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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • If I waited until printers were completely fool-proof, I would never have gotten one. Instead I jumped in 6yrs ago and I’ve printed so many useful things and a lot of toys. Most rooms in my house have at least one printed item in them because of how useful it is.

    Yes I’ve had my share of failures and have had to rebuild a printer a ton of times while learning how it worked, but I also learned a lot of new skills.

    • Soldering used to be scary and now it’s no big deal.
    • I can de-pin connectors and build new adapters instead of spending $8-10 for someone to ship me one from Amazon.
    • With TinkerCAD I can knock out roughly designed parts that are ready to go in a few hours instead of waiting days/weeks

    From learning all of those skills I’ve swapped the motherboard and rewired my first printer to have bed levelling and be whisper quiet, 3d printed an RC car, designed parts for my vehicles, completely overhauled my sim racing setup, the list goes on.

    If you want to get in to it and have the money to get started, go for it. I started with something like an Ender 3 and still use it today. You don’t need an expensive machine if you want to learn how to maintain it. It all depends on what your goal is with 3d printing.




  • What is your use case for the printer? That might help inform your decision.

    A Prusa is a pretty safe pick and more or less fire and forget from what I’ve seen.

    I have older printers that are reliable after numerous upgrades (including a new board and adding auto-leveling) for larger parts and a resin printer for detailed stuff.