I got me 3D printer, awesome!

ShivP said:
OK, what's a "reasonable" price?
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As I posted earlier, the supply of filament at the moment is low, so prices are higher than normal but £20 for kg of plain filament is reasonable. As you can see there is cheaper and more expensive stuff.

Why didn't you get the Hobbyking stuff?
 
bulb66 said:
As I posted earlier, the supply of filament at the moment is low, so prices are higher than normal but £20 for kg of plain filament is reasonable. As you can see there is cheaper and more expensive stuff.

Why didn't you get the Hobbyking stuff?
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I was just a bit scared with the PLA+ rather than regular PLA particularly as it's going to be my first time printing
 
ShivP said:
I was just a bit scared with the PLA+ rather than regular PLA particularly as it's going to be my first time printing
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PLA + or PLA pro (which you linked above) or "normal" PLA are all going to print the same, it's the properties of the print after that is slightly different but to be honest don't worry about it.

Personally I wouldn't get the really cheap stuff as it can have problems, although I have heard good stuff about the cheap Hobbyking stuff. Anything between £15-£25 is going to fine.
 
ShivP said:
I was just a bit scared with the PLA+ rather than regular PLA particularly as it's going to be my first time printing
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I am the same as you and started about a month ago now, so far I have printed with perhaps 3 or 4 different PLAs, to share a bit of my experience from a total noob point of view. I bought a 75 quid printer from china, a i3 clone of shocking quality and that came with some pla, that stuff seems to be a bit brittle and a bit rubbish. I then bought a random roll off of ebay and its called yoyi see images below, this stuff just prints lovely and it was only £12 for 1kg, i tend to print a bit lower than the 200 degree it recommends but it does produce nice results. Then I got into printing some visors for a local group and they provided me with some polymaker pla, 750g of the red stuff, its a chunk more expensive than the blue but imo produces very similar results. So now im just buying whatever comes up and is reasonably priced, the grey was £9 for 500g which I thought was reasonable so grabbed that. Bought the carbon fibre and realised I needed a hardened nozzel so only had a little go with that but tbh every pla ive printed with so far is broadly similar:





My visor efforts today while working: :)
 
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@Vince you should try some silk pla, the prints are gorgeous and shiney.. Need to print at a higher temp, I usally print at 230 with a bed temp of 60 while printing with the silk stuff..
 
Question for you DIY builders. Okay I went lazy and expensive and bought a plug and play solution (relative terms for 3D printing!!)... I know I should have built my own, as I've already designed and made and use my own 3 axis mill/router for wood and aluminium. (1100x680x150 cutting area). So I'm familiar with the principles of stepper motors, drivers, control boards etc.

Where do you source most of your parts from, I see auction sites a wash with cheap Chinese bits of unknown (to me) quality.
Preferred concepts, to me the feeder at the spool end pushing the filament seems better idea to keep the hot end mass down and smaller. (As my Ultimaker does)
Dual material system, 2.85 filament, most DIY suff seems 1.75mm..
Do the controller boards (seen a Rambo 1.2G) allow direct connect to the stepper motors or they need driver modules to handle the power?
I used Valueframe for the extruded aluminium sections on my mill.. Would do similar I guess.
Might be tempted to build one as well, but I'd want a long slim bed, so perhaps 6 or 700mm x 250 x 100.
 
9designs2 said:
Question for you DIY builders. Okay I went lazy and expensive and bought a plug and play solution (relative terms for 3D printing!!)... I know I should have built my own, as I've already designed and made and use my own 3 axis mill/router for wood and aluminium. (1100x680x150 cutting area). So I'm familiar with the principles of stepper motors, drivers, control boards etc.

