3 ms·

I just bought one because they are cheap, I dunno what to do with it. Its not like star trek you can't just ask for a toy car and you get it. There is a lot of

I just bought one because they are cheap, I dunno what to do with it. Its not like star trek you can't just ask for a toy car and you get it. There is a lot of setup leveling and tweaking of supports and the first layer of print to get the print looking clean or even printing at all. Printing takes hours like 6+ for anything remotely complicated. It will probably take you two or three goes printing a thing until you get results you are happy with. Once its printed you then need to clean up the print removing support etc. What material you print in will also massively change your results / chances of success. You may need to encase the printer to control the environment temperature, wind and toxic fumes depending on the material need to be accounted for. The stuff on thingyverse all looks cool but it's all cool gimmicks if you want to do something useful you need to know how to 3d model. TLDR: It's all a bit of a faff but if you are the type of person that likes to build their own computer its a lot of fun, being able to download a car felt awesome. The toy car has surprising detail and despite being made in PLA the easiest plastic to use its again surprisingly strong. Ease of use 4/10. If you can't 3d model its fairly useless 1/10. If you can 3d model its so much faster and easier to get complicated parts 8/10.

muttled 4y ago
I'd echo a lot of these. You have to basically learn the skills of a modern machinist, including learning the quirks of the materials/machinery/environmental conditions. You can easily have something complex print for 20 hours, just to have it go off-the-rails at hour 21 and wreck the entire piece. It sounds like a dot-matrix printer running constantly for hours, the smell can be overpowering without some sort of air filtration, and the amount of finishing work that has to be done if you want something professional-looking cannot be overstated. At the end of my ownership, I realized that I simply did not need that many little plastic things that take hours to print and potentially hours to design if nobody else has created the exact same thing and shared it.

muttled 4y ago

I'd echo a lot of these. You have to basically learn the skills of a modern machinist, including learning the quirks of the materials/machinery/environmental conditions. You can easily have something complex print for 20 hours, just to have it go off-the-rails at hour 21 and wreck the entire piece. It sounds like a dot-matrix printer running constantly for hours, the smell can be overpowering without some sort of air filtration, and the amount of finishing work that has to be done if you want something professional-looking cannot be overstated. At the end of my ownership, I realized that I simply did not need that many little plastic things that take hours to print and potentially hours to design if nobody else has created the exact same thing and shared it.