Maybe something you learned the hard way, or something you found out right before making a huge mistake.
E.g., for audiophiles: don’t buy subwoofers from speaker companies, and don’t buy speakers from subwoofer companies.
Maybe something you learned the hard way, or something you found out right before making a huge mistake.
E.g., for audiophiles: don’t buy subwoofers from speaker companies, and don’t buy speakers from subwoofer companies.
One of those hobbies where starting cheap actually makes it not worth it. Kind of like a cheap camera can make you feel discouraged once you get pretty good at photography. A $500 camera can get you started, but a $1500+ (or refurbished more expensive option) will unlock a whole new level of creative abilities (speaking from experience!)
What would you say the gap between the “this 3d printer will do the job but make you lose your mind” and “this is a reliable 3d printer that is reasonably priced for hobbies”?
I kinda disagree with this, in certain contexts. There is some value in learning how the machine works by self-assembling a kit (or buying off-the-shelf parts and assembling from an open-hardware guide). Identifying the things that can be upgraded, tinkering with firmwares and nozzles, printing parts to upgrade the machine itself… all are a fun aspect of the hobby, if you’re interested in the hardware side.
But if you just want to make figurines from squirty plastic, then yeah just buy a moderately-priced, well-supported turnkey printer (though probably not a Bambu, because they’re sliding toward enshittification).
If not bambu, what do you recommend?
Current sovol sv07 plus user and facing this wall where I can’t decide if it’s a skills/knowledge issue or a hardware limit.
Sovol has been generally decent in my experience (SV08), but they’re kinda positioned between the “tinker” and “turnkey” markets. What wall are you running into?
Bambu would have been my recommendation before they tried to lock people into the cloud connection. They’ve reversed course (for now) due to the backlash, but they’ll do it again when they think they can get away with it.
At this point I’d probably say Prusa, but I don’t have firsthand experience with them so that’s based solely on what I’ve read. If you’re looking for something that will “just work” you’re going to need to search for what’s in your price range and then read everything you can about the models in question on support forums and reddit (ew). You can also learn a lot by watching YouTube videos but you have to be really careful to see past the “they gave me this for free/paid for the video so I’m going to minimize the negatives” crap.
Great point! It also depends on how much time you have for it. I built a 3D printer when I was younger because I had hours most days to work on it.
Now I would probably only have a few hours a week to tinker, so if I spent most of that time just working on the printer and couldn’t get stuff actually printed and printed well, that would feel like wasted time personally!
Would be kinda cool to buy a functioning printer and print parts for a diy printer. Then it’ll have children haha!