Our Printerbot Simple Maker Edition Build

We had a "Summer Lull" in activity last week. My son has a couple of weeks before heading out to the third annual MAKE Magazine 3D Printer Shoot Out and our Kossels are done and printing, sooo, I bought a 30 year old Porsche to refurbish and he got a Printerbot Simple Maker's Edition to build.
Here are some pictures of his first evening with the Printerbot. He said it was a very straight forward and simple build. Will post more reports later.

Meanwhile, I am busy with the car project. I hope to be finished before Maker Faire in Sept. (but I will not be driving it to NY!)

Printerbot Build https://www.flickr.com/photos/jabell...7645452382767/

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nice john! since restoring ars is part of what i do for a living...take whatever you had figured it was going to cost to do the car plus the amt of time and at a min double it. haha. car projects always cost way more and take way more time than everyone plans.



haha!!! i love the bag he got with the bomb on it. thats awesome and a great way for the company to get their point across....awesome!

I am restoring the car for my grandson. He is 9 months old! In the meantime, my son will enjoy it. I have restored dozens of cars over the years so I am aware of the spiraling cost and time estimates. :cool:

ahhh well thats good john. atleast you have some experience in the field. at only 9 mos apparently you have plenty of time to complete the project as well lol.

Took about 4 hours to build the Printerbot (including a short dinner break). Last night it was time to calibrate the optical end stops and do a test print. Here is short clip of it's first print, the obligatory 20mm test cube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pdu54pkXdU

Looks like we have 6 printers in our PA print farm and 3 in NJ now? Guess we will have to figure out which ones to bring to Maker Faire in September?

(Jim, I have 41 years experience working on cars, and 35 years as a Auto Shop teacher)

My son stopped by yesterday to check on my progress with the car project and dropped off his Printrbot Simple. I am guessing he wants me to learn how to use it so I can demo it at Maker Faire in a couple of weeks. I must admit, with the auto-bed-leveling, this little printer is really simple! At about the same bed size as our first printers, the MakerBot Cupcakes, it is much quieter and easier to set up. The added bonus it it costs about 25% of what we bought our Cupcakes for!

I am printing a mini-vase for my first print.

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Originally Posted by JohnA136

My son stopped by yesterday to check on my progress with the car project and dropped off his Printrbot Simple. I am guessing he wants me to learn how to use it so I can demo it at Maker Faire in a couple of weeks. I must admit, with the auto-bed-leveling, this little printer is really simple! At about the same bed size as our first printers, the MakerBot Cupcakes, it is much quieter and easier to set up. The added bonus it it costs about 25% of what we bought our Cupcakes for!

I am printing a mini-vase for my first print.

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Out of 10, what would you give it mate?

I saw the metal printrbot in action and I have to say, that is one nice little design - and for the price not worth even ripping it off, you might as well just buy one..

I would be interested in your feedback as someone who is experienced with a few other types of printers (my workshop looks like your sons now lol.. prusa, replicator and kossel all fighting for desk space

The limiting factor is the small build area. Other than that it prints as good or better than my Prusa and a lot better than my Kossel. It is not quite as good as our ultimaker 2 or our Replicator XL.

it has to be the best $300.00 printer around for ease of build, setup and print quality.

Here are a few things I printed with it over the weekend.

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Here is the T Rex printed on the Ultimaker 2

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OK, Last print samples before I change colors. Had to get the brain in while I had pink on the machine.

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I miss my PrintrBot! Well, it wasn't really mine, it was my son's but I had it for a couple of weeks leading up to Maker Faire NY. I was impressed by the ease of operation and the quality of the prints. We showed it off at the Faire and it printed flawlessly for about 30 hours! So many PrintrBot owners stopped by our display and shared their experiences.

Now that I am back home, I tried a couple of the same prints on another (commercial) printer with poor results? Funny how a $300 printer can outperform a $1000.00 unit?

Oh well, I am off to hook up my new full graphics LCD to my Prusa i3, so I can use my XL LCD controller on the Kossel. Then I have to fix our Repicator 1 which blew up again.