3-D Print General - Feeding Printers Filament

Just Some Other Guy said:
The question is always going to be budget. Practically anything can blow out an ender 3 nowadays, at any price range
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Yeah, I figure that. But I'm in a situation in which, where I live, we don't get most brands and models. Creality was pretty much the first consumer 3D printer brand to enter the local industry by partnering with a few established local tech stores, so they essentially cornered the market. There's more variety now, but a lot of non-Creality printers that normally should be within a reasonable price range, here go from more expensive than they're worth to downright prohibitive.

So I'm not sure what kind of budget I'm looking at. I'm thinking mostly of "what's a good machine to step up from the E3, what brands, models, and features should I look for OR avoid, etc", more than looking at the prices.
Still, I'm not gonna get a Bambu Lab P1P any time soon since it's, let's say, SUPER FUCKING EXPENSIVE here.
 
Nick Obre said:
Yeah, I figure that. But I'm in a situation in which, where I live, we don't get most brands and models. Creality was pretty much the first consumer 3D printer brand to enter the local industry by partnering with a few established local tech stores, so they essentially cornered the market. There's more variety now, but a lot of non-Creality printers that normally should be within a reasonable price range, here go from more expensive than they're worth to downright prohibitive.

So I'm not sure what kind of budget I'm looking at. I'm thinking mostly of "what's a good machine to step up from the E3, what brands, models, and features should I look for OR avoid, etc", more than looking at the prices.
Still, I'm not gonna get a Bambu Lab P1P any time soon since it's, let's say, SUPER FUCKING EXPENSIVE here.
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Hmm....idk. Is that V3 SE available to you? If so it includes pretty much of of the popular mods people did on their plain ender 3s.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
Hmm....idk. Is that V3 SE available to you? If so it includes pretty much of of the popular mods people did on their plain ender 3s.
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Not in any local retailer that I could find.
Anyway it's not like I want to buy something right now. I'm just trying to get a sense of where to go once I decide to upgrade.
 
Nick Obre said:
Not in any local retailer that I could find.
Anyway it's not like I want to buy something right now. I'm just trying to get a sense of where to go once I decide to upgrade.
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Anywhere, really lol. The basic ender 3 is so incredibly slow and outdated that you could toss a dart at a board blindly and hit something that's significantly better.

Look up that SE and KE, use that as a baseline for the type of features that are ideal nowadays. Everybody is gunning for speed now and more printers are coming with Klipper firmware baked in for higher speed quality.

Bed meshing is cool, but anything with a load cell/strain gauge built in is nice because a lot of people usually run into issues with Z offset, and auto Z offset will take care of that.
 
Orange Rhymer said:
R&D? You mean Marketing.
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turning anything into a SKU to sell and support is all part of R&D, even if it's not a mindblowing new product. they also have their own development staff, no matter how valuable anyone considers that. and all their stuff is still open source, I rather not have the chinese corner the market like they did before in other areas (which usually works buy undercutting competition, the price number alone isn't the only factor).
it wasn't meant as a diss towards creality, ender or any other chink printer, they all have their place and target audience. prusa just caters to a different one than you and me. if you have the time you can get the same result cheaper yourself, that's how it usually is.

Just Some Other Guy said:
.....what? You can go on Amazon and find probably just about anything to replace on a creality. Bonus points for grabbing spares for cheaper on Ali.

Support is true, but idk, I don't use customer support on 3d printers. They're pretty simple machines.
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you don't even need a creality for that, you can jerry-rig your own printer with whatever parts you find. but that's now how a business operates, they rather pay premium for stuff that works ootb (and has the support they can scream at) than tinker with till it works or to make it work better. that's also why they pay for service contracts instead of ordering replacements on amazon themselves. or outsource departments and still go with windows instead of linux.
 
Why does modeling anything have to be such a pain, I just want to print a little stand for my PC speaker, but the idea of trying to make it in Blender is making me feel like it's not worth it.
 
anustart76 said:
Why does modeling anything have to be such a pain, I just want to print a little stand for my PC speaker, but the idea of trying to make it in Blender is making me feel like it's not worth it.
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Blender is just counter intuitive. I've heard people have an easier time with Fusion360, though it still takes work to learn.

I just nigger rig stuff in meshmixer lol.
 
I've knocked things like that out in fucking TinkerCAD. Sure they're not interesting-looking designs, but they do the job.
 
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anustart76 said:
Maybe I should use some kind of CAD program.
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100%
Blender is using polygonal 3D models that are primarily used for 3D Animation and Video Games.
You can generally just drag around geometry with little to no constraints and have way more freedom for how shapes look at the cost of having less control over exact measurements.
Great for doing stuff like a dragon or a gun for a game where you (generally) do not need 100% accurate and reproducible measurements but stuff like organic looking scales or some sci-fi laser rifle that should look good and have a nicely optimised polygon mesh so it works well when animated.

For 3D printing you want a CAD program that works with parametric 3D models, so that you can precisely define the size of everything.
You generally cant just create a shape out of thin air and instead need to go step-by-step (for example you first create a 2D drawing and then use that drawing to create a 3D box and then subtract a smaller box from that box to create a "U" shape). This allows the use of very precise measurements for every "step" (ie. the box is exactly 40mm X 40mm X 50mm) and thus is perfect for stuff like 3D printed stands that need to fit the thing they need to hold up.
The main drawback is that this makes it quite difficult to get complex smooth and organic looking shapes. You would not want to model an erupting volcano with this for example.
Generally requires some tutorials to initially get a hang of things, but once you get how to create basic geometry everything else becomes waaay simpler.
Your first designs may not work perfectly (or look breathtaking) but eventually you will get a hang of things and can then fuel your 3D printer with all kinds of functional custom models.
Also in general for CAD stuff, dont get overwhelmed by the million buttons, you dont need need 90% of those to get going. Many are just more convenient ways to do the same basic stuff.

I personally would recommend the free version of fusion 360.
Autodesk is a grade-a kike-hive, but fusion is really neato and you can even directly import stuff like different screw sizes from an menu in program and dont need to bother modeling every M3 nut in your design.

Oh, and you probably want to get a set of digital calipers (the china ones generally do the trick) to easily get accurate measurements for the stuff you want to work around.
 
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Bananadana said:
For 3D printing you want a CAD program that works with parametric 3D models, so that you can precisely define the size of everything.
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I remember using SolidEdge and Autodesk Inventor way back in middle school. We actually did use calipers to measure things in class we modeled. But man did it take forever.
 
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I use FreeCAD because of linux but be prepared to mash shapes together to do what you want. The software is limited and has a learning curve past basic use that its probably better to learn fusion360.
 
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Do those cardboard filament spools piss anyone else off? I mean I get trying to reduce all the plastic waste, but good God are the cardboard ones crap. They keep falling apart when they roll on the spool holder of my printer, so I end up with little cardboard shavings everywhere.
 
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anustart76 said:
Do those cardboard filament spools piss anyone else off? I mean I get trying to reduce all the plastic waste, but good God are the cardboard ones crap. They keep falling apart when they roll on the spool holder of my printer, so I end up with little cardboard shavings everywhere.
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This is extra retarded since the not-low-IQ way to "reduce the waste uwu" is the spool-less refills for re-useable spools.
The cardboard just feels like conveniently cost-saving virtue signaling.
Only upside is that they can be turned into a refill by fingering a few zip-ties around the filament and breaking away the flimsy cardboard container.
 
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What's the place for 3d printed guns now?

It seems the previous best source for 3d printed guns, Odysee, is slowly eating itself. Trying to download from there is like 50% errors for me now.
 
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