What 3D printers are people using?

[Nigel Goodwin]

We use 3D printers a fair bit at work, and specifically at the moment we've got a reasonable number of boxes to print for a new product for a customer - and our existing Ender-3 Max Neo printers are a bit slow, don't print so great, and are prone to blockages and stringing - they also require plenty of 'fiddling'.

So I ordered a Bambu P1S - supposed to be good quality, fast, and works straight out of the box.

So, got I it running, and I was mega impressed - the box that takes 6.5 hours on the Ender 3 now takes 59 minutes, and the quality is a lot higher as well. In fact we were so happy we gave one of our Ender 3 Max Neo's away, and replaced it with the Bambu printer - then decided to order a second one, to replace our other Ender-3 Max Neo. I was offered the first Ender-3 Max Neo, but turned it down due to lack of room - I've currently got an older Ender 3 (non Max Neo), which I previously had for free from work. If we're getting rid of the remaining Max Neo, I might have to try and make room at home for it?.

The second one came this afternoon, and as they said, it takes very little time to unpack it and set it up - although their claimed 15 minutes is a bit short, it takes almost that just to unpack it and do the VERY minimal assembly.

So what 3D printers do others recommend?.

 

[picbits]

Bambu Labs P1S all the way. One of our customers has one as his personal printer and they have just bought one for work - awesome quality and you're printing within an hour.

 

[picbits]

I personally run an Ender 3 with lots of mods, belt tensioners, direct drive, SKR 1.3 mainboard with TMC drivers, uprated power supply and colour screen as well as a few other mods. I made the mistake of buying an Ion Core Zinter Pro at a fairly reasonable price off eBay thinking I was getting some decent precision engineering but there were lots of corners cut in the design of the printer and they obviously hadn't been designed for lasting too long. The pulley wheels were not on bearings and mounted directly on to machine screw (with threads) so had worn the center of the pulleys out as well as the threads off the screws. Belt mounting to the linear rail was done with a single crosshead screw through the belt and the wiring, well don't get me started on the wiring. I've ended up stripping it down and I'll be rebuilding it as a corexy printer with decent bearings and uprated parts as well as a 310mm build plate.

 

[augustinetez]

Although not had the time to set it up and use it, I bought a BambuLabs A1.

Will be New Year at the rate things are going.

 

[Pommie]

I have a Kossels type printer and, unfortunately, can't compare it to anything else.

For producing 3D (stl) files I started with tinkercac.com but later moved to openSCAD as it's more programmer like.

Mike.