Printable View
Ive been doing tons of research lately and trying to determine what 3d printer to go with. Im looking for a printer that will print at least 10in x 10in x 10in.
It seems that everyone has there opinion and favorites but these are the two ive kind of ended up with.
TAZ 5 and the Printrbot plus
Im not stuck on these by any means just looking for so good advice. Thanks for the help!!
Hi,
I own a Metal Plus, I've posted a bit about my use so far there :
http://3dprintboard.com/forumdisplay...rintrbot-Forum
The company's support is really great. They have published assembly drawings, videos and they have a comprehensive spares catalogue. They will move to all metal hot ends standard on their printers soon, I think early august. Also, upgrade kits are created during the life of their product.
The auto level feature is great.
I would recommend it. For costs reason, it's better if you live in the US but they do have resellers in many places now. I bought S3D to go with it and I'm really happy with the combination. From their twitter they seem to work on an Octo-pi -like integrated solution but I don't know when that's for.
so out of curiosity how out of the box ready is this printer? By the sounds of it none of them are really plug and play.
lots of big printers out there, what's the budget.
Setup was :Quote:
Originally Posted by Skorch
- for international buyers the bed is delivered disassembled. took about 30 minutes because I wanted to be extra careful. printing in advance the exploded view from their site is a plus.
- checking belt tightness : 5 minutes, mainly because I was looking around at how it was made.
- assembling a filament reel support : 2 minutes. (this sounds stupid but it is an important asset).
- powering the device. 10 secs
- installing S3D : I had done it in anticipation.
- having S3D recognize the printer : 10 secs, following the instructions I had downloaded a little doodad in advance.
- performing a rough adjustment of the horizontal beam (checking with a ruler that it was really horizontal and then moving it around on the bed to check) : 5 minutes.
- auto bed levelling (the push of a button) : 10 secs
- setting parameters in S3D : they seemed Ok for a first go, and you can do it before unpacking.
- slicing in S3D : instantaneous and you can do it before.
- spreading some paper glue on the bed : 10 secs
- print of first calibration cube (a printrbot special) : 3 minutes ?
Overall an hour I would say.
- printing a few cubes to set the height offset correctly (no need to get them all 100% done),
- printing a few more to get the speed and cooling OK (same here)
I would say about 1 hour more.
How plug and play that sounds to you ... I don't know. If anyone tells you their printer is more plug and play because you don't need to do any of that : I call BS. The printers that don't have an auto bed level feature will take more time to setup, and you will need to redo it periodically so it does take more time.
About the settings to get good prints : if you have never done it before, you WILL need to iterate a few cubes. The good point is that we're here to help. Having previous experience from hands on lessons in my engineering school, this went overall as expected, and it was fun and quite simple. Don't expect to print and sell iphone cases in the 1st hour : that would be unrealistic, with any printer.
I chose to start with PLA because it seemed simpler than ABS for a start and eliminated all the possible warping issues. You can go back to ABS after a few hours.
Please note : I took my time because since I am far from the US I didn't want to take chances + there was a 2 weeks monster periodically howling in my house.
Please note : preparing does help a lot. If you need me to detail any of the above, fell free to ask.
Thanks for all the info.
Im looking at something under $2400