What 3D printers are people using?

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?.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Mike.
Edit, corrected a typo. tinkercac to tinkercad

I prefer the kind of printer owned by someone else.

Bambu P1S - good choice.
Others recommend the 3d printer Anycubic Kobra Max (mainly for larger projects) or the Prusa MK4.

Well as we replaced both Ender 3 Max Neo's with Bambu PIS's we gave one of the Ender 3 Max Neo's to a friend, and I've now taken the other one home

I couldn't bear to see it end up in a skip, and I could see my boss binning it one day when I wasn't there!.

Haha! This is just what I expected - everyone saying Bambu Labs. I among his other stuff Superfast Matt on YT has a fair few things to say about what his Bambu can do beyond the obvious, including flexible materials. His general position is "However broad the range of printers available, there is actually only one choice." That seems to be being borne out by your experience so far and by those who are not budget restricted or haven't already invested heavily in modifications. I would actually be very interested in hearing from anyone who DOESN'T agree with this assessment.

From our point of view we're doing small scale production, and it makes a big difference if a printer is reliable - and fast.

The print quality is so good that we're considering printing our own potting box - we use a LOT, and usually order then in 500's - small ones cost £2.36+vat, and large ones £3.13+vat. Small ones will use £0.25 of filament, and large ones will use £0.80 of filament - so a substantial saving.

Rather annoyingly, from RS, the small boxes come in packs of five, but are priced in ones - so you order 500, you get 500. The large boxes though come in packs of five as well, but are priced per pack - so if you order 500, you get 2500 boxes. My box accidentally did this the other year - no big deal though, we use more than that per year.

We'll also save on assembly time, as we can print the boxes with the required holes already there, rather than manually drilling them - likewise, on jobs where we bolt mil. spec. sockets on instead of a screw and nyloc nut, we can just print a mounting inside the box to accept a self tapping screw.

Typical 'good' orders are 100 or 200 units at a time, so at £2+ saving (plus time) we'll be making £200+ or £400+ more profit

Obviously they take time to print, but large orders (100+) only come in every few weeks, so as long as we keep printing the most popular boxes (including setting them going when we go home at night) we can soon build a stock up ready for orders.

The small boxes can fit 24 (easily) on the bed, and take 4h30m odd to print, the large boxes will fit 12 on the bed, and take 10h19m to print.