Those Ender printers "just work". My Anet A6 has been turning out parts for a year now and runs 12hours a day.
All the posts about how much fiddling the printer take are posted by beginners who are still learning. After a few Kg of plastic parts are made the fiddling time goes way down after you develop a process and workflow. Every printer, no mater how nice it is has ths learning process. I would not recommend an expensive printer until you find that you cheap printer can't do something you need to do. If you are new to this the printer is not the weak lnk in the process. you need to gain experiance. DO that on a sun $200 machine and then after runing 10Kg of materials through it you will be able to make an educated and informed decision. For example in my case. I think my next printer will be a smaller, "delta" style that is best used for higher precision and smaller parts. I'll build this myself from CNC's metal. want to make small precision parts that might be used on a mechanical hand. I am currently making one of these: https://openbionicslabs.com/shop/brunel-hand and can already think of a dozen improvements. Fo this work a full-size Ender printer works OK but a smaller, slower, and more precision printer would be better. You don't know this until after a year or so. Who would have thought "smaller and slower" would be better? One reason to buy a more expensive printer is if you need a resin printer. These use UV light to polymerize a resin into the shape of the part. They can be VERY accurate and the resin is very strong. Formlabs makes some really nice resin printers that work well and offers a yearly service contract and warranty. cost is $3K for a very small desktop system. But the parts it makes are just like injection moldings and can be rigid of even soft plastic. Utilmaker has some good options too if you have the cash. But the starter printer is a"Prussia" clone, like My Anet A6 or now the Ender. On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 11:21 AM Bari <bari00...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 6/3/20 1:00 PM, Chris Albertson wrote: > > > Printer controllers cost about $40 complete, > > stepper drivers and all and fit in your hand. The entre printer, > > extruder, controller and all is under $200. (they have a sale going > now.) > > Seems a waste to spend weeks modifying a mill and milling software t > > make a machine that is not nearly as god as one you can buy for $189 > > > What is the cost down to in mow order to build one of average size that > actually works reliably? What if you don't want to be constantly be > readjusting, tuning or replacing parts for it to keep working with some > accuracy and repeatability? Any idea of cost or if anyone makes this? > > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
