I’m about to pull the trigger on a new adventure and buy a 3-D printer. I’ve done a fair bit of research but I’m looking for experiences from anyone on the Board who has played with them. What factors made you decide on what you bought? I’ve got no fears about a kit or DIY so if you built your own tell me about it!
I bought one about a year ago. Used it for about 3 months then the novelty wore off. Didn’t use it for a while till last weekend when I made some “extra fancy” garden markers for my wife’s vegetable garden.
What type did you end up buying if you don’t mind answering? I’m leaning toward a delta style as I have plans to eventually make some parts for a long neglected bike project.
Have you used one at your local makerspace yet? That’s what you want to do. Buy a membership at a makerspace, it’s usually like $50 a month tops, and there are generally cheaper options. Only if you are 3d printing so much stuff that it’s cheaper to own your own is it even worth buying one.
Also, did you first try sites like iMaterialize and others? Again, it’s cheaper to rent a print job on someone else’s 3d printer (and they will have a higher quality one than you can afford) unless you are basically printing stuff for several hours a day. There are newer ultra-high speed models that also produce higher quality prints, and models that print in metal, and these printers are hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I didn’t want to waste too much time just getting the 3D printer to work, so I got the one that seemed to have the best reviews, esp. in terms of ease of use and setup - the Lulzbot Mini. I think it was worth the rather high price. It worked fine right out of the box, none of the problems I’d heard about from other people. I think the only time it didn’t behave as expected was when I switched to ABS filament, and didn’t use the correct profile.
My only complaint is that it doesn’t have an enclosure - so fumes from the ABS filament is an issue. I ended up building an enclosure out of coroplast (and a bit of plexiglass for the front window).
Also, it needs to be tethered to a computer through USB during printing. So it needs to be close to a computer, and the computer needs to stay on during printing. Which isn’t a huge issue, but I addressed it by using a Raspberry Pi as a control computer, running OctoPrint. It was extremely easy to set up - just download the image, burn it onto a micro-SD, boot it up and follow the basic setup procedure.
Prusa is also highly rated, and a Prusa kit is half the price of the Lulzbot Mini. But availability seems to be an issue (their web site currently says 7 weeks lead time).
I wish I lived somewhere near a makerspace! I’ve actually given some thought to opening one; as it is, I’m 3 hrs away from a major urban centre so drive time becomes an issue.
Good points scr4, I am vacillating between buying a less expensive Chinese kit and doing some immediate upgrades (thus putting in the engineering hours myself) or paying for someone else’s expertise and better support. I’ve looked at the Prusa kits, the Monoprice Maker Series and the fact they both have a huge community is a plus. Either way it’ll work out roughly the same cost-wise. I’m qualified HRS (high reliability soldering), and have a background in tinkering with mechanical and computer bits so a kit doesn’t intimidate me. I’ll have a look at the raspberry pi option, my plan was to pick up a cheap chromebook or use my wife’s old Win 7 laptop as a dedicated printer computer.
Do you have the Pi set up with a monitor and keyboard?
No, there’s no need. Octoprint is designed to be controlled remotely, with a nice web-based interface. All it needs is power and WiFi adapter. (I think you do need a monitor/keyboard for initial setup, just to get the WiFi adapter configured, but I think that’s it. And by “remotely” I mean from another computer on the home network, though I’m sure there are ways to control it from off-site.)
I currently use FreeCAD to design a part, then save as STL file. Then use the Lulzbot edition of Cura to generate the gcode. Then upload the gcode file to Octoprint using the web interface and hit “print.”
We have one here at work that gets used a ton. However it retails for something like $20k and only barely prints things of a size and resolution that I think is worthwhile. We have tested both a makerbot and an Airwolf and found the quality to be pretty poor.
Do you have a good idea of what you’re going to make, or is it something you just want to play around with? I’d be wary of the latter.
A bit of both. If I had $20k for one I’d be making it a business, too! 
I have a few specific projects in mind from the simple to the complex, to wit: fidgets for my wife’s kindergarten class, small speaker adapters so I can mount them to the corners of the wall or ceiling, a few basic sculptures, and finally adapters and jigs for thin wall tubing as placeholders before I wrap them in carbon fiber for a recumbent high racer I designed a few years ago. I’d like to eventually move beyond PLA and look at building with nylon, carbon fiber filament, nGen, or PETT and other exotics at some point once I have more experience. At that point maybe cell phone holders, assorted adaptors for GoPros and Bicycle accessories, and whatever else I can dream up that I never seem to be able to find, especially locally.