this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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3DPrinting

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Hi,

I just have some questions regarding 3D printing. Despite doing this for 2 years I still feel like a beginner.

Questions:

I'm looking at the Ender 5 Plus and Prusa MK3S, I've seen plenty of people say the Prusa is better because the Ender 5 Plus requires more "tinkering". I just feel that the Prusa is overpriced and don't know if I should just bite the bullet and get it or something else? I want to get back into the printing game.

I live in a trailer and my room is pretty small about 30ft x 30ft, would it be safe to use my printer in my room if all I print is PLA (I'm not talking about using it overnight either since I don't trust it). Or should I leave it in my living room?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I would advocate Creality and tinkering for one very good reason... If you buy a fancy printer and it breaks, how will you know how to fix it?

At work we got a $2500 printer years ago. It has the sensors to self-adjust before every print, you pretty much don't need to do anything except send your print jobs to it. Sounds great, right? Until it started failing... Around the same time things started to go wrong, I got my Ender 3 printer, and I spent a lot of time learning how to make adjustments, how to correct things in the slicer for better quality prints, and so on. Meanwhile the expensive printer at work sat idle for about 2 years because nobody knew anything about "fixing" it. I finally decided to take a crack at it and immediately recognized that even though this printer has auto bed leveling it was quite obvious the first layer was too close to the bed. Turns out the sensors had gotten dirty over time, I cleaned them and boom, we're up and running again.

I have tinkered with my printer to the point of printing all kinds of custom parts for it including a direct-drive head. I can upgrade the firmware any time I want and set the defaults to match my custom hardware, but most importantly I know what everything does and can troubleshoot a variety of problems. Tinkering isn't a bad thing, and you only have to get into it as far as you want to because the printer will work just fine out of the box if you take the time to set it up properly, but it does provide options if you want 'better'.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

You can learn by building a printer from a kit, without getting something as unreliable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Are you suggesting the Ender 3 is unreliable? That's pretty funny.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Compared to prusa it's a dumpster fire.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Considering it costs four times as much, it's easy to see the sunk cost fallacy coming into play.

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