Ok. I must ask this for the sake of an argument and for myself: does anyone have anything GOOD to say about the QUBD OneUp and TwoUp printers? Please be aware that I already have a 3D printer and am a big tinkerer with a sizable amount of RepRap experience, and I’m ready to take on any challenge this printer has for me. I would like some opinions from people like me please. Thanks!
I haven’t ever heard anyone speak kindly of these printers.
run for the hills
Harry, I would steer clear. I recommended to my friend who was getting into 3d printing as it seemed to be a great deal and a good intro. I suggested it as I knew I would be nearby to help him through any disasters. The whole process has been a disaster… From the 4+ month shipping delay to the printer itself. Little to no responses from customer tech as I am sure they are flooded based upon the readiness of that printer out of the box. If you have a good amount of reprappin experience you might be okay, but it does require quite a bit of after market modding and parts to get consistent and reliable results. It can be tough to mod if you don’t already have a working printer to print the quality parts to get the qubd printing well. I was hopeful prior to playing with it. I guess to some extent you get what you pay for, but I suggest spending a little more and getting a printrbot simple metal. You aren’t going to find a better quality, moddable, well supported device in the sub $600 price range. Quality is great, works well out of box, comes with some beautifully engineered parts, huge user community, and still built for the tinkerer. Or I would recommend building a prusa or some other kind of Mendel.
@Mike_Kowalczyk I see… I do have a working printer to make parts and I do have a lot of reprap experience. I think I’m armed and ready for whatever challenge this printer has to throw at me, and if it sucks… I’ll turn it into a Prusa.
Good luck! I can see myself thinking the same thing prior to experiencing it… Send me the pics of the prusa when you finish it ;). At the end of the day, you still have all of the electronics. I hate the idea of supporting a business that puts out such a lousy product and support. Post pics and tag me when you get her running nicely!
The QUBD extruder, which they have been selling for over two years, is a disaster. You need to replaces every part of it to get it working reliably. I have no reason to believe their printers are any different.
Your motivation is to spend less money? Consider taking 40 hours of part time work doing something annoying but pays $10 an hour, and then invest those 40 hours + $200 in a much better printer. I can guarantee you that cutting grass, or babysitting, or waiting tables part time, will be a better use of your time than trying to get a cheap 3D printer doing something useful. The alternative is to spend 80 hours fiddling around with the printer and never getting anything that quite works the way you want it to.
They took several of my ideas from my designs and poorly implemented them. Not crediting open source designs is bad form but happens all the time… But reverse engineering the Ubis hotend and screwing it up at every point is offensive- especially since they named it the Anubis. Sheesh. I told them in person it was bad form and I could have provided cheap hotends to avoid bad customer experience. They didn’t respond well to my conflict heavy approach.
The real shame is that they have good equipment in their shop and some design skills in their early high end machines but swung too far from really expensive machines to really cheap machines. Making a viable business with such cheap kickstarter bots is difficult. The only way I am able to do the Simple makers kit do cheap ($349) is I do pretty massive volume. I have POs for mid six figures standing at Amazon.com. At those volumes, I can provide good pricing and have margin to share with them.
We are doing a very cheap assembled bot next year that will break the $300 barrier but likely be a loss leader when customer support and resellers are taken into account. We may be forced to rely on our injection molder and will start selling only from Printrbot.com to keep the paper thin margins it will require.
All that said, I hope that someday Printrbot will be the go to source for beginners on a very lean budget. Or just the tinkerers curious to wrap their heads around a cheap second or third machine just for fun.
Brook
@Brook_Drumm Can I ask why do you think OneUP is so poor in quality? I interested in their design, for relatively simple implementation of acrylic frames. Though I don’t understand how that cheap price is possible.
Do you think acrylic frames is not suitable for rigid design?
I’ve been thinking of make one using acrylic frame 
I have a TwoUp. It still has not printed a single part. I’ve just about got my Cupcake printing again so I can print more parts for the TwoUp.
The X gantry needs to be flipped so the 2 bearings are on the left side, with the drive screw. Even then, there is still an amazing amount of sag.
Every linear bearing needs to be hot-glued in place (I chose hot glue because it’s removable with isopropyl) after using the 2 ziptie (per side) approach. Otherwise they still wobble around.
The extruder hotend suffers from severe heat creep, so the filament will jam after a few minutes. Even with active cooling (a ducted fan blowing on it at all times).
You need to fasten the whole printer down otherwise it’ll tip over when the Y stage starts moving.
The basalt heated bed seems nice, but it ended up being a rather expensive upgrade.
The firmware is “Marlin-Up”, which is some forked copy of Marlin. Hopefully the only difference is configuration changes for the board used and the build volume. But my git-fu is not good enough to figure out the actual differences. I may just replace it with stock Marlin so I can keep up with the latest developments.
I guess the problem is OneUp itself, not acrylic frame issue.