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Treated as a hobby, for me personally, it's 9/10. I spent a few days this week upgrading my Ender 3 with an extension kit to allow for much bigger prints. Great
by dcminter 4y ago
Treated as a hobby, for me personally, it's 9/10. I spent a few days this week upgrading my Ender 3 with an extension kit to allow for much bigger prints. Great fun. It all reminds me a lot of messing around with PC clone hardware in the early days.
If I were doing it for a living... Well, getting the printer dialed in to reliably produce prints is a bit of a black art - but maybe the higher end ones are better for that?
Come to think of it, a lot of 3D printer owners seem to spend all their time printing new parts for the printer, which is endearingly circular...
- thomaslord 4y agoFrom what I've heard, modification is both the strong point and the weak point of the Ender 3. There are tons of community-designed modifications, many of which you can print yourself without having to but a lot of parts off the shelf, but to actually get consistent prints you need to use some of those upgrades. My girlfriend and I bought a Prusa i3 mk3s+ together, and despite going with the kit version to save money it was really easy to get good quality prints right away. One of the big things that I think helps with this is that Prusa has an auto bed leveling feature, so our printer checks the height of a bunch of points on the bed in a 9x9 grid before each print. It can then build a mesh of the print bed and use that mesh to adjust how it prints to compensate for a bed that's not perfectly level or even not perfectly flat.
- dcminter 4y agoBuying a BLTouch (leveling probe) made a huge difference to the ease of use on the Ender for me, so yeah, a printer with one out of the box sounds like a good choice.
- dcminter 4y agoSome of the gory details of that upgrade here: https://paperstack.com/ender_extended/ https://paperstack.com/ender_extended/