Sindoh or something alike. But that also doubles the price.

I think part of why prusa is selling so well isn't the quality printer but the story and complementary product around it.

I would absolutely not recommend Creality or Prusa to non-tech 3d printer beginners as they may not recognize the hazards an open frame cheap printer may pose.
For example, they might start printing abs, hips or nylon. which is toxic. Or print tpu, which will undoubtedly cause a nozzle clog and make the thing catch fire.

It will still be a while before Karen from accounting will be able to buy and use a 3D printer with the same thoughtlessness as the paper printer.

Some of your attempted reasoning/recommendations are unreasonable and smacks of I am better at it than you so you should not get one because you don't know how to That is a circle of intellectual snobbery.

All CNC machinery or any tool including unpowered ones for that matter used badly are a hazard. There are plenty of  dead tradies or ones with missing body parts to attest to that and they in a lot of cases were trained, experienced and qualified.

Attempting to argue that beginners avoid an entire class of printers from Prusa on down makes zero sense at all or are you trying to suggest beginners talk to Stratasys for their first printer or spend $2k+ on their first locked infrastructure Dremel et al printer?

There is a learning curve for 3D printing depending on what the user wants to do with it and even a casual google look at some of the materials you listed would show some of the requirements to use them. Enclosures and extraction will be needed for safety/heat and in most cases even having one for PLA is an advantage.

None of this is rocket science and there is information out there on doing it properly and some of what this thread is about is easing and aiding others into it not telling they shouldn't because they haven't.

[Nuno_pt]

Changing a little of subject, may I ask what you guys use/advice for PC to use with the 3D soft, I've download Fusion 360 for personal use but it crash on my old laptop, so it's time to buy something for the shop, I like the mini PC's (like Hystou), they run on 12V and are small so you can put them anywhere.

[xrunner]

Changing a little of subject, may I ask what you guys use/advice for PC to use with the 3D soft, I've download Fusion 360 for personal use but it crash on my old laptop, ...

Well, what I'm using is a Ryzen 7 1700 8 core 16 thread machine, and it has no isses at all with Fusion 360. What is the minimum requirement for Fusion 360? I'ts prolly in the docs for it but I do not know at the moment.

[beanflying]

Changing a little of subject, may I ask what you guys use/advice for PC to use with the 3D soft, I've download Fusion 360 for personal use but it crash on my old laptop, so it's time to buy something for the shop, I like the mini PC's (like Hystou), they run on 12V and are small so you can put them anywhere.

I was running Fusion on an I3 with 8Gb or memory and it crashed/froze from time to time with more complex models. Adding a small Graphics card 'helped' a bit. So somewhere up from there would be my call. Current beast is a Ryzen 3700X 32Gb and a 5700XT so 'slightly overkill' 

I had started looking at a small fanless solution to drive my CNC mill when I get it back in running order and will also run a bigger Laser from the same box. While Mach4 and RDWorks/Lightburn don't need that much grunt being able to boot up Fusion to tweak a design while at the machines would be nice so I was looking at at least an I5 (or Ryzen) 16Gb and likely a GPU of some sort rather than an onboard or APU solution.

It might be a good topic for the general computing  section?

[mnementh]

Same rig for me, only Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, or a 4-year-old Lenovo with i5/8GB. None of my models have been that complex, tho. I did play around with some demo animated transform projects and the Lenovo gagged a few times on that bandwidth due to no NVMe.

Cura seems to run well on any old doorstop though; even my wife’s eMail-getter i3 Lenovo.

mnem
 

[Jeroen3]

For example, they might start printing abs, hips or nylon. which is toxic. Or print tpu, which will undoubtedly cause a nozzle clog and make the thing catch fire.

Can you please elaborate why nylon is toxic? I understand why asa, hips and abs are toxic, they release styrene or something.

I Also don't understand about tpu, how can it catch fire?

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b04983

With the wrong feedrate TPU immediately screws up your extruder. Jamming the motor.

