I had my 3D printer for over 7 years now.
Didn't use it often, should have used it more.
It was a Davinci 1.1plus. Not cheap, but easy to use. It came assembled, had nice options: fully enclosed, a glass bed and a camera.
Disadvantage was that it uses xyzprinting own filament, which had a chip in it. Unless you hacked it, you were limited to their cartridges with filament. Not a problem unless you really started to print a lot.
I didn't print much, always used the ABS filament.
I mainly used it for prototyping objects. Didn't want to spend hours printing objects to ship to other people, and start a shop with pinball mods.
I just design something I like or need for myself, and make it available for others on shapeways.
https://www.flippers.be/pinball_mods.html here's an overview of what I have made of pinball mods.
After not using it for a long time, a few months ago I started making new pinball mods. And instead of white or black abs, I am working on a mod for Attack From Mars that requires transparent filament.
So I had ordered some yellow transparent PLA. It didn't work great though, the printer doesn't handle it well. The pla often broke, and print quality wasn't what I wanted to do with it.
Worst of all: after about a dozen prints the nozzle got blocked.
It seems other people also have the same problem: the DaVinci 1.0/1.1 seems to work great with abs but if you switch to pla (which it can handle) it blocks. Filament doesn't load well, it doesn't get through.
A new printer head is 100€, very expensive.
And whilst trying to clean the head I shorted something.. serious.. So that was the unfortunate end of my first printer.
I had doubts if I should buy a new one.
On one hand the printer sat here for a few years almost unused.
On the other hand I recently started using it again and I enjoyed designing 3d models and printing things. Even if you don't use it often, it's useful to have a 3D printer in the house.
What I did not enjoy: spending a lot of time on trial and error: prints that didn't come out well, or when I tried making parts in two different materials that should be glued together, the sizes just didn't match.
Looking around what to buy. There are many options for 3D printers, from €250 to €2500..
As I don't use it much and would only use PLA, a basic printer should do..
then I saw the Geeetech printers and other printers with multiple heads. Those look nice, as I'm working on mods that use different colors of filament. Printing it in different filaments at once would be an upgrade, as I wouldn't need to paint it anymore.
The disadvantage seems to be that most of the cheap printers that offer this are cheap printers. The multiple colors are a nice gimmick but the overal print quality is less, and they require a lot of time to tune and adjust things. Which I don't want to do.
And some of the cheap printers are models that are already 4 years on the market or even older. I had my doubts on the quality they would give, if it would be much better than the old printer I had.
Looking at what is new on the market and offers great quality (hopefully!) I came across the Bumbalabs P1P. It looks to be the latest hottest thing. Either it's a lot of promotion or it's indeed a bit of a game changer. I'm not sure, we'll see: I just ordered one.
It should ship from Germany in a few days.
I hope that it's great and gives me a better experience and quality than my old 3D printer !
It's not the cheapest, but if it's really as fast as they say and it keeps me happy for many years it'll be worth it.
