looking for a good 3d printer

[Boyan Silyavski]

Boyan,
I know what you mean about cost and was initially a bit miffed about the cost of the Taulman Bridge Nylon but I have to say that it is well worth the price for small fine detail using a 0.2 nozzle, with 0.4 and 0.9 nozzles I'm getting good results with Nylon at the normal price per Kg,
Regards

Great to know. Thanks!
I always have a stock from PETG and ABS, as i buy 5x at least, so am still shy to buy Nylon
Thing is that for functional parts in a car or a sth that will be hit by sunlight here in spain or left in a car or similar, nylon is the way.

[m.marino]

For Sunlight issues Nylon or ASA in a FDM printer will work very well indeed. I have to say for the money a Prusa MK2S or the MK3 is a good kit for the money. I own and run 2 MK2S's and will be upgrading them to the 2.5 model. Don't know IF I will be buying the MK3 as I am working on a design of my own and will see how that goes (larger build volume and using some of the ideas from the Lutzbot/Prusa).

Michael
MM0MSU

[Doddy]

As an observation about - particularly PLA - and "sunlight", albeit here in the UK, I've read about PLA and the low temperature resilience, also its biodegradable nature. Three years ago, I printed in PLA a button stack - a barrel setting for a captive M4 nut to engage with a greenhouse tee-bolt (i.e. hot, humid environment) and an extended lug with a hole to take twine - so that many of these could be set into the framework of a greenhouse to suspend guide wires, etc, to support tomato and other heavy set plants. At the same time, this being an allotment setting, we were required to present plot numbers on gates, etc. Again, PLA plastic, printed numeric plates set onto gate posts. So, despite all the concerns about PLA, these have survived expose direct to the elements and in hot environments (admittedly not Spain) PLA has been surprisingly robust.

[A_Camera]

Doddy, that's good to hear. I think your climate and mine is about the same....

I had plans on modifying my CNC to be able to use it as a 3D printer as well, so I bought all the parts necessary, together with two large rolls of PLA to start with. After some considerations I decided not to continue with the activity, mainly because I don't want to have a "plastic melter" machine in the house just side by side with my sleeping room. Having a CNC in that room is fine, but I am reluctant to have a 3D printer there also, due to the fumes. So I finally decided today, and actually bought a crazy cheap 3D printer.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Duty-free-Ge...72.m2749.l2649

I know it is a toy... ... a plastic fantastic acrylic machine... but it is good enough to test the concept and see if I want to use it more seriously or not. Anyway, if I want to continue using it, which I guess I will, then I know almost certainly how to make it much better, which parts to change and so on. This way I can move the printer out of the house and let it work for hours if needed. Maybe I'll set up a camera so I can watch and supervise it during the printing. Anyway, I'll get it next week and will see if it was worth the money or not.

[A_Camera]

Doddy, that's good to hear. I think your climate and mine is about the same....

I had plans on modifying my CNC to be able to use it as a 3D printer as well, so I bought all the parts necessary, together with two large rolls of PLA to start with. After some considerations I decided not to continue with the activity, mainly because I don't want to have a "plastic melter" machine in the house just side by side with my sleeping room. Having a CNC in that room is fine, but I am reluctant to have a 3D printer there also, due to the fumes. So I finally decided today, and actually bought a crazy cheap 3D printer.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Duty-free-Ge...72.m2749.l2649

I know it is a toy... ... a plastic fantastic acrylic machine... but it is good enough to test the concept and see if I want to use it more seriously or not. Anyway, if I want to continue using it, which I guess I will, then I know almost certainly how to make it much better, which parts to change and so on. This way I can move the printer out of the house and let it work for hours if needed. Maybe I'll set up a camera so I can watch and supervise it during the printing. Anyway, I'll get it next week and will see if it was worth the money or not.

Just an update in case someone is interested...

I bought the above printer, it arrived a few days later, no issues. Installation took a few hours with some help from the Geeetech official installation videos found on Youtube. Of course, based on my CNC-building activities, I knew that spending time on squaring and alignment worth every minute, so I spent about a week (not 24/7) aligning everything possible. Here is a short video of the assembly and some initial printing. It is not an instruction video, just showing some steps of my progress.



Printing was fine but slow, so just a week or two after I assembled the printer I made some quick and simple modifications. Actually, some of the modifications were implemented already during the original assembly, like replacing the PSU and the heat bed, but the major work was done during a weekend. I also made a short video of the modifications after they were done.



The printer is now "as good as it gets". It is fast and prints really nice, so considering the money and the time I spent with it, it was well worth the efforts. However, I would NOT recommend to anyone who expects a perfect machine right out of the box and is not ready to spend time on improving it. But it is a very good starter machine for a person who is handy and can make improvements, or a person who just want to have a 3D printer to play with and to learn some principles of 3D design and printing.

So the next step...

Currently I am in the process of building my own from scratch. It is a 100% aluminium frame, very robust and rigid design. Perhaps overkill for a 3D printer, but there is no harm in building it stronger than absolutely necessary.

[cropwell]

I printed a couple of dozen shaped washers for a customer/friend and the last two I left to print overnight and went to bed. In the morning I found the print had come unstuck and the ABS just kept extruding, but due to the unstuck component hanging round the extruder, a great mass of ABS had accumulated

So I am just preheating the nozzle and will leave it for half an hour to see if it gets liquid enough to come away without damaging the heat blanket.

