TOPIC:

Hello all,

I'm usually speaking about 3D printing in the middle of my threads about vintage oddities... Time to speak about 3D printing as a topic...

I currently have an Ender 5 Plus, which is stock beside the full metal extruder, the capricorn ptfe, the fan shroud (printed in PLA at this stage), and the silent board. I have this printer since May 2021. And within two years, I spent more time fixing it than printing with it. It was quite frustrating until I found out that wire connectors were not sold on the said wires, and sometimes loose... And this explains easily why the behavior was quite impredictible. That solved, I still have time to times frustrating issues, but overall it works... With the limitation of a bowden tube printer, but it would require many mods to do what I'd like to do at home...

I prepared my wife to the fact I would change or add a printer at home for the last year... And planned for a lot of bucks. What I had in mind in terms of requirements for the second printer :
- closed printer
- ability to print a lot more materials than what I can print currently
- Idex or multimaterial. I toyed with the Prusa XL dual head idea (and set the budget based on that in my mind), but it appears to be a vaporware (as after more than a year it is still unreleased). I could wait, but I was set to decide by early march this year.
- bed size : I intend to get some upgrade for the Ender 5 plus still, so it could be smaller...

Based on the budget I set in my mind, if I get to lower cost, I could eventually think about a resin printer for other uses cases than FDM (Flex, transparent resin, dimensionnal validation of very small part)... Therefore I'm thinking about changing my approach... And I'll talk more about this in the netx few weeks, which is the reason to share about this, because I think it could be interesting for many of us...

This is great timing, as I'm just recently entertaining the idea of acquiring a 3D printer. So far I'm steering away from resin because of the room and ventilation needed, cleaning, etc. I don't think I need the finer details they offer, as I'm not big into the characters or interiors (I love what people do with them, but it's just not in my interest right now). I'm more into functional mechanical parts design. I'll certainly be watching this thread!

Well... 2 years down the line, I took a low cost big bed printer... I learned the things the hard way...
Don't make this mistake
You are right about technical part, where resin is likely not the right target (odors can be mitigated with active carbon filtration, which some manufacturer propose either included or as independant add ons) : That being said, there is cases where it can be of great help, even on the technical side. I'll say more about this when I'll test those...

FDM : there is a lot of limitation you should be aware when setting your choice :
- unclosed printer are limited in material they can print. Basically, anything requiring more than 240°C and a bet at 60°C requires the printer to be closed to and the evnironement to be controlled. This is to be fully understood : any low cost printer, even with a tool head able to go to 300°C is going to be limited by this factor.
- with the experience of the Ender 5 Plus, I would even prefer a Direct drive extruder, as a bowden tube is requiring a lot of retractation, and when material is too flexible (without even talking about TPU), it becomes quite hard to print within a good quality... There is no issue like that with a direct drive, which is pulling the filament very close from the Nozzle...
- think about your use cases and what you are willing to print: don't think the bed to big (like I did) : first big prints takes a lot of time and you may always rely on an online service to get bigger prints if needed.
- material and use cases should be what define the targeted printer. you want to print ABS : think a printer with a enclosure. 
- Don't think too much about multimaterial and IDEX printers as a starter : I feel it's is going to increase the learning curve as there is even more parameters to manage...

Last comments on my side (and I did the same explanation to some people at the club last week) : if you have the budget for it, the best machine to learn is probably a Prusa I3MKS2+ for which you will be able to get upgrades when there is an iteration, and on which you will not have to fight with the printer issue while managing your own learning curve : there is a lot of knowledge sharing among users and every good documentation provided by Prusa for those (the total opposite from Creality, where this is almost unexistant : you will find help, but it is often by people who would tell you their Creality printer works very well but omitting to tell you they changed almost everything on it, and at the end, you are still stuck with your printer finding everything and its opposite as possible solution for your problem - it may sound exagerated, but this is exactly what it is).. In short, the best support on the market and easiest learning curve ytou can expect is a Prusa i3MK2S+. I would not advise clones either : they are copied on a Prusa but with the idea to slash the cost down: in short to the learning curve you will have the printer problems i had with my Creality...

Hope this helps in your reflexion, and watch this thread

On their site it looks like maybe the new standard is the MK3S+ ?

Looks like $1300 (assembled) with the enclosure. I'll need time to justify and budget for that while I get educated, but I'd rather do it right the first time and not stumble out of the gate. I could always get the kit version and save a couple hundred as well. Hmm.

Yeah, costly : I said if you have the budget . That being said you may consider in kit rather than assembled : it's kind of like a Tamiya kit . And the good thing is that those solutions are evolutive : you can upgrade with an enclosure later. A friend of mine is saying that beside the fiabilisation linked to poor cost decision in the copy, a Prusa clone is a good cheap solution. That being said, it was his second printer, so he had already passed the key part of the learning curve, which means he had the possibility to understand he was not the one doing it wrong...

