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Topic: Professional use or just personal use?

How do you use your Solidoodle?

Is it just for personal use? or do you use it in a professionally?

I run a small Industrial Design Consultancy, and use my SD3 for prototyping parts. However, for daily use I find it (especially unmodified) rather unreliable.

Are there any professional or personal users that use it regularly (daily) and are getting reliable and consistent results?

Industrial Designer
Fresh Design Works (UK)
www.freshdesignworks.co.uk

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Re: Professional use or just personal use?

mine is for personal use...but i cant say its unreliable....maybe it requires more maintenance (adjusting belts and so on ) than you would prefer but it always seems to run

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Re: Professional use or just personal use?

I haven't had to adjust belts.

But I regularly have to level the print bed, tweak slic3r settings, have gone through 4 hot ends in 6 months on 2 machines, had to replace 2 print heads, a fan, and often it takes 4 or 5 attempts to print a part.

Often, it's a case of print as much as possible whilst its printing well. Even then it's only a few days, a week tops, before it needs adjustment/repair.

I can print loads one day, then the next morning go to print and it needs recalibrating again even though nothing has changed.

As well as the mentioned repairs/mods, I have also added insulated covers, and 5mm thick mirror glass beds.

Industrial Designer
Fresh Design Works (UK)
www.freshdesignworks.co.uk

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Re: Professional use or just personal use?

both for me...

I work as a design/draftsman, my own company etc.... so use it for prototyping and modelmaking.

personally; it's used for the inmoov robot

http://inmoov.blogspot.co.uk/

currently have an SD2 - New SD3 arrives tomorrow (need the bigger bed for a current job smile ) time to get that lead screw swapped out !

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Re: Professional use or just personal use?

saymo606 wrote:

both for me...

I work as a design/draftsman, my own company etc.... so use it for prototyping and modelmaking.

personally; it's used for the inmoov robot

http://inmoov.blogspot.co.uk/

currently have an SD2 - New SD3 arrives tomorrow (need the bigger bed for a current job smile ) time to get that lead screw swapped out !

how often would you say you use on average and how do you find the reliability?

Industrial Designer
Fresh Design Works (UK)
www.freshdesignworks.co.uk

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Re: Professional use or just personal use?

my SD2 has been running daily since november 2012..

average hours per day must be near 12 per day, however latterly it has been on 16 hours or so every day for about 2 months..

my idler pulley went recently, and I had lots of layer shifting, printed a new set...problem gone.

upgraded to an M3 rod...quality was vastly increased, cant over emphasis how much that one change made to the machine...

sure I level the bed,,,maybe once every 30 hours or so?

new filament spools have a tendancy to slip off the spool... i need to design a small clip to prevent this....

warping is my biggest bug , however, printing with a 5mm brim helps.. but allowing the print to complete the first layer then using acetone on the brim helps to hold it down and 'minimise' warping as much as I can...

really, I can't fault it for the money, hence the reason to buy another one this morning smile

I need a new one for a job for a client and I know this machine quite well now, so it made me go for another smile

couldn't be bothered with learning a new set of probs with a different printer...

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Re: Professional use or just personal use?

I use mine for everything you can imagine and probably a few things you can't wink both business and personal. I find reliability is directly related to knowledge of how the printer and it's components work and also what to do, when to do it, and most importantly what NOT to do smile so I can accurately say my printers are pretty reliable smile