Fusion 360 doesn't need much. It very inefficient programming due to the platforms they're running it on. You don't need a facny GPU, it doesn't use it much. Not even for renders. May want one for the dedicated graphics memory though.
Just have enough system memory and fast internet. It uses about 2 GB.
Complex designs make fusion slow on even the best systems. It's cheap after all.

[exe]

With the wrong feedrate TPU immediately screws up your extruder. Jamming the motor.

May be, how this translates into a fire hazard? Stepmotors always consume the same power regardless they are jammed or not.

As of nylon, that's sad, I hoped it's safe. Probably I'll make chamber or something. Thanks for the information.

PS didn't read long posts above, but I'll add a datapoint . I recommended prusa to a friend of mine who had previously zero experience in 3d printing. To my surprise he managed to assemble it and immediately jumped into printing large objects, including printing multiple large objects simultaneously. He was blindly downloading complex designs, slice them and print, without, imho, too much thinking. And it worked very well (kudos to prusaslicer and predefined profiles!).

After three months he did ran into problems and was quite hopeless. It was hard to communicate with him as he, in my opinion, was in complain mode and didn't do exactly what I told him to do, nor he wanted to contact the support. After a month of troubles he finally disassembled the extruder just to find there was a piece of filament inside that stuck (I attribute this to using low-quality filament he was using, he wanted to use the cheapest one). To the best of my knowledge, the printer works fine since then. I'm not drawing any conclusions from here. Just raw data.

[Nuno_pt]

From what I read on the Fusion forum, they say to favor speed over cores/threads, so a I3 3.4 will run better then a I7 2.0, they say that the cores/threads are used on rendering, rendering is core/thread intensive, while 360 is speed intensive, also 360 will do best with any gaming GPU, since it favors DirectX.

I see that are guys using I7 980x and GTX 460/480 on 360, can't seem to find any.

I'll create a new topic on the computing section.

[Jeroen3]

It translates into a fire hazard because the extruder perfoms a slow unplanned dissasembly.

Few programs are very well optimized for many cores. So buying the new amd threadripper 64 code for $4k gives you the same single thread performance compared to a ryzen 5 3600. Which is a pretty well priced part at the moment. 
So go look at that single thread table and pick a affordable one from there.

[Mr. Scram]

LOL... a benchmark that is entirely derived from fettling by people who know what they're doing, and made possible by the network of fanbois who will gladly spend days helping you get it working. I guess that's somehow a "value-added" proposition...? 

 And NO, it IS about the materials used. In the 3DP INDUSTRY, as in industrial 3DP, they'd fucking laugh you out of the room if you showed up with anything made the way a Prusa is. 

If you're going to try and argue something so patently ridiculous on the face of it... that somehow precision machined metal is not a superior foundation in comparison to printed plastic... I can only assume that you are YET AGAIN trolling me, Scram... and I have no patience for it today. 

mnem

Bullying and being loud and belligerent isn't proper discussion form. It's a tactic designed to distract people from the lack of substance of the argument, and to tire them out with unrelated matters. Just two weeks ago you had a similar run in with other members of this forum, causing them to walk out. What med6753 said back then is almost exactly what I'd say to you now, except that I'm not going to walk out.

And my measured response to this is bullshit. You know, it's not the subject matter so much that I object to, it's the attitude that goes along with it. You act like a bully. That this forum is for your personal use to trash with tirades as you please and openly ridicule anyone who disagrees with you. And your response here to me and Oculus proves it. I got news for you. Who died and left you boss?

Yes I'm a prickly bastard and proud of it. And I really don't like individuals who truly believe they are always right. And unfortunately that's how you come across. You feel like you walk on egg shells? What a load of crap.  More like a bull in a china shop.   

I got my big boy pants on. As well as my walking shoes. And I'm voting with them. 

Getting back to the discussion at hand. Materials used are only relevant when the results follow. So far bench mark print quality has resulted from plastic parts. On a personal level I'd prefer to see some chunky metal parts, but both the large amount of junky metal printer parts on the market and printers with plastic parts which print benchmark quality show causality isn't patently obvious or even present at all. Any expert who takes the part material as a measure of the resulting print quality obviously isn't any kind of expert at all.

