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> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even smal

> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. I've seen what people go through when they operate 3D printers. The impression I have is that they still make 2D inkjet printers look like paragons of reliability.

Ccecil 6d ago
I wouldn't trade that time spent on my printers for anything. I wrote a post about this recently [1] There was way more valuable things learned in the process than just making Benchy. For years I have been trying to tell people this. The value of Reprap was not just "to have a printer". [1] https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/ https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/
- JoshTriplett 6d ago
  Some people want to have an experience with their printer. Some people want it to be an appliance. If you wanted an appliance, and got an experience, you're going to be disappointed. For people who genuinely wanted the experience of exploring 3D printers, like yourself, I'm very happy that those people got that experience. For myself, just as I want to print documents and not have adventures with inkjet printers, I want to make things and not have adventures with 3D printers. Which is why I have no plans to own a 3D printer.
  - WillAdams 6d ago
    My Elegoo Centauri Carbon and Flashforge AD5X have been pretty much plug in, load filament, calibrate/configure for that filament, print. It or a similar printer (CoreXY, enclosed if you're going to print filaments which warrant that) from a brand w/ a good reputation should work as well.
  - lirolero 5d ago
    [dead]
alecst 6d ago
Crazy as it sounds, that’s the opposite of my personal experience.
- nearlyepic 6d ago
  Yeah in the four years I’ve had my Prusa it’s had basically no problems. They’re a pain in the ass if you buy bottom of the barrel crap with sloppy tolerances for $100 I guess, but the same is true of regular printers.
  - giantg2 6d ago
    I had a cheap Ender 3 Pro for years. It had occasional issues, but they were fairly easy to solve due to the large user base. It was great to learn on since you had to learn the concepts and do some stuff like leveling manually. So even the cheap stuff can work fine.
fourside 6d ago
I recently bought a Bambu Lab A1 printer. I went specifically with Bambu Lab because everything I read said that was the better choice if you want something low maintenance and easy to set up even if it’s not as open as some of the alternatives. It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine. I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since. Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
- RobGR 6d ago
  Your experience is unusual for a Bambu. I know of numerous people who have purchased one and you are the only one who didn't have it "just work".
  - mhb 5d ago
    Mine just worked. Couldn't be happier with it.
- krisoft 5d ago
  > It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it. If they are not responsive enough just send back the whole thing. What would you do if you buy a laptop and it never passes the Power-On Self-Test? I would just return it to whoever i bought it from. > I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience. I mean it is. For everyone who i know who owns one. Every company will sell an occasional dud. Either it got damaged in transit, or the fault somehow escaped their QA, or you managed to screw up the assembly by not plugging in something, or leaving a transit fixture in somehow. Either way contacting support is the correct way to get to the bottom of it. Come to think of it when i bought my Sherline lathe initially the motor didn’t turn on when i plugged it in. I wrote an email to the distributor who got me in contact with someone from Sherline. They asked me to check a thing which fixed the issue.
Aurornis 6d ago
I’ve had several printers over more than a decade. Even the most reliable new units can still be difficult to debug little things. My cousin’s family got a Bambu printer with no technical or mechanical experience and gets it working well most of the time, but there are still things that can bite you like prints not sticking to the bed because it has oils on it or filament breaking in the feed path because PLA absorbs moisture from the air and becomes brittle. A modicum of attention can keep these problems in check but the operator has to do some reading and learning. There is another set of people who are in 3D printing because they like the experience of debugging and improving the printer as much or more than the final prints they get from it. The most hardcore 3D printing people I know don’t actually print much other than 3D benchies and test towers because their fun comes from playing with the machine and trying new parts. Those people build a different set of printer types than the plug and play units used by most casual makers.
kakwa_ 5d ago
It heavily depends on which printer you are talking about. There is a world of difference between a 2019 Creality Ender 3 and a 2023 Bambulab A1 for not that much more money. Auto-leveling, input shapping, PEI plates, high flow hotends, better build quality... all that have improved reliability significantly while increasing speed by a lot. It even kind of killed the whole "tips and tricks to have good 3D prints" Youtube niche. The Ender 3 had a huge role in democratizing 3D printing, but a 20% failure rate was kind of expected. With modern printers, the expectation is bellow 5% failure rate, plus the failures are much less painful since they are ~4 times faster. It's not quite "press print and it works" but it's pretty damn close.
mlyle 5d ago
I operate a small fleet at my school: * 1x Prusa XL Gen 1 with 5 toolheads * 1x Prusa Mk4IS * 1x Bambu Labs X1C with multi-material * 2x Voron 0.2 * 1x Sovol Zero My experience: the typical higher-end printer runs out of the box and runs hundreds of hours (or more) between maintenance beyond wiping the plate down, occasionally greasing the rails, and blowing little plastic bits out of the enclosure. Every year I end up doing a few hour significant maintenance job on about one of the six printers. But then there's lemons. That Sovol Zero is terrible and has been down more than it's been up, because of something in the extruder assembly. It also came with a defective camera and needed it replaced. I need to decide whether to rebuild all that with many hours of labor or just get rid of it.

