I am looking to buy a 3D printer for my son (and for myself too). We want to print, not tinker, so it should be something that gives great results right from the start.
Can you guide me to a sensible choice?
My first choice would have to be the Prusa MK3S Plus but it is outside the price range I am shopping for, except if I buy used – would that be bad to do?
Realistic choices:
- €380 used Prusa MK3S+, with 10 days printing time
- €400 new Prusa Mini+
- €250 new Ender 3 V2 Neo
Criteria:
- High quality, no hassle. I want to print, not tinker.
- Preferably (semi)assembled.
- Auto bed leveling.
- Auto error detection (filament, power, etc.?).
- Budget up to 600 EUR/USD including extras, excluding filament.
- Speed is not important.
- Size is not important.
- Must not be cloud-based.
Questions:
- Surface?! Smooth, os satin, or textured? (Why) Should I have more than one kind?
- (Why) Do I need an enclosure?
Yeah, these are sure nice quality of life things, but also not super high priority for a beginner.
Regarding the active bed levelling, there are a few other options to get the same effect. First, if you have any of the TMC drivers with stall guard (and it setup correctly), random missteps just don’t happen. That’s maybe the best way to go since it fixes the issue at the source and prevents it from happening during the print.
A second option is to tie your Z axies together with a belt. That way they all do the same, and you can just replace all these motors with a single big one.
Or you go the creality route and just use a single Z axis, but that requires a really stable gantry/bed, depending on what hangs off your z axis.
Also, skipped steps (especially on Z) aren’t really a normal thing and point either to a mechanical issue (check bearings, belts, pully screws and obstacles), too weak motors (rare if you are using stock motors) or too little stepper motor current. Especially the last point. Turn the current up a little and see if that resolves skipped steps.
I haven’t had a single skipped step on my current printer, which I have had since 1.5 years. Did a motor current tuning when I got it (necessary because I swapped the mainboard) and that’s it.
The problem with dual Z is when you turn off the printer, motors lose power and can missalign. You can connect motors with belts or just print some brake-like part that makes enough friction to stop motors from moving under weight of printer itself. Idealy you will have 1 motor per axis
I had a dual Z printer before (Tronxy X8), so I know the issue.
I already mentioned tying the motors together with belts.
But if you want to not do any modifications, you can also move the print head off the bed, disable software endstops and move the Z axis down until both motors start to skip. That sounds bad but doesn’t hurt the mechanics or engines at all, they are built with skips in mind.
That also aligns both Z axies.
I disagree on the “beginner” part. Yes, I am a beginner, but that does not mean I want an entry level device, nor that I want to replace this device soon.
I want one solid machine that I will be content with for years. So any QoL details would definitely be useful, even or especially to a beginner.
More systems means more that can go wrong and more difficult trouble shooting. No matter what printer you get, stuff needs to be tuned, stuff needs to be maintained and stuff breaks.
Getting the biggest best do-it-all device with all the bells and whistles (like a fully speced Voron) means not only that you spend a massive amount of money for a machine that does the same thing just a bit faster, but also that you have tons of things you need to watch out for.
Auto bedlevel, for example, is by far not a fire-and-forget solution.
Upgrades are also a thing. Once you get into printing and understand what it’s all about you will learn what you want and need. This allows you to upgrade the machine and make it better. Especially the Ender 3 series is built with upgradability in mind. They have a lot of drop-in upgrades that are as simple to integrate as the (very simple) initial setup of the machine was.
If you buy your first car you also don’t start out with an 800 PS super car or a semitrailer.
Sure it’s fun to upgrade but there are things you should just want to have on your 2023 machine from the start. It’s more like you’re suggesting a starting driver that they don’t need electric windows, cruise control or whatever because they have to learn why they’d want it first…
That’s why I got the v2 Neo and am very happy with it, as it’s got the stuff you’ll want after one week anyway but pre-installed and very cheap as a bonus: ABL, all metal extruder, improved hotend, better springs. There’s no reason to pain yourself and your wallet by waiting with these ‘until you get more experienced’ IMO
Better mechanics are never bad. But the points we where talking about weren’t that at all. We were talking about automatic alignment of multiple Z motors. That doesn’t apply to any stock Ender 3, because they all only have a single Z motor. No alignment needed, and actually no alignment possible.
Regarding the other points:
But of course the recommendation would be for the newest version of Ender 3, because there’s no point in starting off with an outdated machine.
Again, the upgrades the other guy mentioned where not that.
As someone who’s started printing a few weeks ago (E3v2 Neo) i’m very happy with the QoL upgrades on it. Regarding auto bed levelling: I think you misunderstand what it does, as it’s not about maintaining Z stability/accuracy at all. It corrects slight bed level problems from the springs but also imperfections in the bed material itself.
Believe me, I know what it does. At this point I would respectfully point to the fact that I’ve been printing for 6 years, have been running self-compiled Marlin for over 5 of that and have been fixing up the printers of 6 people in my friend group.
If your printer runs Marlin, your printer contains code I wrote.
I’ve been doing this for more than a few weeeks.
Also, you misunderstood what that guy before meant. He wasn’t talking about simple Autobedleveling, but rather about auto-aligning multiple Z axies. See, if you have multiple powered Z-axies (e.g. if you have a bedslinger with two Z axies or a Cube-style printer that moves the bed along multiple Z axies), these Z-axies can become misaligned if one of them skips a step or you power the printer off and they become misaligned. There are multiple solutions for fixing this, and the guy before went for the nice but expensive route of controlling each Z axis with a separate stepper and homing each of them separately. That is what I said was a nice gadget, but not a must-have feature for a beginner.
Now regarding classic auto bedlevel: It’s meant to correct slight misleveling and bent beds. It does so by purpously warping the print to follow the misalignment of the bed. This means, you’ll end up with a print that is not straight. The reason why ABL exists is that 5 or 10 years ago, springs and beds were utter crap and thus people had to workaround in software.
In 2023, if your bed loses leveling all the time, you have the whole bed leveled too high so that the springs aren’t tensioned correctly. On my printer I have to re-level the bed maybe 2-3 times a year and that’s usually related to modifications like using a different nozzle.
Also, in 2023, if your bed is so bent that you’d need to use ABL to compensate, that’s a warranty case.
If you actually don’t RMA such a board but seriously try to compensate it’s failings with ABL, you can choose between a fast 9-point ABL, which does nothing, a 16-point ABL which doesn’t measure the center point, a 25-point ABL which does a bit more but takes forever or you go even higher and spend more time leveling than printing if you do small prints. Also, you need to re-level every time you print with a different bed temperature.
All in all: don’t compensate mechanical issues in software. Fix your mechanical issues.
Oh man am I so happy to hear someone say this.
Go over to the clipper forums and watch people spend days calibrating resonance compensation instead of just installing a brace on the tower or some shit.
Software compensation is good for stuff you really can’t fix.
But people use it to compensate stuff they totally could fix, e.g. a badly levelled bed. Almost as good as those guys who level the bed using a spirit level.