It seems like they’re all really expensive, with most halfway decent ones being over $1000. It also seems like they’re really finicky and hard to get working consistently.
Are there any 3d printers that are actually a refined product, something you can just get and start using? I don’t want to spend most of my time fiddling with the settings and having to buy a ton of upgrades in the hopes of getting it to be a functional machine that can actually be used to print out parts.
If there are any out there that are basically self-maintaining or highly automated in terms of configuring themselves correctly, is it only the really expensive ones, or are there more affordable sort of “get and forget” printers that you can just set up and start using?
Whatever you get, look for auto-leveling in the features. Fuck manual leveling.
If you have a spare raspberry pi, octoprint bed level visualizer takes a lot of the hassle out of it. But yeah, really sucks when you have to level it by feeling a piece of paper.
If you want cheap you gotta deal with jank.
That might as well be Creality’s motto but hey mine works
“Crealty: If You Want Cheap, You Gotta Deal With Jank!”
I have a Prusa MK3S+. I bought mine as a kit, though they did sell (mostly) assembled units as well.
After 2 moves of just shoving it in couch cushions and waiting over a year between prints the only thing I did to get it up and running was blow the dust off the hotplate. I probably coulda done more, but I didn’t have to and it banged out a perfect print first time. Most of the fiddling I’ve done with it is in the slicer.
It’s a lot of money, but it has “just worked” every time I’ve used it.
I’m not the expert but at my work we’ve used several varieties and brands and the MK3S+ is our standard workhorse
FDM or Resin? I got a Ender 3 S1 Pro for my fdm printing and I have to fuss with it way less than other printers I’ve owned. Comes with all the upgrades you could want except maybe an enclosure (and the creality tent does it pretty good for cheap).
Still need to level your bed, but assembly is pretty foolproof and you don’t need to fuss with much else.
There are ones that come with hard enclosures and even have beds that level themselves, but those features are very spendy.
Edit: any printer you get, you’ll still need to learn to slice files in Cura or whatever, figure out when you need supports and what good settings are. But also, the new Cura has pretty good default settings for that printer.
For resin, I’ve never had issues with Elegoo printers. Used to have a Mars 3, upgraded to some sort of Saturn, both worked flawlessly, I just wanted to upgrade to a bigger build plate.
Ender 3 S1 has been pretty great for me. I mainly do functional prints and it can do some pretty fine detail. I learned a lot by doing and tweeking settings as I went along. Not even the high dollar consumer grade ones will be “self maintaining” or just be able to load a file and print perfectly without knowing what settings to tweak to get which results. Getting a $500+ printer has some features that will make certain things easier, but you’re probably not going to care about those features unless you’re doing production work.
my opinion: you probably won’t like the amount of fiddling of any FDM printer, even rock solid ones with autolevelling, you end up having to fiddle with slicer settings to optimize for speed, quality, printing overhangs or weird geometry, strength, whatever.
Are the resin ones any better?
Resin with lycheeslicer is incredibly simple, much less tinkering. Messy because you need to do the whole wash and cure thing, but the slicer has a “magic wand” button that never fails me. I leveled my Saturn once when I bought it, and haven’t had to do any tinkering since.
But fdm and resin printing kinda have different purposes. I use fdm for functional stuff (plastic strong), and resin for dnd minis (resin pretty).
Resin printing is awesome, I just grabbed an Elegoo Saturn 3 on ebay used for $150 and the level of detail it can produce is incredible. One thing to always keep in mind is that the resin in its uncured state is highly toxic and you’ll need gloves and a good respirator anytime you’re in your printing space, which should vent outside somehow (a small grow tent and 4 inch fan will work well for this) You may also want to get a wash and cure station, but on a tighter budget you can get by with a mason jar full of alcohol and set parts out in the sun to cure for several hours.
You can also get water washable resins too now. I’ve been playing with a bottle of it recently and I’m struggling to notice the difference between it and the alcohol washable ones.
I have no personal experience to speak from, but I’ve heard that aside from a couple very expensive resins like Wargamer, the water washable resins tend to be very brittle so I’ve avoided them so far.
I mostly use Sunlu ABS-Like. I can get it for $18/kg and it’s easily the best ABS-like I’ve tried. Going to buy a bottle of SirayaTech Tenacious soon too to mix a little bit in with my regular resin (9 parts ABS, 1 part Tenacious) which should make my minis nearly indestructible without any noticeable detail loss.
I don’t have hands on experience but it seems mostly more straightforward yes. More steps in terms of like, washing and UV curing, and the resin is toxic (I hadn’t heard of people using a full respirator for one but I assume ComradeRed knows what they’re talking about), but less fiddling. And resin printers tend to be on the small side, so great for minifigs, or medium sized stuff if you pay a bit more, but not great for large objects (those take forever on FDM but are at least possible for cheap.)