The video below compares the Ender and the Prusa seems to reflect the general consensus. It also includes assembly, print quality and general liveability. As so many will say, the Ender 3 is amazing value for money.

[mnementh]

*Yawwwnnn* Scram, you're a well-known troll who just doesn't know when to quit. 

You may not like my style, but I've been there, I've dunnat, and I know the difference between fanboi-ism and what's actually easy. I'm trying to keep people from making the same mistakes I made, (Please, please for Ifni's sake, learn from my mistakes) while you (again) just keep parroting back the same exact arguments over and over in slightly different ways, while still refusing to address the points I've made from actual experience. 

So... I'm going to ask you something. Just how many 3DP do YOU have FIRSTHAND experience building...? I obviously don't know as much about 3DP as Monkeh or even bean; but I DO know what isn't EASY (therefore appropriate for a first build), AND I've done it, so I have some experience. What do YOU have aside from conjecture? What's your excuse for bringing this shit back up when we've FINALLY moved on to productive discussion?

mnem
Thanks for playing.

[Monkeh]

It translates into a fire hazard because the extruder perfoms a slow unplanned dissasembly.

Which extruders disassemble themselves when faced with a jam? All of mine will either stall out or chew through the filament - no hazard, just frustration.

[mnementh]

I think he may be talking about over the long term... the constant grinding and popping back on retraction does tend to loosen screws over time (at least it did when I was fiddling with that hybrid hotend) unless you really tighten them down. This brings its own hazards in stripped threads, especially if you have huge Shrek hamhands (like me) and have to constantly mind yourself not to over-tighten, or if you like to tinker and are tearing it apart repeatedly. You also tend to notice such things more often if you tinker constantly.

mnem
 

[Mr. Scram]

*Yawwwnnn* Scram, you're a well-known troll who just doesn't know when to quit. 

You may not like my style, but I've been there, I've dunnat, and I know the difference between fanboi-ism and what's actually easy. I'm trying to keep people from making the same mistakes I made, (Please, please for Ifni's sake, learn from my mistakes) while you (again) just keep parroting back the same exact arguments over and over in slightly different ways, while still refusing to address the points I've made from actual experience. 

So... I'm going to ask you something. Just how many 3DP do YOU have FIRSTHAND experience building...? I obviously don't know as much about 3DP as Monkeh or even bean; but I DO know what isn't EASY (therefore appropriate for a first build), AND I've done it, so I have some experience. What do YOU have aside from conjecture? What's your excuse for bringing this shit back up when we've FINALLY moved on to productive discussion?

mnem
Thanks for playing.

Yes, I am trolling. med6753 was trolling. Oculus was trolling. Everyone is trolling. It's never mnementh. People can read for themselves. They can draw their own conclusions.

My first-hand experience building printers? Five or six printers I guess, depending how you count, not counting non FDM ones. I dicked around with a couple of the very early Reprap models, a Darwin at the local hackerspace and later a Prusa Mendel for myself. Threaded rods everywhere. After that I got into Ultimaker style printers and did a few of those. I had some fun with Prusa i3 first gens but never got around to building one for myself. I'm currently deliberating whether to build a new Ultimaker style printer with all the modern bells and whistles from the ground up or just buy a Prusa MK3. Both have pros and cons. That's why I asked about the Duet versus the SKR board.

I don't think the earlier questions about your experience with Prusa or Prusa style printers were answered. Not that any of this is relevant to the discussion at hand, mind. More relevant sources for that were provided.

[Monkeh]

I'm currently deliberating whether to build a new Ultimaker style printer with all the modern bells and whistles from the ground up or just buy a Prusa MK3. Both have pros and cons. That's why I asked about the Duet versus the SKR board.

Look into a Railcore if you fancy a project. An expensive, time consuming project. Boy do they make nice prints, though. Zero chance I'd recommend one of those to a newbie.

[Mr. Scram]

Look into a Railcore if you fancy a project. An expensive, time consuming project. Boy do they make nice prints, though. Zero chance I'd recommend one of those to a newbie.

