3D printer

zundapp

Hi Looking at purchasing a 3D printer for some small projects at home.
I was looking at the Ender 3 would anyone have any personal reviews or alternative recommendations ?

mordeith

zundapp wrote: »

Hi Looking at purchasing a 3D printer for some small projects at home.
I was looking at the Ender 3 would anyone have any personal reviews or alternative recommendations ?

Was also looking at this. Online reviews seem good. Where are you looking to buy it from?

VECTRON

I have an Ender 3 and have been getting some really good results with it. This is a kit - so you will need to build it, wont take more than an hour. Follow this guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me8Qrwh907Q and you cant go wrong.

Its my first 3d printer - so still learning the ropes and https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3/ has been a great resource.

make sure to make any purchase from https://www.creality3dofficial.com/ or banggood / aliexpress.

Avoid www.creality3d.shop as this is a reseller and not the official shop/company and ship times/ support can be non-existent.


sidenote - I have an unopend ender3 that Im looking to sell for retail price, I'm based in Dublin, its unopened and would need to be built as this is a kit.

sheepsh4gger

zundapp wrote: »

Hi Looking at purchasing a 3D printer for some small projects at home.
I was looking at the Ender 3 would anyone have any personal reviews or alternative recommendations ?

My recommendation is not to buy any to begin with and learn traditional methods of manufacturing instead.


I owned maybe 4 printers now, each had its quirks and was a total night mare and FIRE HAZARD.


Do not buy anything from Wanhao, it's made out of whatever they had on the Shenzehn market on the day.


The Photon printer is the best printer I owned so far, but spilling resin on the control screen killed it so I had to pay for a replacement screen module.


That's for resin-projector based ones.


I also have a filament one (uses a spool of plastic) that is brittle cancer on a stick and takes an entire day to calibrate. FDM is cancelled, don't use it. The problem with it is temperature - there's no way to keep everything the same temperature so your print constantly shrinks and distends during printing. You would have to keep it in a chamber with temperature control or something, I don't know... maybe print in a medium like gelatin.


My main gripe with home printers is tolerances. You print 4 parts, they kind of look OK on their own but don't fit together. The print always stretches somewhat - a millimeter here, a millimeter there. If you want accuracy pay for a print form an industrial powder-based printer. Forget about owning one, the cheapest one is 5000€.

Dr Bob

I've had an Ender 3 pro for a few years now .

On the plus side its cheap , and popular enough that you'll find a lot of support for it .

Plus you'll learn a lot about 3D printing.

The downside is that you'll need to do a lot of fiddling with it to get it to work* .

It doesn't have an auto leveler , so you may have to manually level the bed fairly regularly.

Also you'll probably end up upgrading it a lot . Mines had Bowden tubes swapped , a BLTouch added , mainboard replaced with an upgraded one (twice , as I accidently blew my first one) , new firmware , converted to direct drive , and currently adding a second Z stepper. And that's not counting the clips , fittings and fan cowls I've printed for it.

Oh and adding an Pi running OctoPi is a really good idea (as it turns it into a print server that lets you monitor prints from anywhere).

*(in theory its possible to get an Ender 3 out of the box , and have perfect prints every time , but I dont think its ever happened)

Dr Bob

Also meant to mention .. there's a 3D printing forum here

https://www.boards.ie/categories/3d-printing