And by the way you may also think that at some point you will have not one but two printers - it always end this way :-D

silvertriple wrote:

And by the way you may also think that at some point you will have not one but two printers - it always end this way :-D

Similar to how I just wanted to get the re-re Blackfoot kit a couple months ago and maybe throw in a Technigold motor . . . and now I'm up to nearly 30 models and 30 unique motors?!?

UGH, maybe I DON'T want a printer(s) 

Some progress on the printer selection, and the reason for this.

Until now, I thought that IDEX was the only way to acheive multimaterial properly. Until very recently, tehre was three solution for doing multimaterial on a single nozzle printer:

• Prusa MMU solution. It requires a a Prusa printer, so it is out of question for me currently. And additionally it works more or less as per all the feedback I saw.
• Mosaic Palette : the unit take controls of the printer, and insert filaments they slices together at what is expected at the right place. It apparently works well, however there is one limitation : due to the nature of the slicing process you have to work with material of the same nature. I don't think this would work by mixing PLA and PETG (because adhesion is not very good, making PETG a good breakaway support material for PLA) or other materials... Plus it is limited in temperature it can work with...
• enraged rabbit carrot feeder : open source, but the name itself suggest it requires a lot of TLC...

I absolutely need to be able to print at least two different materials on the bed... And the limitations of those solutions made me think IDEX (Independant Dual Extruders on X carriage) was the only solution to achieve this properly. That said, IDEX means you have 2 heads to calibrate in Z, and you need to have the calibration for X and Y as well so they both print at the same place, and when you know how it may be difficult to achieve a proper Z level sometimes, you understand this may be quite difficult : so IDEX comes with additional issues. Prusa is promising a lot on this specific point with the Prusa XL, but those are only virtual at this stage...

And over last year the printer market changed a lot. There is a newcomer that changed a bit the things : BambuLab. They came out with a enclosed and fast printer, with a very interesting Multimaterial solution called AMS. It can't print TPU in mutimaterial, and requires the different materials to be in the same range of temperatures, but beside this, it is great improvement compared to other solutions (and they came out with a second one non enclosed more limited in material range, but that is worth to consider as well, maybe even for a beginner). They started to sell a solution with different support materials (not solvable), but which is aimed at be used as interface layer between other materials, allowing to detach the support very easily....
During the last few days, I searched a lot about those: they are not really easy to procure and that is an issue. However, some users found out that PETG can be used the same way to support PLA (and the PLA as support for PETG); and apparently, PC can be used for PA and vice versa...

That opened my mind : I searched thru all the printed parts I made in the last 2 years, and all the parts I'd like to print : none would absolutely requrire solvable (and expensive) support material : a single layer of alternative material between supports and printer material would be enough to do the trick, and this AMS solution would make the thing easy. In my uses case from the past, and those I intend to deal with this is vald for 99% of the cases. The 1% remaining is relative to tires and TPU printing, and I still have doubts on the ability for TPU to provide a solution for tires so this will be left on the side at the moment.

Conclusion : the printer is likely to be a BambuLab X1 Carbon/AMS combo. It's expensive, but it's less expensive than the budget I booked for, and it opened possibility for a resin printer as well...
The use cases I can foresee at this stage:

• transparent resin for very specific parts with no mechanical involvement
• flexible materials (tires enter in this field)
• injection moulds (I still have this in mind and I'm willing to try, and I feel FDM is not precise enough)
• other dimensionnal validation for very small parts
• further use cases belonguing to my son and my daughter I would not quote here as not at all related to rc...

I identified some target resins few months ago, and I' definitely want to try printing tires and running them to see the result. If this works, I will have a solution to share with everyone...






 

Morning activity :
Shuffle things from the zone my wife already nicknamed "Home fablab". It remains a trademill that was usefull in the past (and very useful during the lockdowns when it rained): no one is using it anymore at home... Need to find a solution to get this out of the home ASAP. 

Also started to think about how I will organize the area with cabinets and a desk to put the printers. 

The Ender 5 plus is going for some upgrades... At this stage, the only things I did was :

• silent board,
• capricorn tubing
• full metal extruder

Due to the place it is installed (under the side of my desk), there was no room to set it as direct drive. This will be a first quick modification I'll do, before thinking about next ones. I've been in the past considering changing the motherboard, the power unit, and get a light Biqu H2 direct drive extruder/hotend. It is small, able to do reach the temperature I target and would not require much change in the printer structure (except hot end assembly fixation, and rethink the cooling elements).

Just checked a review on that BambuLab X1, that is a really good machine, and quick! Not a cheap printer though, but definitely seems worth the price with the feature list. I look forward to seeing how you go with this if you get it. I think the only concern I would have with this machine, and I could be wrong as I don't have one, is that is seems very to be a very closed system. So modding and a lot of user servicing seems out of the question.