Looking to get a 3D printer soon.

[GunsOfNavarone]

I guess Fusion 360 does the slicer aspect now. I am playing with it as well speak. As always, I really need the CNC equipment to see what's really happening....A few more days. I am bummed I didn't get the PRUSA MK3, hopefully apples to apples in the manner I will use.

 

[7milesup]

Cancel the order and get the Prusa Mk3. Easy enough to do but it is going to be $350+ more.
One thing I noticed with the Ender as soon as I looked at it was the fact that it only has one Z drive motor. Prusa, and others, have a Z drive on each side with rails. Not sure if that is going to be and issue or not but I am not a fan of cantilevered build plates.
Anyhow, it will get you started.

Edit.... I use Cura for the slicer although Prusa has PrusaSlicer that you could download too. I find that one very easy to use and I believe it might work with other printers but you would have to look into that.

 

[brino]

”analysis paralysis”, is that akin to pre-buyer’s remorse (you have not bought it, yet you still feel some what screwed)??

It's more that there are too many variables!
Many of the variables also aren't fully understood.....before jumping in I really couldn't picture if I wanted a 0.5mm or 0.4mm nozzle.

Plus it's moving sooooo fast....if you take a month to research a few variables in depth, then there are new models of printers available.

I decided I just had to jump in; and i am glad that I did!

-brino

 

[MikeWi]

Regarding the coarse looking finish on those chess pieces, part of the issue is you're seeing places where there's a slope and that always makes the layers more obvious. You really can get some amazingly smooth surfaces with stock equipment Prusa or not. It just takes a little tuning. ABS plastic and some others can be smoothed further using solvent vapor, but I don't bother with that.

3D printing is a lot like machining in that it's easy to spend the money on the equipment, but it takes some time to learn the skills. I totally agree that Prusa is perfect as a turnkey solution. There's little to do in terms of upgrades, and you can focus on learning everything else. OTH, I'm a tinkerer, and I learned so much upgrading my Ender 3 and don't mind that I spent nearly as much in the end. It was worth it for the knowledge and expertise I gained.

Regarding the slicers: Any of the slicers will work for your printer, and there are a lot them! All with strengths and weaknesses, but all the good ones are free, so when one has an advantage for what you're doing, use it, and change to a different one when you need to. No need to be married to one slicer. That said, I tend to stick with Slic3r++ (now renamed to SuperSlicer). It's Prusa slicer on steroids, and features pioneered on Slic3r often end up in Prusa's version later on.

One important PSA: Stay away from Simplify3D. It's out of date, poorly supported, and way too expensive ($150) for the limited abilities it has.

 

[Aaron_W]

That has been a huge part of my internal debate between the Prusa and Ender printers. I spend way more time tinkering with stuff than actually making stuff as it is, which has had me leaning towards the Prusa. Of course the miser in me likes the price of the Ender. The comments in this thread really push me towards the Prusa kit. Nothing stops me from later buying an Ender or other printer if I feel like I'm missing out on the tinkering aspect. I already know I'm eventually going to want a resin 3D printer as well at some point.

My main interest is in making 1/24-25 scale model parts. I see the Prusa says it can do 0.05mm layers, would it be able to make an accurate line of 0,05-0.1mm a couple of mm long and maybe 1mm tall? What about raised or sunken "dots"? One of the things that has been vexing me for years has been trying to make scale 1/4" details like the cooling fins on an air cooled motor or small perforated housings.


Those of you making model parts, are you just using the printer to make masters to then resin cast, or do you directly use the parts you make?

 

[acruxksa]

That has been a huge part of my internal debate between the Prusa and Ender printers. I spend way more time tinkering with stuff than actually making stuff as it is, which has had me leaning towards the Prusa. Of course the miser in me likes the price of the Ender. The comments in this thread really push me towards the Prusa kit. Nothing stops me from later buying an Ender or other printer if I feel like I'm missing out on the tinkering aspect. I already know I'm eventually going to want a resin 3D printer as well at some point.

My main interest is in making 1/24-25 scale model parts. I see the Prusa says it can do 0.05mm layers, would it be able to make an accurate line of 0,05-0.1mm a couple of mm long and maybe 1mm tall? What about raised or sunken "dots"? One of the things that has been vexing me for years has been trying to make scale 1/4" details like the cooling fins on an air cooled motor or small perforated housings.


