I got a resin printer about a month ago which is a lot of fun. I’m thinking of getting an FDM printer, does anyone have recommendations?
They are by no means perfect, and calibrations/adjustments come with the territory, but they have a certain threshold for quality that removes some of the most horrible sources of errors.
Eg, flex in the structure often comes from cheaping out on material or design, and is imo the worst kind of sources of errors. A static error (eg a fixed offset of the bed leveling) is more easy to calibrate/compensate away.
Other big brands may be as good as Prusa, but I have no experience of them. A friend got an Ender 3, bed was warped, replaced the unit, bed warped on that one too. Our Prusa mk3s2 had no such kind of quality errors. YMMV.
Some things I learned:
* do a z-level calibration (finding distance for the first layer) according to guides
* increasing temp (bed and head) by 5degC on first layer increased adhesion
* clean the bed with IPA only, that's well enough if you never touch it.
* never touch the bed with bare hands - I always used tissue paper as a glove
* never needed to use paper glue or hair spray or anything after the above things (but before that I used paper glue which didn't help, and was haaaaaard to remove)
* don't scrape the print off with the metal spatula, it'll scratch the bed surface easily
* when turning on the printer, don't use the small amount of filament that's been sitting in the print head since last time. Back out the filament and cut that off and start with new filament.
All that said, Prusa seems to be the benchmark.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/lv818a/purchase...