Month: February 2020

The things no one warns you about when buying a 3D printer

You get your 3D printer. It’s an Ender 3 or an Anycubic Mega-S/i3 Mega. You’ve done some quick research online, you have your Cura profiles set up, and you’re ready to go.You get your first prints, and they fine. Nothing spectacular, but they didn’t fail instantly. This isn’t as hard as people say. So you start tweaking with the settings. PLA is coming along fine, you aren’t getting any issues, you feel like a natural at the craft. You start printing mods for your printer, making it better than it was before, while simultaneously breaking and fixing it in all sorts of small ways as you learn about the machine. Maybe you feel adventurous and flash some firmware on it.You buy some sandpaper, a heatgun, and get to perfecting your PLA models. A few weeks of this goes by, and you want to try something new. You learn about acetone smoothing. Time to try ABS.Your next step is to buy or build an enclosure. Suddenly, this printer that fit neatly in the corner is taking up more space. You get an air filter for the enclosure, and off you go. More pitfalls now that you’ve started with ABS. You deal with nozzle clogs, you deal with adhesion problems, you spend hours every night printing benchy after benchy until your settings are just right. Until your overhangs are crisp. By this point, you have over a dozen Cura profiles, each finely tuned to every various model you want to print.Next you buy some acetone. You try various ways to smooth your models. Eventually you find the setup that works for you. You’re getting smooth as hell models. But you still want more.You buy an epoxy resin to finish your models in. You mix too much at first, and have no clue what to do with what’s left. By this point, your printer is running 24/7. You experiment with the resin, wasting a solid third of it, until you get the amounts just right. Now your models are starting to look professional.But maybe it could be better. Maybe they can look even better with less work if you go the dual extrusion route. After all, cutting off supports feels so primitive, when you’re just a few hundred dollars away from being able to just dissolve your supports in liquid. As you’re contemplating your purchase, you hear your extruder clicking in the other room. Sigh, another clogged nozzle. https://ift.tt/2SFbmej