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3D Printing beginner questions
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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I would advocate Creality and tinkering for one very good reason... If you buy a fancy printer and it breaks, how will you know how to fix it?
At work we got a $2500 printer years ago. It has the sensors to self-adjust before every print, you pretty much don't need to do anything except send your print jobs to it. Sounds great, right? Until it started failing... Around the same time things started to go wrong, I got my Ender 3 printer, and I spent a lot of time learning how to make adjustments, how to correct things in the slicer for better quality prints, and so on. Meanwhile the expensive printer at work sat idle for about 2 years because nobody knew anything about "fixing" it. I finally decided to take a crack at it and immediately recognized that even though this printer has auto bed leveling it was quite obvious the first layer was too close to the bed. Turns out the sensors had gotten dirty over time, I cleaned them and boom, we're up and running again.
I have tinkered with my printer to the point of printing all kinds of custom parts for it including a direct-drive head. I can upgrade the firmware any time I want and set the defaults to match my custom hardware, but most importantly I know what everything does and can troubleshoot a variety of problems. Tinkering isn't a bad thing, and you only have to get into it as far as you want to because the printer will work just fine out of the box if you take the time to set it up properly, but it does provide options if you want 'better'.
While this is true, and I learned a ton on my Creality. Some people don't want to tinker, or repair anything. Some folks aren't comfortable or confident in their ability to do that. That is why you can find so many super cheap used creality printers. People buy them, and don't want to work on them. It fails and they get rid of it. If you get a more reliable machine, like the Prusa, and it seems like Bambulabs is starting to join that club then you may never really need to repair it.
I have had my prusa for coming up on 2 years and haven't adjusted or touched anything. I did build it as a kit, and have built and tinkered with Enders, but with my prusa I don't need to. If people don't plan on printfarming or selling, or having it run 24/7 chances are it will run for ages without needing to adjust anything. Thats not the case with the cheap printers.
I did mods on mine simply because it's so easy to add things to make it look better, or in some cases make it easier to work with. I think the only significant improvements for printing were adding an arm to change the angle of the filament entering the extruder, and a fang duct which helped a lot with bridging and stringing.
I didn't really do anything major until I wanted to print with NinjaFlex TPU so I printed and assembled a direct drive head, compiled a new version of Marlin to move the motors the right way, and included some extra features that help print more consistent lines. Yeah that's going to be way outside the comfort zone for most people, but my printer always worked reliably for the three years before this change (I got it at the end of January 2019). I've been working on other projects this year so it's been awhile since I printed anything, but I know I could clean the dust off the bed, load up some filament, and kick out a print job. It just works.
You can learn by building a printer from a kit, without getting something as unreliable.
Are you suggesting the Ender 3 is unreliable? That's pretty funny.
Compared to prusa it's a dumpster fire.
Considering it costs four times as much, it's easy to see the sunk cost fallacy coming into play.
I have a probably irrational disdain of anything Creality makes.
I mean yeah, they're cheap, and there are definitely some production issues, but they're pretty good about replacing bad parts in new machines. I think the biggest factor that got me off and running right away was following youtube videos to learn how to do the initial assembly including squaring up the frame, and videos on doing bed leveling correctly (if your spring aren't almost completely closed then you're going to have problems). Took me three hours to do the initial assembly but I've never had to do it again. I still stand by Creality because they helped me and countless others break in to 3D printing at home at a time when the next available model was around $500 (but that one was made by Creality too! 😀 ).
They definitely paved the way for more affordable printers! But I feel like there are better options at the same price today.