I did some things to get my Carvera into the basement and onto my desk that were… ill advised. I underestimated what 110 lbs weighs. Looks like the XL is half that, or Glowforge weight, which is a lot more manageable.
Unfortunately it’s not going to fit anywhere nicely, as my space is pretty much full at this point. The mini printers fit nicely into an IKEA cabinet, but the XL is going to have to take up space on the bench that I had explicitly designated as “always keep this clear for project work”. But that’s a problem I’m willing to have!
I don’t need another expensive printer. I don’t need another expensive printer. I don’t need another expensive printer. I gotta keep just telling myself this.
I’m still afraid to get a 3d printer. I have one friend who has a couple, and he knows a lot about them – he’s that guy. We all know that guy. Some of us here are that guy for various subjects.
But he is also that guy who makes everything he does extremely complicated. Do you know that guy too? In listening to him, I have become convinced that 3d printers are hangar queens that need 40 hours of maintenance for 1 hour of printing. I have become deeply concerned about rigidity and ball screws and different kinds of rails and stepper motors and how you gotta fabricate new parts for a printer before you can even use it … And I am not up for that, I need something more like a Glowforge that Just Works most of the time.
I have asked him to print objects for me – “Here’s a link on Thingiverse can you print this in black? Doesn’t even matter what kind of plastic,” – and he has like a thousand questions on how I want it printed that I can’t answer.
Someone tell me it’s not actually that complicated, LOL.
Just get a quality machine and you will be fine.
The years of “the printer is the hobby” are mostly over. Yes it will break, yes you need to tension the pullies once in a while but over all they are very reliable these days unless you rush to the bottom.
I get you. I used to do the 3D printing classes at work. I used to make the analogy that some people buy a motorcycle so they can take it apart and put it back together, and some people just want to ride it. (Substitute any of a million similar things for the motorcycle). Both are valid ways to enjoy something.
I own a Lulzbot Mini and a Prusa Mini specifically because both brands are known for being low-maintenance workhorses. They both worked perfectly straight out of the box (*slightly more one-time assembly required on the Prusa) and have only required one small DIY repair each over the years I’ve owned them. I have zero interest in modding or blinging them out, performing fancy tricks, tweaking them in pursuit of the ultimate performance or perfect print, or anything else that involves more than pressing the button and getting a good enough thing out of it.
I echo the sentiment, especially in 2023, that you can get a 3D printer and just use it, if you stay away from the ultra low end. Since I’m not “into” 3D printing as a hobby, I don’t pay attention to the landscape of what’s out there, so maybe these are table stakes now, but two things that really mattered to me were a heated build plate and auto leveling. The last thing I ever want to do is fuss around coating the bed in glue stick or hair spray.
I started with a crappy cheap printer and hated every moment. Replaced with prosumer-quality Ultimaker and it “just worked” out of the box. I’m currently on my second UM2+.
Well to echo the comments above a 2023 big brand printer is pretty reliable if you don’t pick the cheap race-to-the-bottom models which are for tweaking and get a fully assembled one. It’s like Glowforge va a Chinese blue and white laser. Do you want to just throw stuff on the bed and start pew pew or sit there and tweak the power supply every morning… now it is never going to be as easy and your hp laser jet printing from ms word, but it’s pretty good now.
First knee done and works better than I thought. Handing it to the orthopedic surgeon to try out for corrections to tendon thickness (how we vary tension). Then we can make versions with pathology. Need to switch pla for polycarbonate or nylon-cf as the torque on the shafts is very very high
I just bought a Bambu Labs Carbon X1 for the family for Christmas. (My wife says it is for me, but I insist that it is for the kids…)
I chose that brand because it looks to be easy to use and low maintenance. I like the features of the internal time-lapse camera and auto-calibration. I am not sold on the filament switching yet, that just seems super wasteful.
I really want to play with it… but I am waiting until the kids open it for Christmas…
Yes, the infamous “poop chute” on the Bambu does waste a lot of filament. That’s the advantage of the XL being a tool changer rather than filament switcher (purge vs. prime - purge being like 10x more wasteful). As far as time-lapse yes that’s nice, although in the past I just used the raspberry pi’s camera to do it which was also watched by Obico’s spaghetti detector AI. For the XL just have a webcam watching it
That being said the Prusa XL is not a starter printer, in the prusa line the Prusa Mini+ would be a perfect printer to learn on. The XL 5-tool monster is an industrial printer with a complex workflow (mostly all the placed you need to remember to assign tools to things), but pretty much if you want to print something simple like “I want to print that model on thingiverse” you can let Prusaslicer (or whatever your modern slicer is) take care of itself and load filament and hit print. The big thing that trips newbies up is managing supports (for overhanging parts) and what you can get away with (tons of videos on youtube). For the knee model above I used “organic” supports that look like little trees and they support material was a different type of plastic that the item being supported (PLA and TPU are chemically incompatible so won’t stick to each other which was what I wanted) but day one you don’t need to worry about these things
My buddy who makes everything overly complicated blessed a couple of brands including Bambu as the best off the shelf beginner picks. (“You only have to replace half of it!” LOL) I hope you enjoy it.
Maybe 2024 will be the year I get a 3d printer. We even have a business need for it via my wife, but I would have to learn some 3d modeling to make it pay off. What we need to create isn’t something I can download.
I do not really enjoy it. But also, in my past I have had to work with a few different programs and each of them was wildly different… So I never got very comfortable. For example I used UnrealEd for a while at work, and then when I tried Sketchup at home I found it completely unusable because they made it “easy.”
This is the modeling project before me… I have to make 120 shapes like this to recreate a 3d visualization aptitude test that my wife administers in the course of her work. These are vacuum extruded, 40 years old, no longer manufactured, and extremely fragile.
Ooh, that’s a fun one. I presume you have a set of the originals and don’t need to reverse engineer them from the pictures. I think if I were presented with that, I’d be very tempted to turn it into a coding challenge in OpenSCAD and get totally distracted rather than follow the simple path.
If they’re all made out of the same size blocks, one easy-ish way might be to make a 1x1 unit cube, duplicate it in the necessary positions, and join them into one body.
