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There was a stretch of time I was looking at videos of budget gaming PC builds and they'd be like "How to build a gaming PC for $150" and a lot of them went like "Buy a used Optiplex for $120, max out its RAM for $30, then use this GTX 2080 I got from nvidia for free because I have two billion subscribers."
Me: Should I buy a prebuilt 3D printer?
Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.
Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?
Reddit: Well, I'm still tuning it for all my filaments. I've been through about 40kg, and I've got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.
Building a 3d printer is really its own hobby. You don't build a 3d printer because you want to print stuff, you build one because you want something to tinker with
- Average Linux user
Am the Linux user, can confirm.
Yeah, I made nearly that mistake. Twice, actually. First with a monoprice, then a creality. I probably have more money in upgrades on my CR10s than I have in the purchase, and I still haven't upgraded the board. I keep thinking I'll fix it but I've resolved to strip a couple of parts and throw it away. My Prusa XL preorder came last month. I made one update to it (for better TPU performance), and printed one QoL add-on (nozzle wipers). That's it. I'm done. It prints like a dream, multi-material supports are indistinguishable from magic, and even swapping nozzles is fairly quick and easy. Now I'm (almost) exclusively printing things for my other hobbies rather than worrying that something on my CR10s will fail or need re-tuning.
Exactly why Voron is on my to-do list
Yeah those communities are wild. Before I bought my own printer I thought 3D printing is mostly fixing your printer and buying better parts and bed leveling and tuning etc.
Wasn't looking forward to it so I bought an off-the-shelf printer with minimal assembly from a "boring" Chinese brand - couldn't be happier with it, it just prints without any hassle and I have no urge to switch firmwares or tinker with the printer itself instead of with the printed stuff. To each their own I guess.
(Still plugged in a raspberry pi for octoprint and did some initial calibration for the filament of course ...)
Octoprint for the win. Fuck SD cards for printing
I feel personally attacked.
There is something to tinkering your own machine to the best of its ability on a budget.
But if you just want to 3d print, nowadays there is no need to build your own. Premade are pretty great.