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  1. #21
    Engineer ralphzoontjens's Avatar
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    The Pursa i3 seems like a great printer to me, all in all. I'm looking to buy either that one or an Ultimaker Original. Maybe a Solidoodle 3G but I've heard it has a few issues. The noise samples from Mr. Luigi are pretty loud! But I trust this can be reduced a lot. It would be a problem for me since I would want to run the printer overnight and not wake up myself or the neighbors (it seems that they sleep in the room next to my office, and the walls are thin). Could the printer get very silent if you set the speed to very slow, but still fast enough to, say, print 10cm3 an hour?

    Also a requirement for my printer is that I should be able to print ABS, PLA, and Nylon (or another more flexible filament) - and this printer seems to not be able to do this with the available nozzles. Or could the nozzle for 1.75 mm filament handle these 3 materials?

  2. #22
    Super Moderator RobH2's Avatar
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    It does get a little quieter when you slow it down but mine makes a different noise when it's slow. It's not unpleasant but it's just a different frequency noise. But I bet it's only about 25% quieter at the most. I'll try to measure that sometime soon and report back.

    As far as what you can print, that's all in the nozzles as you know. As long as you can hitch the nozzle to the X Axis bed and set it up in RAMPS/Marlin you can use it. I want to print nylon too but from what I've read about it, it's not the physical printers that make it difficult, it's just difficult. Sticking it down is a problem because it's a self lubricating kind of plastic. You don't have to cool it like PLA though, at least from the few articles I've read. There aren't many suppliers for filament yet either they said. However, I'm watching it as I'm sure I'll be retrofitting my i3 to experiment with nylon later this year. I'm too curious. Maybe we can start a "sticky" here that's about Nylon.

    When you are talking about availability of nozzles, if you are referring to Makerfarm not having them then that doesn't mean there aren't other nozzles available. I just think Makerfarm sells what they like and what they know about. There are plenty of other places to get parts and add-ons that will work great with the Prusa i3.
    Bambu P1S/AMS
    NVision4D http://nvision4d.com

  3. #23
    Staff Engineer old man emu's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DrLuigi View Post
    Edit: Heard it has to be 0.39v, With that ive also found how to measure it, If the chip is facing down, the left second last pin and the POT screw.
    DrLuigi,
    Can you explain what you mean by "chip", and where is it?

    Old Man Emu

  4. #24
    Super Moderator DrLuigi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by old man emu View Post
    DrLuigi,
    Can you explain what you mean by "chip", and where is it?

    Old Man Emu
    I mean the chip that has the heatsink on it, The one that processes everything i guess.

  5. #25
    Technologist MeoWorks's Avatar
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    Ah, the stepper driver.

  6. #26
    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. The positive thing is that it seems that once you get the printer assembled it actually does print pretty well. Mine is good enough for my purposes; I don't have a baseline to compare my prints to. I'm printing PLA on bare glass with excellent adhesion (in fact, I'm now trying to tweak it to make adhesion to be just a tad -lower- since it's pretty hard to detach the prints after printing). Also, I've done relatively little calibration so there may be still be ways to improve my prints, even though I probably won't bother to. Now for the negatives. The kit was hell to put together, and it took me 3 long -days-, not 3 hours. This hell was caused by a number of factors that buyers should be aware of. Firstly, the laser cut wood parts were cut to poor tolerances making the pieces hard to fit together, certainly much harder than as shown in the videos. In -most- cases it was impossible to exert enough pressure by hand, I had to resort to using sandpaper (to shrink the parts) and clamps (to "up" the force level). A few times I had to resort to using a Dremel with a sanding disk attached (or whatever it's called I'm not a tool person). Most of the time the friction was so high in the assembled part that it seemed like a waste of time to add the supplied nuts and bolts that are -supposed- to hold it together. While this may sound good for rigidity, I think it has a higher chance of fracturing the wood under unavoidable temperature/humidity variations. This would negate the cost advantages; i.e., the only reason we would consider buying such cheap kits in the first place ;-). Secondly, it's rarely clear from the build instructions exactly what type of bolts are being used at each step. Sometimes after trying very very hard to figure it out and being sure that I must have bolt they mean, I would find that it's too long or too short for the construction step in question. Eventually I just used whatever looked right and then eventually I ran out of appropriate bolts so I had to buy extra nuts and bolts from my local hardware store to supplement the kit. Thirdly, the clearance between the bed and the lower part of the front frame is, like, theoretically zero in the design once you take the bolt head into account. Significant sanding of this zone was required to ensure that there would be no friction. If you don't notice this and take steps to correct it, I can imagine that this could lead to occasional missed motor steps, especially during "rapid" moves where the steppers have less torque. I was forced to notice it because the bolts I bought to supplement the kit had larger heads and didn't clear the frame without a substantial "push", but in a few places I had the supplied bolts in and they were making light contact with the frame also. Fourth, the printed parts (extruder) seemed to have poor print quality (you'd expect a shop that sells 3d printers to be able to make quality prints, no?) and I had to Dremel a lot of the gears to fix extrusion stalls. It's pretty hard to Dremel the herringbone gears; in fact, I gouged into the "other" side of the tooth a number of times (oops, but then I'm not a dentist ;-). Fortunately, I got it running stable in the end. So, the bottom line is, from my perspective, if I had to do it all over again, I would seriously consider self-sourcing a classic reprap instead (i.e., printed plastic with rods as structural elements). It should -in theory- save time to buy a kit and not worry about sourcing, and this is why I considered kits only, not self-sourcing. But, in my case, it turned out that the kit took so long to put together that I could've self-sourced parts for five different printer designs in the same timeframe. Of course, it's probably a toss-up in terms of choosing a printed parts supplier as well, but if you don't like one guy's printed parts you can buy another set elsewhere. The philosophy of the classic reprap is that it should be modular and I now see the reason for it. I will probably buy a back-up extruder from somewhere if I'm not able to print one myself (I haven't got ooze under control yet). In any case, -my- next build will be a classic reprap if this thing breaks down or if I need more 3d printing capacity. Also, why the heck doesn't anyone sell a "plain old reprap" kit, why do all the kits have to have fancy acrylic/aluminum/wood frames? It is a mystery ...

  7. #27
    Super Moderator JohnA136's Avatar
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    While we love the Prusa Reprap i3 design, we only build them with the aluminum frames from Joe Prusa. The rigidity, fine tolerances and portability this affords makes the few extra bucks well worth it! My machines are so quiet I have to mute the TV to hear them running in the next room. Adjusting the voltage on the stepper drivers makes all the difference in sound control.

    Here are a couple of pictures of our next twelve kits being staged.

    photo (45).jpg photo (44).jpg photo (46).jpg
    Last edited by JohnA136; 03-16-2014 at 09:15 AM.

  8. #28
    Super Moderator RobH2's Avatar
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    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.

    PrintedParts_01.jpg
    Bambu P1S/AMS
    NVision4D http://nvision4d.com

  9. #29
    Engineer-in-Training beerdart's Avatar
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    I agree with Rob. Our Makefarm is fantastic once you get the it dialed in. As the old saying goes garbage in garbage out.

  10. #30
    Super Moderator RobH2's Avatar
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    beerdart, what is that thing? The text printed very cleanly. I'm getting clean prints too but the best I get are using Kisslicer. What are you slicing with?
    Bambu P1S/AMS
    NVision4D http://nvision4d.com

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