I’m a bit over a week in having a brand new Prusa MK2S and i thought I’d share my experience for future noobs. I had no prior experience with 3D printers. I’m very comfortable with tools and computers.Dealing with the company: Ordering, Shipping, Information and Customer serviceIt’s probably one of the thing that tipped me over to this printer, the website is amazingly clear. It has a lot of information about the printer and it’s capabilities and more importantly than anything host a very detailed building guide. I had a couple of questions during the purchase and the support team on the web-chat was more than happy to help and answer.Unfortunately I had some issues during shipping and my printer was returned from UPS to Prusa then shipped again. During that time I noticed a bit of disconnect inside Prusa between their chat support and the logistic team which apparently had trouble communicating between themselves. There was a lot of follow-up required to get any information and eventually I was asked to put in an email everything I had already written in various chat session so that the chat support guy could forward it to someone in logistic. Once the logistic got the info about my issue they did a very thorough follow-up.PackagingThe printer arrived in good condition even though UPS clearly treated the box like shit. I don’t know if hanging on a rope at the back of the truck while they drifted around town or if someone went at it with a cheese grater but it looked more like it shipwrecked on my doorstep than was delivered by a professional company. It’s seriously mind boggling how you can fuck up something so badly.Anyway, props to Prusa for the solid packaging. In spite of UPS effort everything inside was in good shape.The free spool of grey filament was taped on top of the box (this matters later).BuildBuild to self-test took about 12 hours over 3 days. All the information already available is correct in saying that the guide is great and that the paper guide included in the box is useless, just use the one on the website because looking at the high resolution pictures really helps.The guide is as close to being idiot proof as possible but the assembly requires patience and precision. I made a few mistakes which where mostly the same two types:Not reading carefully the instructions and actually spending too much time on a step. For example there is this one step on the frame where I spent a good 10 minutes with a ruler perfectly matching the distance of my pieces to the 6 given dimension in the pictures without realizing that the step description had final note saying something close to “the size are just approximation, don’t worry about them too much for now”.Using the wrong length of screw and having to disassemble a piece to get it back. M3x8, M3x10 and M3x12 are pretty similar when you’re not paying attention.Overall the pieces where mostly a good fit. I only had one case where the printed part has a slightly wide first layer and I had to gently file it to make it fit very tightly with another piece.I did quintuple checked the electric wiring of the motherboard.One thing that really surprised me was the amount of stuff that is assembled with zip-tie. From the pictures I saw online before I knew various cables where held together with zip-ties but there are many core pieces of the printer that are too. Too be honest it feels cheap.example example2 example3 (holding the rods)The frame (see above picture) probably isn’t the best. It takes a long time to assemble and it’s a PITA to square. I guess it’s super cheap being just a bunch of rod, nuts and 3d printed part but I can’t shake the feeling that a machine cut piece of metal would make the whole thing sturdier, easier to build and look less like a toy.There was a surprising amount of comment of people in the manual who said that some pieces were not fitting or that they had to drill and get some new screw from their own collection or whatever. Everything is possible but in my experience if it doesn’t fit or if you don’t have the right number of screws it’s because you’re messing up and I would suggest backtracking and contacting the very helpful support before improvising.That weird box of black piecesWhen I reached the end of the manual congratulating me for assembly the printer I was left with an unused box of black 3D printed part. Did I miss a step? I thought so for a while but it appears that Prusa accidentally sent me a set of orange and a set of black part. I contacted them and they helped me go over the checklist to make sure that the extra box of parts didn’t mean anything else was missing. Nothing was. That extra box also explains why my filament was strapped on top of the shipping box and not inside: there wasn’t enough space inside.Calibration and First printI half expected the printer to catch fire when I turned it on but to my surprise I didn’t do any mistake during the electrical assembly. Self test went well, reporting a good job with a slightly skewed frame. I decided that I didn’t know how to make it better so I’d let it deal with it. I managed to go through the rest of the calibration with a lot of uncertainty about what I was doing and I didn’t do very well.Then I tried to print something. I didn’t feel I had the balls to print a dragon right of the bat (no pun intended) so I started with one of the smallest item I could find preloaded on the SD: the prusa logo. Well it didn’t work. The printer was just laying down filament and ripping it off creating a garbled mess. I played with the live Z adjust and eventually got it to stick a little better but still not great. I probably restarted that print 5 or 6 times. I spent the next days tweaking everything, testing different slicers and eventually went back to slic3r. When I thought it was going well I tried to print the frog but it was ripped of the bed an hour into the print.I eventually settled on:Increasing the extruder temperature to 230 for the first layer and 225 for the rest instead of the default of 215 and 210 (i think).Increasing the bed temperature to 70 instead of 50.Carefully adjusting Z with the live Z adjust until the first layer was comfortably squishedReducing the first layer speed to 20mm instead of 70% (not a big reduction).About the temperature, I’m kind of suspecting that the A/C in the room is strong and contributing to the cooling but really I don’t know. Maybe those temperature are normal, maybe not. “It works” is all I can say.Now I’m more comfortable and the results are more predictable. I managed to print some medium size piece without too much trouble and today I completed my longest print of 8 hours while at work. A case for octopi and pi camera.http://ift.tt/2wKxpqo printed a bunch of smaller things too.Smell and noiseOk, so everywhere I read that the smell of PLA is nice, somewhere between pop-corn and getting a massage while eating christmas cake, this is where I think the community is mostly full of it. While it doesn’t smell like burned plastic it doesn’t smell good by any stretch of the imagination and staying in a room with the printer for a couple of hours I had a sore throat. That stuff is definitely toxic and needs to be boxed and ventilated.My wife agrees even more strongly and she complained repeatedly about the smell from another room even when I leave the window open. So I’m now building a box with IKEA Lack table and I will put a fan to vent it outside the window. (I checked I can buy about 1500 LACK side table for the average cost of a divorce so it was a no brainer.)Noise: it’s noisy, it sounds all clickety and buzzing. Hopefully the box will attenuate the sound a little bit too. I’ve read you can find better rods and bearing but i don’t want to go through the hassle of dismantling it and I’m a bit annoyed at the idea that I need to buy better parts.I can hear it from the bedroom so running it at night under the current circumstances is a no-no. I will try the various tips about setting it on a big stone, boxing it and see how it goes. If not maybe i’ll invest in better bearing. :(Apps & OctopiThere’s a bunch of apps given with the printer. The most useful one is slic3r of course. The way they preconfigured it for the printer is a little bit annoying because they use a customized data repository which means that if you try to launch slic3r directly from fusion360 it doesn’t load the “prusa specific” config. I know it’s easy to fix but I haven’t got around to yet.There is also an app to control the printer over USB that is a steaming hot pile of garbage; I tried to use it to upload a file to the SD card and I only got it to crash over and over.I got an extra raspberry pi 3 and a camera to run octopi. Of course you can live without it but it really feels like it should be built in. It’s kind of a bummer that the printer doesn’t come with some way to control it over wifi out of the box.Final wordsOverall i’m quite happy with my purchase. It’s definitely not an out of the box experience. Even ignoring the assembly there is still quite a lot of work to do on the environment to make it a very really comfortable experience (calibration, box, remote control, soundproofing) but it’s already pretty good. Of course I have no basis of comparison other than my own few prints already looks better than the sample print I’ve seen displayed in some stores so I feel good about that at least. http://ift.tt/2vku79M