Those of you making model parts, are you just using the printer to make masters to then resin cast, or do you directly use the parts you make?

For reference, when Prusa says 0.05mm layers, they are talking about the height of the layer, not the width. In practice you will be hard pressed to get a layer width less than the diameter of the nozzle. ie. a 0.25mm nozzle is going to print a line with a minimum width of 0.25mm. Most likely a slight bit wider (.28mm - .3mm) to allow good adhesion to the bed or layer below it. At 0.05mm layer height, it would take 20 passes to get to 1mm tall. (20 x 0.05mm = 1mm)

If your primary purpose is to print parts/details as small as what you've mentioned above, I'd say you might be happier with an SLA printer, however they are limited in size of the object and require different processing and slicing than standard run of the mill FDM printers. In the end though, 0.05mm is far easier to achieve with SLA than FDM. I've thought about grabbing an SLA printer because my kid is always trying to print figurines for various games on my printers with varying levels of success. Generally he gets good results by scaling them up to double their normal size. ie. 1.5" tall rather than 0.75" tall. Part of that is that I like my 0.4mm nozzles and in fact often use 0.6mm nozzles, so they aren't optimized for smaller scale items. But another part of it is that small detailed prints turn out better with SLA and always have. That's not to say you can't achieve good results with a traditional FDM as you've seen by several previous posts here.

 

[acruxksa]

The Prusa MK3s is essentially good to go out of the box (once built.....yes get the kit), but at double the cost of an ender 3 Pro with some simple mods (BL Touch, all metal hot end, polypro build plate, 3d printed upgrades). As I said many posts ago, If you want a printer to just print and don't want to mess with it, get the MK3s, if however you intend to upgrade the printer and tweak it, save some money and get the Ender 3 Pro.

Eventually you will end up in the same place with either................................a second or even third printer that does things the other one can't.

 

[Pierre52]

Regarding the coarse looking finish on those chess pieces, part of the issue is you're seeing places where there's a slope and that always makes the layers more obvious. You really can get some amazingly smooth surfaces with stock equipment Prusa or not. It just takes a little tuning. ABS plastic and some others can be smoothed further using solvent vapor, but I don't bother with that.

3D printing is a lot like machining in that it's easy to spend the money on the equipment, but it takes some time to learn the skills. I totally agree that Prusa is perfect as a turnkey solution. There's little to do in terms of upgrades, and you can focus on learning everything else. OTH, I'm a tinkerer, and I learned so much upgrading my Ender 3 and don't mind that I spent nearly as much in the end. It was worth it for the knowledge and expertise I gained.

Regarding the slicers: Any of the slicers will work for your printer, and there are a lot them! All with strengths and weaknesses, but all the good ones are free, so when one has an advantage for what you're doing, use it, and change to a different one when you need to. No need to be married to one slicer. That said, I tend to stick with Slic3r++ (now renamed to SuperSlicer). It's Prusa slicer on steroids, and features pioneered on Slic3r often end up in Prusa's version later on.

One important PSA: Stay away from Simplify3D. It's out of date, poorly supported, and way too expensive ($150) for the limited abilities it has.

Mike have you actually used Simplify 3D or is that just a hearsay statement?

I started with Cura some years ago and struggled to get good prints. I then switched to Simplify 3 D and started to get some really good results. I have since tried both an up to date version of Cura and Prusa Slicer 2 but ended up reverting back to Simplify 3D. The Simplify 3D website also has a really good troubleshooting guide that is free for anyone to use. Yes there are some issues with the team at S3D but my copy of the slicer still does everything and more that I need from it.

I guess it is like asking the question "Which (insert product type here) is best?" You will always get a range of opinions. IMHO Simplify 3D has been worth every one of the $150 I spent on it. YMMY.

 

[Janderso]

That flyinfool make anything yet with the 3D printer?
It's fun watching you guys get into this

 

[Janderso]

Eventually you will end up in the same place with either................................a second or even third printer that does things the other one can't

Well said, this applies to lots of things.....Might as well step up and save money.