Where do you source most of your parts from, I see auction sites a wash with cheap Chinese bits of unknown (to me) quality.
Preferred concepts, to me the feeder at the spool end pushing the filament seems better idea to keep the hot end mass down and smaller. (As my Ultimaker does)
Dual material system, 2.85 filament, most DIY suff seems 1.75mm..
Do the controller boards (seen a Rambo 1.2G) allow direct connect to the stepper motors or they need driver modules to handle the power?
I used Valueframe for the extruded aluminium sections on my mill.. Would do similar I guess.
Might be tempted to build one as well, but I'd want a long slim bed, so perhaps 6 or 700mm x 250 x 100.
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So parts you can go direct to E3D for extruders, hotends, step motors, drivers etc personally I prefer direct drive over bowden but if you only going to do rigid filament bowden is fine.

Control board, can either have integrated drivers or plugin ones but they are needed regardless.

As for extrusion I would go to Ooznest.

Any other questions feel free to ask.
 
9designs2 said:
Question for you DIY builders. Okay I went lazy and expensive and bought a plug and play solution (relative terms for 3D printing!!)... I know I should have built my own, as I've already designed and made and use my own 3 axis mill/router for wood and aluminium. (1100x680x150 cutting area). So I'm familiar with the principles of stepper motors, drivers, control boards etc.

Where do you source most of your parts from, I see auction sites a wash with cheap Chinese bits of unknown (to me) quality.
Preferred concepts, to me the feeder at the spool end pushing the filament seems better idea to keep the hot end mass down and smaller. (As my Ultimaker does)
Dual material system, 2.85 filament, most DIY suff seems 1.75mm..
Do the controller boards (seen a Rambo 1.2G) allow direct connect to the stepper motors or they need driver modules to handle the power?
I used Valueframe for the extruded aluminium sections on my mill.. Would do similar I guess.
Might be tempted to build one as well, but I'd want a long slim bed, so perhaps 6 or 700mm x 250 x 100.
Click to expand...

Im currently building a DIY and most of the stuff has been coming in from china and taking 3 or so weeks to get here. I bought some extrusion and some other bits off of ebay from uk sellers. Fun little project, I have not been steaming through it but I recon my new little printer is about 80% done now. Hopefully finish it in the next few weeks. Still waiting on some of the electronics and for me to finish the rest of the cad work.
 
Put together the X carriage for my scratch build printer using an ender 3 mount, printed parts, titan aero clone and also bl touch. Looks ok so far might have to make some small changes:

 
varkanoid said:
out of interest which one did you buy ? Was it the CTC one ?
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It no longer looks anything like it did as I have upgraded everything on it, literally, but yes it was the ctc i3 clone. I was clearly over using it as the motherboard burnt out a stepper driver within a week. This is how it looks now, all the purple parts are printed upgrade parts:



Ive changed the bed from a wooden to metal one, all the rods, all the mounts, the vertical bars are new and a different thread pitch, the extruder is not the one it came with, its now running an anycubic trigorilla board with 1/32 drivers and a bigtreetech tft rather than the lcd it came with. It is basically just a mess of random parts but actually she prints pretty decent now.

It has been fun messing with it but i'm having a lot of fun building my own printer using it :)
 
varkanoid said:
It does look nothing like the original CTC. Just wondering whether to get one for my Dad for his birthday in August as a surprise. Its cheap enough to tinker and experiment with.
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Honestly - It is worth it, even if it breaks parts cost pittance and part of the fun is rebuilding and reprogramming it. One thing that did concern me with the off the shelf config is it doesn't have any thermal runaway protection or bootloader to be able to reprogram it with the latest marlin. No thermal runaway on something like this is imo dangerous and was part of the reason my one fried itself. My one is now running the latest Marlin and i've tested all of the thermal runaway and added some of my own code for a 3rd fan to point at the board.

In terms of something to mess with and play with and even get some very nice prints it isn't bad at all. All the prints I shared above so the boaty, visors and the x axis for my new design were all printed on the ctc.
 
Just been watching this assembly video and reading the comments puts you off a bit with all the problems you need to fix and parts coming missing or broken and lack of instructions. I guess you get what you pay for.

Whats really funny in the vid is from 19:20 doesnt look built right then suddenly at 22:25 guy looks at it mystified then at 22:30 it suddenly jumps as they edit it to a correctly built one.


I can see what you mean about Thermal Runaway protection.
https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/questions/8466/what-is-thermal-runaway-protection
 
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