I made a couple of mods to the printer. The first one was to fit stainless steel extruder gears, but this proved wrong. The stainless does not have the self cleaning property that the original brass has, so any minor filament jam just grinds a notch in the filament and the dross just stays on the gear and requires disassembly to get to it to clean.

I have also replaced the 40mm M3 bolts that hold the extruder motors, extruder, heat sink and fan on to the bar with the nozzles. I used 50mm M3 studs and wing nuts, so that I can remove the heat sink to get to the extruder gear without having to take the extruder motor off the frame (cos it is a bugger to get it back).

The other thing I did was make a jig for setting the height of the nozzles with the nozzle bar out of the printer. It saves a hell of a lot of hassle later on in assembly, when you can't easily get to the nozzle height clamping grub screws.
.

I think I may have gotten away without having to replace the heat blanket


Cheers M'dears !

[Chaz]

So, IVe got one of my original Mendelmax printers still but its a bit tired.

Can anyone suggest what I'd look at today for a 'decent' budget printer? Dont mind a bit of fettling to get it 100% right as long as things like the extruder work reliably (this always seems to be the main issue on most printers).

Thanks

[AlexDoran]

As an observation about - particularly PLA - and "sunlight", albeit here in the UK, I've read about PLA and the low temperature resilience, also its biodegradable nature. Three years ago, I printed in PLA a button stack - a barrel setting for a captive M4 nut to engage with a greenhouse tee-bolt (i.e. hot, humid environment) and an extended lug with a hole to take twine - so that many of these could be set into the framework of a greenhouse to suspend guide wires, etc, to support tomato and other heavy set plants. At the same time, this being an allotment setting, we were required to present plot numbers on gates, etc. Again, PLA plastic, printed numeric plates set onto gate posts. So, despite all the concerns about PLA, these have survived expose direct to the elements and in hot environments (admittedly not Spain) PLA has been surprisingly robust.

I agree, a lot people who report problems with PLA and its thermal performance seem to be over the pond in the states - phone holders printed for their cars melting in the summer heat etc. I use PLA for a lot of stuff, all of the components on my printer are done in PETG simply because i wanted it all the same colour, and parts on the Extruder Carriage needed to be PETG to survive the heat. I also bought a roll of "Reflect-A-Gold" tape from the states, off the top of my head it can reflect 80% of the heat upto ~500c. Good stuff and seems to work well, my old Blower Fan Shroud used to touch against the hotend, and this tape stopped it melting for well over a year.

Alex

[Boyan Silyavski]

PETG works for cars. This summer tested in Spain, i have printed a holder for the mobile.

I have a digital temp controller oven so i have found that yes, 75C is the temp that the PETG starts to lose rigidity and is able to be reshaped. But one very important thing to understand is that in an oven 75C means the whole piece is heated from all sides so there is no way to cool. While in a car it could be only partly heated or one side heated. So its not the same. In reality i expected a fail but that was the only material i had at hand at that moment
PETG will work also for printer parts inside enclosure, as the desired and achieved in reality temperature of the enclosure is around 40-45C, no more.

But PLA is definitely a fail in the car dashboard or directly hit by sunlight here in Spain. neither it works for printer parts in enclosure.

Hi Temp PLA is absolute crap. tried all the famous brands. Heat treated and so on. No, no and no. Very difficult material. Once you try to treat it it warps tremendously >5% so is unusable in real life.I have f%%d at least 50 pieces but to no avail. So i stopped using it.

So heating to certain temperature in an oven is not the same as in normal use. But FYI under the car hood is an oven so there only Nylon and at worse case ABS. maybe PEEk also.

[AlexDoran]

PETG works for cars. This summer tested in Spain, i have printed a holder for the mobile.

I have a digital temp controller oven so i have found that yes, 75C is the temp that the PETG starts to lose rigidity and is able to be reshaped. But one very important thing to understand is that in an oven 75C means the whole piece is heated from all sides so there is no way to cool. While in a car it could be only partly heated or one side heated. So its not the same. In reality i expected a fail but that was the only material i had at hand at that moment
PETG will work also for printer parts inside enclosure, as the desired and achieved in reality temperature of the enclosure is around 40-45C, no more.

But PLA is definitely a fail in the car dashboard or directly hit by sunlight here in Spain. neither it works for printer parts in enclosure.

Hi Temp PLA is absolute crap. tried all the famous brands. Heat treated and so on. No, no and no. Very difficult material. Once you try to treat it it warps tremendously >5% so is unusable in real life.I have f%%d at least 50 pieces but to no avail. So i stopped using it.

So heating to certain temperature in an oven is not the same as in normal use. But FYI under the car hood is an oven so there only Nylon and at worse case ABS. maybe PEEk also.

You could also try the Colorfabb HT, however i have found anything other than PLA from Colorfabb to be a nightmare to stop warping. I think PEEK might need hotend temps of 350+.

Typically i use Carbon Nylon for extreme stuff, its very expensive, but is very easy to print compared to traditional Nylon as the Carbon fibre makes it very stable and not very prone to warping. I was also sent a sample of a Polycarbonate filament, however it was TOXIC - and the print also de-laminated very quickly as it cooled down.

Alex