Well, I went and done it. The kit printer I bought myself for my birthday last year never worked quite right. I think I had maybe 2 actually good prints out of it and spent nearly all of the year “waiting for a part” or “designing a replacement piece” or “reading about how the motors and stops work” or “diagnosing a problem”.
For some reason this didn’t do anything to dampen my interest in the hobby, so I decided to buy a non-kit printer for my birthday this year that was a little nicer so that I could print parts for my kit printer. Or for a new design to be built out of the kit printer components maybe… or a CNC router out of the parts… anyway, now I have a printer that works without much tweaking and it was “only” $550 with the coupon.
Say hello to my new Maker Ultimate from Monoprice…
@kenneth_rooks that’s kinda how I felt with my printer. It was very cheap and I learnd a lot just getting that thing up and running. I’m far from being a pro but because I have spent so much time just trying to get the thing working properly, I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge.
If you want to have a bunch of plastic things, buy a 500+dollar complete and assembled printer. If you want to learn about 3d printing, buy a terrible kit and make a lot of mistakes
@Tom_L I would 100% agree with this statement. But you can get prints from these cheap printers, it just takes a lot of trial and error to get things up and running properly. I’ve had my printer for like 3 months and I’m still tweaking it but I’m getting close. I’m getting to the point where I’m tweaking the little details now.
My first printer was a Makibox… let’s just say I became very well informed and experienced with problem solving and custom part modeling. But I wouldn’t go back and trade that experience for a perfectly working printer of I could.
now I just need to find something useful to do with it!