Topic: What's the next printer up?
I've made a lot of headway in learning about the mechanical and electrical aspects of fixing, modifying, and maintaining a 3D printer from using the Solidoodle 3, but I've also, I feel, reached and passed my limit. I'm seriously considering giving it up and moving on.
Part of it is my own frustration with the fact that, while I've had it about seven months, I've probably had it in a state where it could actually print for less than one month of that. Pretty nearly every part of it has caused a problem at some point. The last two months or so I've been on this seemingly unending chain of problems, each of which gets to a recommendation of some "fix" that depends on a difficult, possibly expensive upgrade that is challenging for me; and every time I successfully complete such an upgrade, or do some fix or calibration or test, either the problem isn't solved, or there's just another one, which leads to another recommendation for another challenging, expensive, lengthy upgrade. It's always "just one more upgrade". (Sure, maybe I really am just one more fix, one more upgrade, one more calibration from being able to print. There's got to be some point where that's true. Just gets harder to believe it's now, when I've been told that over and over and over.)
And part of it is the sense that I've worn out my welcome. You guys were willing to put up with me asking stupid questions, not knowing stuff you've all known for so long you don't remember ever not knowing it, not being ready to take plunges that seemed alarming to me but that were easy-peasy to you. You patiently explained things and helped me along. I promised, and every chance I got I fulfilled that promise, that I would pay it forward by helping people who were one notch below me on the tinkering-savvy scale; but most of that promise is unfulfilled simply because I never got to where I actually felt like I could do this stuff. And now it seems like people are increasingly less ready to put up with me still needing help. (Believe me, I'm no happier about it than you are, quite the contrary.) People are short with me (and I've been short with them too, out of frustration -- I owe more apologies than I'll ever be owed, that's for sure, I'm not claiming otherwise), and it seems like I can't really get help that's focused enough to have one bit of advice built on remembering the previous steps anymore. And that is a showstopper for me because I'm in so far over my head that without the lifeline of that kind of coherent, extended advice, I'm just lost.
So I figure I made a mistake to try this. It was a bit too far for me. What I really wanted, all along, wasn't to learn how to calibrate belt tension, replace motors, or install extruders; what I wanted was to design objects and print them. I was willing to get through the bleeding-edge stuff outside my comfort zone to get there, as long as it actually was getting me there, but it seems that it isn't; at my skill level, the only thing I can make with an SD3 is a slightly less broken SD3. The SD3 is not, at least for me, to the point yet that the hobby of having one is about designing and printing things.
Ultimately the answer is probably that nothing on the market is quite ready for anyone to just plug it in and start printing, all the marketing speak notwithstanding. The technology isn't there yet. But I imagine that there's a trade-off between how much closer to that you can get, and how much you spend. I can obviously handle some of the mechanical and electrical tinkering; I'm not expecting any printer will have zero of that. But is there something out there that requires, say, a third as much as my SD3 has required from me? And if so, which? Because maybe I should be starting to save up for that.
Some of you have experience with a lot more printers than I do. Maybe you can recommend one that's more realistic for me.
tl;dr version: What's a good 3D printer that suits someone for whom the SD3 is too finicky and demanding of mechanical skill, but who can still do some of the tinkering it requires, but is still at least nominally consumer-affordable?