I wasn't looking for a project of that magnitude but my, that print quality. You're giving me naughty thoughts.

[mnementh]

No, med was not trolling. med and I are old friends, and we happened to have a disagreement in thread. The fact you don't see that, and know that like adults, we worked it out, is exactly what I'm talking about. You only see ammunition to use in your attacks.  You really ARE a well-known troll, you have earned this reputation, and I am sick and tired of defending you to my friends.

Your questions about which models I worked with, as you've correctly stated, were immaterial; I ignored them as the obvious attempt to drag me back into a semantic argument I'm already tired of that they clearly are.



Do you have any experience with any of the CReality or clone printers that bean and I have suggested? Or do you simply assume that because you battled your way through all those Prusa builds it's only fair to expect others to do so?

The disagreement we keep having here is NOT one of "how much quality" can you get out of a Prusa; you can get quality out of a plywood RepRap build, especially if you have help. It's whether the "kit" is appropriately simple, pre-assembled and idiot-tolerant to be a good choice as a first build. It's over the amount of fettling required to get a usable print on your first build. What an experienced builder considers to be easy is not the same as what a noob will consider to be so. I learned those lessons the hard way through lots of

The Prusa kits STILL aren't even in the same league as the E3 for simplicity. Nor do they have the E3's proven track record of being a FDM printer that is just plain easy to live with. They require maintenance due to the choice of materials that just isn't there with an extrusion-framed build.

There are SO MANY printers out there which produce similar or better results to the Prusa, that it's hard to believe someone with your vast experience can't come up with some good firsthand reasons other than "these guys say it's good" and "I didn't think it was that bad".

I don't know... maybe it's a matter of philosophy, and you just click well with the Prusa crowd, and just don't see what I see in the comparative assache factor of the two kits as a first build. If that's the case, I guess I'll never be able to make you see it.

For the difference in price, you can certainly start with a nice easy E3 or CR-10, THEN when you've gotten a handle on what you're doing, it's EASY and cheap to upgrade to linears & rods or sliders, making them every bit the equal of the Prusa (because hey, they ARE Prusa-derived), only on a more stable base so less fettling over the long run. Two of my friends from my old hackspace, and many popular figures online have gone exactly that route.

But there I go saying "These guys say it's good."

mnem
 

[HobGoblyn]

I’m thinking about getting a 3D printer.  Was going to ask for advice. But reading the last page of posts, I think I’m going to get conflicting information

Anyway, never used one in my life, but am very mechanically minded, having to tinker and adjust things isn’t a problem.

Not looking to spend a fortune, but want something that is usable and will remain so for years to come. (Am thinking of £500 max with everything I need)

Space is a problem, height doesn’t matter but ideally no more than 56 cm (22 inch) from front to back, width as near to that as possible although can be a little wider if needed.

Noise will be a problem as my house has living room and dining room knocked into one, and my labs in the dining room. Wife won’t put up with constant loud noise when she is watching TV.

As for what I want it for, haven’t a clue really, just always wanted one and have a bit of spare cash at the moment and it’s probably buy one now, or never get one. In the past I’ve tried to fix things with broken cogs etc on, being able to make broken parts is one thing. Making various storage solutions for my electronic components is another.

Any suggestions or can anyone point me to a non biased site giving the pros and cons of the various cheaper models?

Thanks

[Monkeh]

Well, I can't believe I'm going to light this dumpster fire again, but...

The Prusa Mini fits the bill of being small and probably (just being cautious, I don't have one..) quiet without being too expensive. Presumably with limited space and a WAF to deal with, having to tinker a machine into silence would be problematic. Footprint is apparently 38×33 cm, wider than I thought. Needs some additional clearance for the bed cabling but you've got that.. It's not going to arrive any time soon, though.

I'm sure there are other small bed-flingers (tend to be cheaper) but none spring to mind that I can definitively recommend quality or noise wise (most cheap printers still use Allegro drivers, not to mention awful fans).

I don't think I've seen any popular sites or reviewers without some degree of bias, so I'd suggest taking a wide sampling.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get some protective gear on before the flames arrive.