Well I have bought and assembled a makerfarm kit, and I have one positive thing to say about it and a few negative things to say about it.
Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with building the Makerfarm printer. I'll first say that I do not know anyone at Makerfarm or have any connection to them.

Colin at Makerfarm has probably the best customer support that I've ever seen, anywhere, for any product. I'll frequently send an email at 1AM because I'm catching up from the day, and I'll get a response. I think that if he'd know you were having some issues, he'd have done something about it. My Makerfarm was easy to assemble, needed no force, sandpaper or workarounds. I did use a couple of bolts in the wrong place and had to make do with some bolts I had on my workbench but it assembled very nicely in about 4 hours. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you were the unfortunate recipient of a bad cut job. With any manufacturing process there is a quality range. Most parts come out identical, some come out perfect and there are always a few that for some odd reason, come out poorly. Maybe the sheet of wood got shifted a millimeter in the middle of the laser cut making all the tolerances tight. Who knows. But I think your case is atypical from what I've read from other users. I know that doesn't make you feel any better.

But, now that the pain of assembly is over, you can expect really good prints from the machine. It all comes down to calibration and learning to use the slicers properly. There is a huge learning curve to get from passable prints to great prints. It will take some time and you'll waste a lot of plastic. But at $37 for 2lbs of filament, you'll waste less filament than what you would have paid to buy a $1500 prebuilt printer. Just like any printer a level bed is critical. I don't have any noise issues and it makes little more noise than my Epson printer. I assembled by giving a good amount of torque to all the parts and I've had nothing come loose in 6-months. Again, I'm not a salesman for Makerfarm but I do think that it's a fantastic bargain for the price. The old adage is "you get what you pay for" and we should probably never expect that if we buy the cheapest product our there, that's it's going to be the best. That does not apply to my printer though. I bought it to save money as I didn't want to get into the 3d printer world, spend $2000 and then realize it wasn't for me. I figured I'd start out with the Makerfarm, get my feet wet, and then go buy another printer. The opposite happened. I'm so happy with my printer that I'm not planning to buy another printer any time soon.

I'm posting a few prints here to show you what I get from it. I hope it will ease your mind because I think in the end you'll like the printer. It's a shame that the build was so frustrating for you but someone in the world has to be the least happy customer in the batch and I think you got the bad apple kit this month.

In this "technological world" product pride has always been pervasive. The PC VS Mac arguments still rage and shockingly, still get more heated than a rousing discussion of politics or religion. We have to be careful when someone is bragging about their new toy and tearing down the one we have because it's not always comparing apples to apples. There is no doubt that a $2500 printer is going to outshine an $800 one many levels. But the one thing about 3d printers is, once the bed is level, the parts are tight and the tolerances are calibrated, we are all extruding with similar parts. Basically we are squeezing the same filament, through the same hot ends, driven by the same motherboard, onto glass. Forget about all the superstructure that gets that hot plastic onto the glass. It all comes down to that singular task; squeeze melted plastic onto glass and stack it up. The slicers that we ALL use don't care (in practical terms) what machine they are driving, it works the same way for all of us.

So I think, no, I hope that you soon find you made a good purchase. I really like mine. I have printed some great stuff. I bought mine to create a specific product so I don't have toys, legos, critters or vases to show you but below are a few of the items I've printed plus a few microscope (I use a microscope frequently and use it to inspect my plastic extrusion) shots. I think I'm getting really clean prints down to a layer height of 0.16mm.

If you still run into problems, come back here or any of the online forums and someone will help you. I've found the online participation and assistance in 3d printing to be phenomenal. There are a lot of very talent people here that love to show their knowledge by helping out. Keep at it, be meticulous and don't give up. It took me about 3 weeks to get to a sweet spot and fully understand calibration and slicing. But from then on I've had great results and little stress.

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