1 Topic by ryanz0528

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Topic: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

Greetings everyone:

I am currently a senior industrial design college student studying in the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Me and my friends formed a design studio few months ago and we have some projects going on recently.
What school faculty teach us was how to create 3D model in Rhino and fixing it in netfabb then send to Shapeways.com to order 3D model, but we found it extremely inefficient and expensive so we decided to purchase our own 3D printer.

We have been looking through Cubify, CubeX, Makerbot series, Solidoodle, Reprep, Phoenix 3D Printer(funding on kickstarter right now), and the Buccaneer. We know there are a lot of other 3D printers on market but we decided to go with the flow so we mainly focus on the 3D printer brand that I mentioned.

We are very interested in Soliddoodle 3, and Phoenix, but we need to wait at least a year for the Phoenix printer. We are also worried about the quality of solidoodle 3.

My questions might seems very dumb to you guys but I hope you can help us out:

1) Why are Makerbot series and Cubify/CubeX so much more expensive then any other 3D printer?
2) Solidoodle 3 has a big build bed and has nice resolution, why it's so much cheaper then Makerbot and Cube series?
3) We are also not sure about the material that 3D printer can handle, I mean could we purchase those printing plastic from any manufacturer as long as the size are standard(1.75mm etc.)?
4) We are looking for a nice quality 3D printer, we can afford a 3D printer that cost less than $2000 or $1500(of course the cheaper the better), as you read our situation which one do you guys think will be the best for us?

Again, thank you guys so much for reading this, it will be a great help if someone could give us some explanation!

2 Reply by foofoodog

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Re: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

Even though I think this thread might be being ignored as a troll I see you got no reply so I will jump in here.

>>1) Why are Makerbot series and Cubify/CubeX so much more expensive then any other 3D printer?

They appear to be more consumer market oriented a opposed to basement hacker oriented. For the Cube to start being sold in national office supply chain stores they are going to have a good budget for marketing and plan to get repeat sales from the materials. Not sure about the Makerbot, they look pretty dam slick but I do not know enough about the capabilities or hardware to tell you one way or the other. Either way I think they will be selling out of the box user friendly plug and play experiences. Like having a windows printer driver that adds dimension to a 2D photo, slices it and prints it in one click. They are selling appliances not machine tools.

>>2) Solidoodle 3 has a big build bed and has nice resolution, why it's so much cheaper then Makerbot and Cube series?

The SD3 build is simple, utilitarian and downright scary industrial. There is no color choice, no powder coating, no injection molded curvy sleek case, no flashy graphics logos with gradients and swoops and no color shifting metallic fleck paint. As above I don't know all the details for comparison but I am inclined to believe that as far as basic capability goes you won't get enough more out of the others to justify the price.

>>3) We are also not sure about the material that 3D printer can handle...

Pretty much yes. Like anything you will want to go with a vendor that is known for quality and stands behind their product.
For the SD3 you will need to figure out your own profile for anything other than ABS but I will bet that lots of folks on here have already done that and are already extruding anything and everything that can be made into a 1.75mm rope.

>>4) We are looking for a nice quality 3D printer
Me I like my SD3, it does what I want it to do and keeps doing it even though I am not always all that gentle with it. Looks were not a priority for me, functionality, performance and of course price were. You might want to try and look around and see as many different printer makes and models in action as you can, and maybe create a matrix of capabilities and prioritize those to help make the decision.

I guess one big SD 2/3 upside is that it appears to be very upgradable if you want to start unbolting things and replacing them. I don't see that happening with the Cube and I am not so sure about the Makerbot. So I guess that means it can grow as your needs grow and as your wallet grows. You can actually get your hands in there to work on it if you want to.

And of course you could just source all of the parts for any RepRap variant and build one yourself. I personally like how those deltas work, they got some silky smooth moves.

3 Reply by Gomisan

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Re: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

As a starting point, the Solidoodle is great. I've done very little tweaking other than normal calibration and people are very impressed with the quality of the prints. It certainly exceeds my expectations and I'm getting tot the point where I'll happily do larger scale objects and be confident of a good print almost every time.

Gomisan's Website

4 Reply by ryanz0528

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Re: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

@foofoodog

Wow thank you so much for the great explanation, that was really helpful big_smile

I have another question about the SD3: does it provide supporting materials or it uses the material you are using to print as the supporting material?

We actually have the same question for other printers. The 3D printer we have in school provides an individual supporting material. After printing you just soak the whole thing in to a special tank and wait 36 hours to let the supporting material melt.

5 Reply by ryanz0528

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Re: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

@Gomisan

Thank you for your time reading my post(I should've make my post a lot shorter tongue)
I will definitely look into SD series for sure.

6 Reply by techbuilder2175

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Re: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

Honestly
unless you want to spend a lot of time I recommend the FlashForge 3D printer from amazon.

You will spend more time then you can imagine trying to get decent prints out of this thing
and mods are a must.

Honestly if I could go back I wouldn't of purchased this printer.

If your willing to wait you could also purchase the rigid bot however it hasn't come out yet so no one knows the quality yet

Powder coated steel enclosure, 1/4" Surface grounded hardened aluminum plate, MK2A Heat bed, .200 Polished fused quartz plate, Machined quick change hot bed mount, E3D hot end, Ramps 1.4, DRV8825 stepper motor drivers

7 Reply by JuanRoncal

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Re: Questions about purchasing 3D printer!

Wow, i see that we have to learn a lot of things about every printer before choose one :$