I've seen what people go through when they operate 3D printers. The impression I have is that they still make 2D inkjet printers look like paragons of reliability.
There was way more valuable things learned in the process than just making Benchy.
For years I have been trying to tell people this. The value of Reprap was not just "to have a printer".
[1] https://www.robosprout.com/thank-you-reprap-for-all-of-it/
For people who genuinely wanted the experience of exploring 3D printers, like yourself, I'm very happy that those people got that experience.
For myself, just as I want to print documents and not have adventures with inkjet printers, I want to make things and not have adventures with 3D printers. Which is why I have no plans to own a 3D printer.
It or a similar printer (CoreXY, enclosed if you're going to print filaments which warrant that) from a brand w/ a good reputation should work as well.
* 1x Prusa XL Gen 1 with 5 toolheads * 1x Prusa Mk4IS * 1x Bambu Labs X1C with multi-material * 2x Voron 0.2 * 1x Sovol Zero
My experience: the typical higher-end printer runs out of the box and runs hundreds of hours (or more) between maintenance beyond wiping the plate down, occasionally greasing the rails, and blowing little plastic bits out of the enclosure. Every year I end up doing a few hour significant maintenance job on about one of the six printers.
But then there's lemons. That Sovol Zero is terrible and has been down more than it's been up, because of something in the extruder assembly. It also came with a defective camera and needed it replaced. I need to decide whether to rebuild all that with many hours of labor or just get rid of it.
It’s stuck in the auto calibration stage. It gets halfway through then it stops with a generic error message. The UI around this is really clunky. I’ve tried searching online, asking Claude and nothing. I emailed customer support and they came back with cryptic instructions that assume familiarity with the internals of the machine.
I decided to leave this for a day when I wasn’t too mentally drained from work to debug issues in my free time and instead the machine has been collecting dust ever since.
Maybe it was a mistake to get a Bambi Lab? I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
So it was dead on arrival. You should have contacted support who would have figured out if you need the whole unit replaced or just part of it. If they are not responsive enough just send back the whole thing.
What would you do if you buy a laptop and it never passes the Power-On Self-Test? I would just return it to whoever i bought it from.
> I thought it was the more turn key option but it hasn’t been my experience.
I mean it is. For everyone who i know who owns one. Every company will sell an occasional dud.
Either it got damaged in transit, or the fault somehow escaped their QA, or you managed to screw up the assembly by not plugging in something, or leaving a transit fixture in somehow. Either way contacting support is the correct way to get to the bottom of it.
Come to think of it when i bought my Sherline lathe initially the motor didn’t turn on when i plugged it in. I wrote an email to the distributor who got me in contact with someone from Sherline. They asked me to check a thing which fixed the issue.
I mentioned that in my comment. I contacted CS. Multiple times in fact. They wanted to diagnose the issue remotely before issuing a refund. Their instructions were poorly written and assumed familiarity with the internals of the machine. ChatGPT helped some but not completely. Then life got busy, I had work travel and the 30 return window passed before I realized it.
Your response is, frankly, a little condescending. You seem convinced this is somehow my fault or that sat there twiddling my thumbs. Of course I understand that duds make it through manufacturing at times. It’s great that the happy path is easy. Do we judge the accessibility of a product only by how it behaves when everything goes right? I was careful during assembly and watched multiple YouTube videos and read the official instructions when putting it together, I contacted CS. In retrospect I should have pushed harder for a refund, but my original point still stands. As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty and then a really painful process for getting it solved.
Like, if the Bambu Labs printer doesn't work either you did nothing wrong and it is broken or you did something incredibly stupid. There is no in-between where e.g. knowing how to build your own Voron gives you an edge in fixing it yourself.
It sounds equally condescending to say that it is difficult to set up a Bambu Labs printer when what you are doing is actually full on fault diagnostics of the internals which you shouldn't have to do. You're allowed to complain about DOA products and terrible QA processes or bad customer support.
Obviously customer support has a perverse incentive to shift the blame onto the customer because RMAs are expensive so you got caught in the crossfire of a defective printer and the customer support.
They were stalling you. You are in someone’s succesfull quarterly KPI metric, as a succesfully avoided return.
> You seem convinced this is somehow my fault
That the printer is not working is 100% Bambu’s fault. That they got away with it is yours.
> As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty
So there is a misunderstanding here. When people describe a 3d printer as “just works” they mean that it has the sensors and firmware smarts so you don’t need to become an expert to get good quality prints out of it. With previous generations of printers when the print was crap you had to look at the process and tune a ton of parameters to get it okay. Maybe your bed wasn’t flat enough? Or hot enough? Or unevenly heated? Or you needed to tweek an extrusion parameter? Or speed it up or slow it down? Or increase the hot end temp? Or increase the cooling fan rpm?
With a modern 3d printer (like the Bambu ones, but not only them) you don’t have to become an expert. Their engineers nailed down all the parameters which can be nailed down, and the rest which they can’t they added sensors for so the printer can measure them as an in-field calibration.
With the older generation of printers if it is not printing well, oh boy, you should probably get better at tuning it. With the new generation of printers if it is not printing well then the company who made the printer failed you. If it is not printing at all, because it failed the calibration then that’s the printer telling you it is broken.
It is like… imagine that you want a nice picture of your loved ones. Buying an older type of printer was like buying oil paint and a brush. You can’t just hope it will do the picture on its own. You could get the picture you wanted but you had to acquire serious skills first. No art supply shop would accept a return of your paint and brush just because the picture you paint with it are kinda crap.
In contrast buying a new generation of 3d printer is like buying a polaroid camera. It requires way less skill than the oil paint and the brush. You point, you shoot, out comes the picture. If the picture doesn’t come out the polaroid camera is broken and you should return it.
The polaroid camera is “just works” compared to the oil paint and brush even if every second camera is broken comming out of the factory. Because it is not a statement about their defect rate, but a statement about the design philosophy.
There is a world of difference between a 2019 Creality Ender 3 and a 2023 Bambulab A1 for not that much more money.
Auto-leveling, input shapping, PEI plates, high flow hotends, better build quality... all that have improved reliability significantly while increasing speed by a lot.
It even kind of killed the whole "tips and tricks to have good 3D prints" Youtube niche.
The Ender 3 had a huge role in democratizing 3D printing, but a 20% failure rate was kind of expected. With modern printers, the expectation is bellow 5% failure rate, plus the failures are much less painful since they are ~4 times faster.
It's not quite "press print and it works" but it's pretty damn close.
There is another set of people who are in 3D printing because they like the experience of debugging and improving the printer as much or more than the final prints they get from it. The most hardcore 3D printing people I know don’t actually print much other than 3D benchies and test towers because their fun comes from playing with the machine and trying new parts. Those people build a different set of printer types than the plug and play units used by most casual makers.
They’re a pain in the ass if you buy bottom of the barrel crap with sloppy tolerances for $100 I guess, but the same is true of regular printers.