So I have owned a printrbot simple for almost a month now and I thought I would do a brief review. Pictures included.
Assembly: not bad, the assembly manual is a bit scattered, I am under the impression that it doesn’t defect any one version, so it gets a bit confusing. Even with mistakes and reassembly, the build time for me was around 4.5 hours.
Quality: it works, but there are some major drawbacks, the string slowly wears down. If a print fails the string gets eaten up, but that being said it does work well under normal conditions.
Print area: quite small, I have found that the useable area is about 8-10 mm smaller then advertised in my build. I may be able to get that back with some reassembly, but it isn’t broken so I’m not going to fix it.
Print quality: fine. I have printed mostly arty .2 mm only a few prints at .1 mm, but I have no issues with anything I have tried. I have not tried spanning yet.
Overall impressions: it is fine as a first printer. After owning it I do want a larger build area (200 mm cube would work I think), but I do like this product on the whole. It is cheap and I have had only 5 prints fail after the first layer (tilt or turn into the saddest spaghetti monster).
Honestly. I have not had to do much. I have not calibrated e-steps, have not calibrated x-y distance/step, Nothing. just assembled and hit print in repieter. This is a later revision of of the simple (ie came with motor upgrades, fan upgrade, and tensioner upgrade). But it is as printrbot shipped oct 25.
Sucks. I’d be tempted to upgrade it to belts if the string was causing issues. Mine hasn’t broke yet, but if it does any time soon I will be switching the belts
@Nathan_Ryan It really is a simple thing to replace, and a cheap item at that. breaking a belt will cost you some dollars (probably wont happen) but breaking a string costs you some cents. Really my plan is to get a spool of proper string and replace it when i need to. (it will cost less then upgrading to belts).
Before starting the print i did notice wear on the line, i should not have started it, but i the print was like 25-30 grams so i though hey, if i loose it i’m not out much.