Ccecil 6d ago

I wouldn't trade that time spent on my printers for anything. I wrote a post about this recently [1] There was way more valuable things learned in the process than just making Benchy. For years I have been trying to tell people this. The value of Reprap was not just "to have a printer". [1] https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/ https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/

JoshTriplett 6d ago
Some people want to have an experience with their printer. Some people want it to be an appliance. If you wanted an appliance, and got an experience, you're going to be disappointed. For people who genuinely wanted the experience of exploring 3D printers, like yourself, I'm very happy that those people got that experience. For myself, just as I want to print documents and not have adventures with inkjet printers, I want to make things and not have adventures with 3D printers. Which is why I have no plans to own a 3D printer.
- WillAdams 6d ago
  My Elegoo Centauri Carbon and Flashforge AD5X have been pretty much plug in, load filament, calibrate/configure for that filament, print. It or a similar printer (CoreXY, enclosed if you're going to print filaments which warrant that) from a brand w/ a good reputation should work as well.
- lirolero 5d ago
  [dead]

alecst 6d ago

Crazy as it sounds, that’s the opposite of my personal experience.

nearlyepic 6d ago
Yeah in the four years I’ve had my Prusa it’s had basically no problems. They’re a pain in the ass if you buy bottom of the barrel crap with sloppy tolerances for $100 I guess, but the same is true of regular printers.
- giantg2 6d ago
  I had a cheap Ender 3 Pro for years. It had occasional issues, but they were fairly easy to solve due to the large user base. It was great to learn on since you had to learn the concepts and do some stuff like leveling manually. So even the cheap stuff can work fine.

fourside 6d ago

I recently bought a Bambu Lab A1 printer. I went specifically with Bambu Lab because everything I read said that was the better choice if you want something low maintenance and easy to set up even if it’s not as open as some of the alternatives. It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine. I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since. Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.

RobGR 6d ago
Your experience is unusual for a Bambu. I know of numerous people who have purchased one and you are the only one who didn't have it "just work".
- mhb 5d ago
  Mine just worked. Couldn't be happier with it.
krisoft 5d ago
> It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it. If they are not responsive enough just send back the whole thing. What would you do if you buy a laptop and it never passes the Power-On Self-Test? I would just return it to whoever i bought it from. > I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience. I mean it is. For everyone who i know who owns one. Every company will sell an occasional dud. Either it got damaged in transit, or the fault somehow escaped their QA, or you managed to screw up the assembly by not plugging in something, or leaving a transit fixture in somehow. Either way contacting support is the correct way to get to the bottom of it. Come to think of it when i bought my Sherline lathe initially the motor didn’t turn on when i plugged it in. I wrote an email to the distributor who got me in contact with someone from Sherline. They asked me to check a thing which fixed the issue.

Aurornis 6d ago

I’ve had several printers over more than a decade. Even the most reliable new units can still be difficult to debug little things. My cousin’s family got a Bambu printer with no technical or mechanical experience and gets it working well most of the time, but there are still things that can bite you like prints not sticking to the bed because it has oils on it or filament breaking in the feed path because PLA absorbs moisture from the air and becomes brittle. A modicum of attention can keep these problems in check but the operator has to do some reading and learning. There is another set of people who are in 3D printing because they like the experience of debugging and improving the printer as much or more than the final prints they get from it. The most hardcore 3D printing people I know don’t actually print much other than 3D benchies and test towers because their fun comes from playing with the machine and trying new parts. Those people build a different set of printer types than the plug and play units used by most casual makers.

kakwa_ 5d ago

It heavily depends on which printer you are talking about. There is a world of difference between a 2019 Creality Ender 3 and a 2023 Bambulab A1 for not that much more money. Auto-leveling, input shapping, PEI plates, high flow hotends, better build quality... all that have improved reliability significantly while increasing speed by a lot. It even kind of killed the whole "tips and tricks to have good 3D prints" Youtube niche. The Ender 3 had a huge role in democratizing 3D printing, but a 20% failure rate was kind of expected. With modern printers, the expectation is bellow 5% failure rate, plus the failures are much less painful since they are ~4 times faster. It's not quite "press print and it works" but it's pretty damn close.

mlyle 5d ago

I operate a small fleet at my school: * 1x Prusa XL Gen 1 with 5 toolheads * 1x Prusa Mk4IS * 1x Bambu Labs X1C with multi-material * 2x Voron 0.2 * 1x Sovol Zero My experience: the typical higher-end printer runs out of the box and runs hundreds of hours (or more) between maintenance beyond wiping the plate down, occasionally greasing the rails, and blowing little plastic bits out of the enclosure. Every year I end up doing a few hour significant maintenance job on about one of the six printers. But then there's lemons. That Sovol Zero is terrible and has been down more than it's been up, because of something in the extruder assembly. It also came with a defective camera and needed it replaced. I need to decide whether to rebuild all that with many hours of labor or just get rid of it.