Bambu A1 or P1
I’ve Qidi X Max 3, its also good but heavy af and requires a bit more tinkering but completely offline, Bambu has cloud stuff which you can disable with custom firmware I think if you want.
Check this channel out it has good reviews on different printers
Maybe try looking up what printers people use to make 3D printed guns. The parts need to be strong enough to resist exploding and immediately cracking from shots, and of course they’ll need a printer strong enough to print that materiao
Bambulabs P1S is maybe your best bet for something that just works, but that is also $850 so not the cheapest. Creality Ender 3 is relatively cheap ($200 I think these days?) and doesn’t require too much tinkering I think to get good basic PLA prints. I think really any printer is eventually going to require some tinkering to replace parts and that sort of thing, even pricier ones. It’s really not too bad though, and kind of fun once you get into it.
EDIT: I just had another thought. Do they have any makerspaces in your area? If so, they almost certainly have 3D printers and would probably let you print stuff either for free or for a small donation. Might be worth it to look into it at least.
I live in a rural area of a kind of underserved province, so there aren’t any maker spaces and my library doesn’t have a 3d printer
List of 3D printers, with their pros and cons. You can just skip to “Top Picks”
You can fiddle with the settings as much as you want to fiddle with it. I use the Sovol SV06+, and after assembly (which you can’t go wrong with because it’s just near impossible to place things the wrong way), the prints worked just fine with PLA and the default profiles in the Prusa Slicer. You can leave it like that, but if you enjoy building, you’ll enjoy fiddling and starting to explore things like different materials, settings, etc.
Also, what and how are you planning on printing? Are you making your own models or downloading them? You will end up having to fiddle with models regardless for printability (for example, printing something tall and thin will result in fail prints in many cases).
For what purpose? Making your own fun? I don’t have much experience with FDM or resin fun but have a proper CNC I’ve made some projects on (purely for personal use of course). Really depends on the use case, if you just want some cool minis of your blender models structural integrity isn’t really a concern like it may be for other things. There are a lot of inherent limitations with 3D printing so I’d advise against it if it’s purely for fun. Pro tip: you can bend a flat for Mikhail’s masterpiece into shape with just a vice+jigs if you don’t have access to a full machine shop
I use 3d printers to make parts on a weekly basis.
The fdm (squirting) ones that are “set and go” start around $2000.
Most of that is having a controlled environment for the squirt to transition in and having “profiles” appropriate for doing more than making bowsette statues.
It’s hard to use the information in the diy community to make functional parts because they’re all making bowsette statues.
The exception is guns. The gun people have extensive information that will allow anyone to produce a functional (?) firearm (?) using a $99 printer and the cheapest pla on Amazon.
There is little to be learned from the gun people because the properties a functional (?) firearm (?) requires are super specific and don’t really correspond to much else.
To get a functional “good” diy fdm setup, you need to start with a ~$1000 printer like a prusa knockoff and build an enclosure with climate control around it and set up some kind of sbc that will manage all of that and maybe send commands to the printer to adjust its bullshit to whatever +/- 1 degree variation occurs.
Everything I just wrote is about fdm with non-basic pla stuff. If you just wanna make bowsette statues and guns then get whatever your files are sliced for (it’s an ender 3) and use that.
Resin printers can be more set and forget, but you need to buy a good one to start with, have ventilation, have wash and curing stations and it has to be able to handle whatever goofball non-warhammer-figurine material you’re using.
If you just want to print warhammer figurines then get an elegoo mars (?) and use it.
My goal is to be able to make little functional and decorative parts that look “good” without too terribly much post-processing. For example, I’d like to be able to print a case for the communist fantasy console project I’m working on and have the different parts actually line up instead of being all warped. Little functional parts for fixing things around the house, or printing decorations or prosthetics (Canadian healthcare basically only covers them in BC, so a lot of people never even have the chance to get one.) idk about printing a gun, especially as far as legality goes, but it sounds like that’s on the “easier” side of FDM manufacturing from what you say
Okay, when you said you wanted to print parts I assumed you meant components with nylon or rubber attributes or something like that that needed to be more performant than pla.
If it’s just “stuff” you want to print but don’t want it to turn out all “fucked up” then get an ender and a cardboard box and some insulation and put the insulation on the inside of the box surfaces and put the box over the ender.
You won’t be able to see what’s happening, but after you calibrate the printer for use with an insulated enclosure (a cardboard box with old insulation stapled to it) it’ll be able to consistently crank out quality parts.
When you start getting self conscious about your trailer park ass 3d printer, look up some of the nicer clear plastic enclosure builds and make one of those.
