well said!!!
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I’ll sell you a qidi tech 1 (replicator clone) for little under $200 ! needs a bit of love but I have got good prints from it and should be good to go. Dual head is useless tho I just use one as getting both configured to work at same time is a pain. It has xy motion and a solid build plate, enclosed so can print ABS and other difficult fillaments. Have some spare replacement parts (nozzels) and fillament I can throw in.
My bad for hijacking lol. Added benefit of you can have it today! But in the near future it could use an upgraded driver board for 32 bit, quieter steppers, and better firmware(nothing explicitly bad about qidi just lacked some features I wanted). I just have decided to use the makerspace tho honestly as I prefer to just print and not the hobby.
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Another vote for the Prusa machines. They do great work with minimal interaction for a reasonable price.
If you’re looking for something other than a ‘generic’ printer, high temp materials, larger bed size, multiple materials, there are other ways to go. But for all the day to day functional parts, figures, toys, etc the Prusa gets my vote.
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I have both the Prusa i3 MK3 and the Prusa Mini. They’re both excellent choices in those categories.
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Is that what you used to make the fractal pyramid?
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Yeah, you can see it on the Prusa in this thread:
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There’s an emoji for “nail care”, but not for a Sierpinski octahedron. That’s frickin’ bullshit!
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I have a Creality CR 10 Mini. It was $230 and after a very accurate bed leveling with a feeler gauge, good Prusa filament, and a slight bump in bed temperature, it prints well on default Cura settings. It’s super cheap and works.
But from all I’ve read and seen the Prusa printers seem to be at that optimal balance point between tested quality and cost.
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ROFLMAO! This world sucks!
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I agree with everyone on the Prusa Mk3. Best support and print quality for the price, easy to follow instructions, prusa edition slic3r has great features.
The CR-10 and Artillery Sidewinder X1 are bigger volume but good for the price if you don’t mind doing some troubleshooting.
I’m bias to SeeMeCNC, their Artemis delta printer is a work horse.
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Cetus MK3 $399 (or other Tiertime printers)
I’m the rare 3D Fab enthusiast that wants to design and print, not work on a printer. Cetus is the step kid of Tiertime whose been making printers for 15 years. It is as close to a turn-key printer that I’ve seen on the lower price range. I’ve had my MK2 for a year and a half. I’ve had to change the nozzle a few times (brass is worn out by some filaments) and leveled the bed maybe 3 times, that’s it for upkeep.
The one thing some don’t like about them is that they use Tiertime’s slicer instead of open source. That limits some of your printing variables and ability to tie in other Arduino based equipment. That said, the Tiertime slicer used on the Cetus is the same they use on their $200K commercial units, and it works great! Running my Flashforge with different slicers, I got used to an unexpected fail 5% of the time. The only failed prints I have on my Cetus or UPMini II are due to user errors.
Cetus is not as well known, but I can’t recommend it enough. Check out MakersMuse on youtube for a pro review.
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Damn, I must add that the Prusa face shields being made won’t fit on a Cetus. This face shield will though, and it is the most comfortable of the ones I’ve tried.
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I have been thinking of getting a mmu as well, would you say the benefit is worth the hassle? My Prusa works quite well as it is.
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I agree, I had a Cetus and it worked well with a minimum of tinkering. I think it was great for someone new to printing. I upgraded to a prusa for a larger print volume and to use different filaments.
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I tend to print more functional parts than artistic, and my original plan was to use a lot of water soluble support filament. The problem with that is the filament needs to be kept super dry, so I wouldn’t be able to probably keep it loaded all of the time. There are fancy enclosures people build for their MMU’s, and I might end up doing that one of these days to solve that humidity problem. If I wanted to get artistic parts, I would probably spend the time priming and painting them, which would ultimately look better.
On artistic stuff, it feels really wasteful to purge the chamber for the most part with the color wipe. I still haven’t tried it, but at least you can do your wiping to a part now in the slicer (presumably as functional part that you don’t care about aesthetics on).
The color wiping sometimes takes a lot more purging than the default settings too. For instance if you look at this:
you can tell the yellow parts still have some green filament in them (the red was just the lousy color of the filament, needs to be darker for sure in this context).
One thing I need to do is also some sort of auto rollback filament spool setup. The filament buffer that comes with the MMU2 kit is kinda a PITA. To actually load filament, your thumb and pointer finger grab the filament and push it towards the MMU2. With the way the buffer works, you can move it about a half an inch at a time, and it’s annoying. This comes back to me needing to build some auto rewind spools (there are lots of designs out there), but you can maybe see what I mean in this picture:
The buffer and spools also take up a lot of real estate on your table and you lose a lot of mobility in general with your printer. Transporting it safely mostly requires loosening screws and removing tubes etc. When it was just a MK3, I could seatbelt it in and take it elsewhere 
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The Red PLA+ from Microcenter was a lighter color than I wanted. True Red was darker and I like it much better.
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Thanks for the info, that’s a nice print, btw.
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I agree with this. I was one of the first people to order the original MMU for my MK2 and it’s pretty much made it to where I don’t want to use mine anymore. Would love to get rid of it and buy a MK3s or the new SLA.
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Can I tag along with the question, “what 3D printer would you get if you needed a large format 3d printer? Say something that is at least 11x11”."
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I hear the Artillery Sidewinder X1 is a good 300x300 (11.8in) 3D printer from what I hear, as well as the CR-10 V2 pretty similar
X1 review:
CR10 v2
They both have their issues, so it’s up to you. Luzbot Workhorse is still an option (although they laid off most of their employees recently)
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