I've been wanting a 3D printer for years but the price point (around 500-1000$ for a half decent printer) always put me off and I heard it was a lot of tweaking and screwing around to get decent prints. When Aldi had a Cocoon printer on sale a year or two ago, I was tempted at €500 but helf off.
Then last weekend, I stumbled upon a Youtube video about the Ender 3 printer. I've only kept half an eye on the 3D printing world, having watched vids on resin printers that were pretty expensive and annoying to use (needing UV curing after print and then needing painting) so I wasn't really aware of where the "normal" filament printers were heading and wow, China really picked up the slack during the past year. On top of that, the development of good PLA has really made it a lot easier to get quality prints as well.
The Ender 3 is really cheap for its quality at €200 or less. I watched about 10 hours of video on it and ordered it on Wednesday off Aliexpress only for it to arrive on Friday. I'm quite blown away with it. It prints extremely accurately, prints beautifully clean and required minimal adjustment. I'm surprised so few people are aware of how fast 3D printing has gone up in quality while dropping in price so I thought I'd drop this topic, see who else is printing and who may be interested in starting.
Does it? Because so far I have never seen anything but grainy mess that others get wild about and I'm thinking: cool, it has an application... but its butt ugly for anything creative.
Post some of your creations once you're comfortable with it. I'd love to see something better than what is usually shown.
Last edited by Morphineus on Sun, 14th Apr 2019 02:15; edited 1 time in total
Does it? Because so far I have never seen anything but grainy mess that others get wild about and I'm thinking: cool, it has an application... but its butt ugly for anything creative.
Post some of your creations once you're comfortable with it. I'd love to see something better than what is usually shown.
Now, doesn't that look beautifully clean? It's two parts and it snapped together perfectly as you can see.
And I had the same impression you had which is why I was so surprised to see how things have progressed so quickly. A lot if not most older printers used ABS which is a bitch to print with so you get ugly prints but PLA is way more forgiving.
Interesting. I can't find many reviews for it so it must be very new. The V3 is several years old now so wouldn't be fair to compare.
It has some nice features the Ender 3 doesn't have by default like auto bed levelling, higher temperature for certain filament types (although the lack of an enclosure makes for a weird combo - you need that for high temperature filaments since even a slight draft can ruin prints). The 5x speed is very nice too (and probably why it costs 5x as much) - I wonder what effect that has on the prints.
Does it? Because so far I have never seen anything but grainy mess that others get wild about and I'm thinking: cool, it has an application... but its butt ugly for anything creative.
Post some of your creations once you're comfortable with it. I'd love to see something better than what is usually shown.
Now, doesn't that look beautifully clean? It's two parts and it snapped together perfectly as you can see.
And I had the same impression you had which is why I was so surprised to see how things have progressed so quickly. A lot if not most older printers used ABS which is a bitch to print with so you get ugly prints but PLA is way more forgiving.
Not beautifully clean, but quite a lot better than what I've seen so far. Pretty great for that price point if you ask me.
I got myself a Ender 3 last summer. Cost me $150 from gearbest with 3 day dhl shipping.
Pretty much prints like red_avatars print out of the box.
But since im a fucktard, i can't keep my fingers away from it, so im doing some rebuilds of it with e3dv6 hotend and shit like that. Also got a e3d aero laying on my desk, but unsure if i should use it or not..
I got myself a Ender 3 last summer. Cost me $150 from gearbest with 3 day dhl shipping.
Pretty much prints like red_avatars print out of the box.
But since im a fucktard, i can't keep my fingers away from it, so im doing some rebuilds of it with e3dv6 hotend and shit like that. Also got a e3d aero laying on my desk, but unsure if i should use it or not..
I should add I got the Pro version - slightly more expensive but it has a few improvements like a more reliable PSU, silicon cap on nozzle, better Z axis stability, a magnetic bed with excellent adhesion (no hairspray needed) ... . Nothing earth shattering but for $20 extra ... .
And yeah, I'm replacing some parts myself - especially the extruder because everyone and his cat says the plastic one is too flimsy and there's too much play on the tube because of cheap couplings. I just hope I don't make things worse by "improving" it. I guess I can always go back if the replacement parts cause more trouble.
I'm now going through the process of learning all the tricks of Cura - I used a basic profile for the Ender 3 with standard settings but some models need specific options turned on or off and these can make a huge difference for the end result.
Bought a cheap Anet A6 last christmas, took a while to assemble and understand (had it standing for around 1 month because i thought its kaputt but was only bad settings in CURA, resulted in fucked up GCODE).
Print quality was so-so, the acrylic-frame was kinda wobbly so after printing some upgrades, i decided to buy alu frames and make it basically wobble-free. Ordered a cheap RAMPS 1.4 board from china aswell to get better stepper driver with it and have more room for Marlin features
(Anet A6 v1.5 Board is filled 89% with any newer skeleton install of marlin)
All in all, its great to have one but you gotta spend lots of time and money on aftermarket parts to compete with 3k$ out-of-the-box printers
paxsali wrote:
Now, I don't know what hardware costs in Poland, I guess it's cheaper because everything is stolen from Germany and resold...
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It's two parts and it snapped together perfectly as you can see.
