Last time, I talked a bit about the 3D printing tool chain, and how I determined whether 3D printing was something that I could actually do. This time, I want to talk about something a little different – how I determined whether 3D printing was something that I could actually afford to do. In particular, what factors contributed most to my choice of a printer, what the main options were (as I saw them), and a little bit about what I thought once I had actually received my printer.
In looking for printers, the first thing I really wanted to decide was whether I wanted to get a 3D printer kit (like a RepRap) or whether I wanted to get an assembled printer. My first thought was that getting an assembled printer was out of my price range, so I didn’t look too closely, rather, I looked at a lot of kits, and spent a lot of time pouring over the instructions for putting them together. This might seem a bit odd, since I didn’t even have one yet, but I really wanted to know if this was something I was going to be able to do before I spent a lot of money shipping a bucket of parts to my house. At this point, the front-runners were the Mendel from RepRapPro (hadn’t decided on mono or tricolor), and one other which I don’t remember (except that it actually shipped with a soda can as a legitimate part). The price seemed reasonable, and it seemed like I was getting everything I needed to be up and running.
At this point, I talked to my friend Jay, who had put together a MendleMax kit. My questions were basically simple – is putting together a 3D printer a weekend job or a month-long project? Is this something I am going to need specific tools and a love of assembling stuff? His answer was simpler than that, which I am still very thankful for – he relayed his own experience about putting together a kit, and noting the difference between making operating a 3D printer a hobby, or making a hobby about what you can do with your 3D printer. I really wanted to go with the latter (remember, I’m not an engineer), so I started looking at various assembled designs.
I first needed to narrow down what various machine options were, then I could figure out what was important to me. So, I looked for some comparison sites, and found findthebest.com had a section on 3D printers. This was quite useful at illuminating some of the less-obvious parameters, and was very useful at pointing me to some of the various assembled printer options. From the assembled printers, the two that I liked the best were the Makerbot Replicator and the 3rd Generation Solidoodle. The 2nd Generation Solidoodle was also an option, and was something I was looking into along with the Solidoodle 3.
As I was trying to balance among these things, the main kicker was whether I needed a second extruder. The more I thought about it (and examined the workflows I was going through), it wasn’t clear to me how useful that would be, and exactly how I would fit it into my flow. Jay also mentioned that multi-extruder was fairly new (this year), so I knew that I would be paying a premium for that capability (which may not be there in a few years). With that in mind, I ended up getting the Solidoodle 3 because it wasn’t significantly more than the Solidoodle 2 (with the heated print-bed) and had the larger print bed and more open design. My thoughts were really starting to revolve around the idea that this would not be my last 3D printer – just my first. So, it really needed to be able to do the basics easily, and the rest would come later (maybe when multi-extruder had matured and made less expensive).
When I first ordered my printer, I expected something like the Amazon experience – I’d get an e-mail when my order went in, and, in a couple of days, when it shipped. Unfortunately, the lag between “order received” and “order shipped” was about 3 weeks, and, unlike Amazon, they charged my card when I ordered, not when it shipped. I was able to get in touch with their customer service, and they politely let me know what was going on, and gave me an estimate on when my printer would ship. This helped a lot, as it helped stave off the worry that my order (and my money) had disappeared into a black hole somewhere. My printer arrived in the first week of June, and I promptly unboxed it and got it plugged in.
What I was hoping was that I would be able to get it up and rolling without any fuss, what I got was slightly different. The directions didn’t say anything about calibrating my machine when it arrived, but I found that this was going to be a significant part of what I would do with the sample filament. In particular, every aspect of the print bed was misaligned when I got it – the Z-axis was too high (closer to the extruder than it should have been), and the tilts in the X and Y directions were quite a bit off. After a few failed prints (remember those tokens?), I did some Internet searching to find out how to adjust the Z-axis and the print bed. Doing this by hand was not a pleasant experience, but I managed to get everything dialed in such that I could get a single decent print at the end of my sample roll.
The worst part of the calibration experience was that I had effectively ruined the polyimide sheet that covered my print bed (I didn’t even know what that was at the time). Because the hot extruder head was too close to the print bed, it effectively burned circles into the polyimide sheet rather than actually printing filament. Now, all of my prints have a rough-spot on the bottom where the burn marks are – a bit of a bummer!
Now that it’s dialed-in, things have been working fairly easily – I was able to print out all the tokens and card boxes for the Dune board game, and start on a few other projects. I really like the software workflow, and so far the Solidoodle has been very easy to work with – I know what I’m getting into when I turn it on, and Jessa was even able to print a few things out for me while I was at work. I plan on replacing the polyimide sheet soon (probably with my next filament order), and am looking at what it might take to use a depth gauge and a multimeter to really zero the Z-axis. My current project is more of an artistic nature though, and I’ll chat about that in my next blog.