For everyhting 3D printing related.
Please be excellent to each other :)
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I've bought and assembled a few different (3) 3d printers including an Ender 3 Pro. I was never able to get any of them printing well consistently.
My best recommendation is to pick a printer that does auto bed leveling.
If I purchase another 3d printer, it will likely be a Prusa. They're quite expensive, but worth it for the support.
Ugh that's my nightmare, sink all that money and never get the thing leveled well enough to print anything.
The Prusa MK3S+ is $1200 CAD assembled though, almost double my budget.
I definitely understand the fear. Auto bed leveling should make life a million times easier. None of my printers ever had it. If you decide to pull the trigger now, just make sure it has that feature. If not, Prusa is a pretty bulletproof option, even if you opt to assemble it yourself to save some cash.
The nice thing about 3d printing, is that the second-hand market is pretty good. So if you can't get it sorted, you may have some luck selling it locally. I ended up giving mine away lol.
I have Prusa MK3S+ printers in my makerspace. They're great. Very few issues. That said, I'm looking at a Sovol SV06 or maybe the plus for personal use just for the price difference. It was recommended to me by a guy with 15+ machines at a maker fair who prints as a business.
That's a tough endorsement to beat .
The prusa mini also gets a lot of solid recommendations, it does have a smaller print area though. I can't recommend a prusa enough however as a first printer, they have solid support and they're a tried and tested tool, I've got nearly 3k hours on my mk3s+ that I got I February and other than slight tweaks like swapping to abs printed parts, I've not had to do much to it.
With the mk4 being out, you may be able to find people selling their used mk3s+, which I don't know that I'd be concerned about based on my experience with their reliability. Their instructions are super detailed, you could also save a buck going for the kit but I can appreciate wanting something you can just go with, I did that too this year for the same reason, but I'd do a kit now that I have a known good printer.
I wound up going with the Sovol SV06 Plus over the Ender 5 S1. Have you looked into that one yet? Biggest difference is it's not a cube frame (which is one of the reasons I went with the SV06 instead).
I haven't but I'm definately interested in it being half the price. From reviews it looks like I should do some reading on it first, did you have issues with the auto level or anything else getting it going?
No, it printed almost perfectly for me out of the box. The issues I've encountered are just the nature of 3D printing and not specific to the machine itself. Having it auto-level makes me almost cry with joy after 5 years of manually leveling with thumbwheels!
The bambulabs p1p. It just dropped in price to $599 USD. Not sure what that exchange rate is.
It is an absolutely freaking fantastic printer. I have been kicking myself for days now for not buying this thing sooner.
It sucks that it's not open source, but if you want a no fuss printer that just works, the p1p is hands down the best available on the market at that price point.
739$ CAD which I would say is in the price range. I'll look up some reviews and tutorials thanks.
Yea man. You have any questions just hit me up. Like I said I've only had mine a few weeks but holy hell is it night and day between this and my last printer.