Stratasys Mojo alternatives

[93EXCivic]

The company were I am working is looking at buying a 3D printer in the $10000 range. It seems it is pretty much Mojo or nothing but the material is pretty expensive and the sales guy was not the best. I have seen the Leapfrog Xeed but I don't know much about it.

The only machine I personally have experience with is one of the Stratasys Fortis series and i have been studying hobby style ones for personal use.

Can someone help a brother out?

[Mjolinor]

Why not go with a second hand Stratasys? With the eprom having been hacked material is really cheap now. Mine runs fine on the cheapest ebay stuff I can get.

[Roxy]

Why not go with a second hand Stratasys? With the eprom having been hacked material is really cheap now. Mine runs fine on the cheapest ebay stuff I can get.

Can you provide some links for the updated EEPROM image? Which Stratasys printer can use non-Stratasys plastic?

[Mjolinor]

You do not want to talk about this in here. Stratasys forced the best stratasys forum on the net to close because it was talked about. As companies go they are a shower of sh1t with an attitude similar to Sony.

https://github.com/bvanheu/stratasys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP6uVo5R7Vg

Mine is a 768. I am not sure which ones it can be done on but certainly the 768 and the Elite, I think some others but not sure which. If your eprom is like the one in my video then it can be reprogrammed.

[Roxy]

So this kind of sounds like what the big printer companies did with ink. They put electronics in the module so that it would be difficult for Walgreen's to refill the cartridge. And anti-trust issues came into play. They can have the electronics to provide 'value' but they can't deliberately design the cartridges so they can be a single source supplier.

But all that aside, if the Stratasys printers are real good, I'm going to start learning about them.

[Mjolinor]

I can't really say if they are good. Certainly the stuff that comes out of mine is way better than this Duplicator 3 but I gave £100 for the Duplicator 3, the Stratasys cost $25,000 when it was new. You can pick them up cheap, Stratasys had a scheme whereby if you bought a new printer and traded the old one in then all they did was take the print head out and leave you with the rest, that is why you see them for sale with no heads and to buy a head is just mind bogglingly expensive.

Without a head you would probably have to replace all the electronics as the heads are controlled with active feedback so the electronics know how hard the filament is being pushed, not an easy thing to duplicate. Having said that it will still make an excellent printer with RAMPS and Arduino control because of the heated cabinet and the solid construction. Nothing in there that is out of the ordinary but extremely good engineering, standard X Y movement and vertical Z table.

In it's standard state I find it infuriating, very little control over how it prints things, no messing allowed. If it decides it needs support there then it will put it there and you have no choice about it. You can hack then to print finer, mine is supposed to do 0.254 layer height but it makes extremely good prints at 0.1 even though Stratasys will not let it do that without some hacking.

I have sort of decided that I am going to sell mine and put my efforts into modding the Duplicator or making another printer that I can mess with.