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Original Prusa MK4

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211–220 of 277 posts

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#211
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just canceled my X1-Carbon order. Just spend some time on the Bambu Labs subreddit and you will see a lot of frustrated owners. It is insanely loud, and it seems unreliable and buggy. I have owned a lot of printers over the years, and the only printers I, or any of my colleagues come back to are Prusa printers. They are incredibly reliable. The few times we have had issues with a part, we have been able to print a…

> Just spend some time on the Bambu Labs subreddit and you will see a lot of frustrated owners. I have had mine (w/ four total AMS units) for two months now and have over 500hrs of printing so far w/ minimal failed prints. I often print in sport and/or ludicrous too. I own eight other 3D printers of various major brands (including Prusa) and it’s by far and away the best I’ve ever owned. Easily comparable to printers…

The problem is going to be what happens when the needs to be serviced, whether it be a car, boat, lamp, or 3d printer. I'm glad that your experience is good -- as the way it should be with most consumer equipment.

But this comes down to basic dogfooding. Prusa dogfoods their stuff. Bambu AFAICT doesn't. Are any of the parts on the Bambu 3D printed or is everything metal and injection molded with plastic? Serious failures are going to happen at the 1/2/3 year mark.

I really don't know that answer for bambu. I do know the answer for Prusa.

I also know because Prusa open sources their designs, E3D had a platform to sell their REVO nozzles.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#212
Words come to mind when I think of using Prusas I have used: Reliable, Plug and Play, Workhorse, Industrial, Application

Every other 3D printer I have used: Calibration, Settings, Filament, Buggy, Spaghetti, Error.

Doubt this will be much of an improvement, there is little to improve upon with the MK3S+.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#213

There’s also various upgrade kits from the 3 to 3.5, 3.9 and 4. Here is the full kit https://www.prusa3d.com/product/original-prusa-i3-mk3-s-to-m...

Sadly at $579 that is almost the price of a full printer at $799. May as well buy the full printer and sell the old one :(

The 3.5 upgrade looks compelling at 250 for the input shaping and pressure advance. Native Wi-Fi is a mild bonus if you already have an octopi setup. For the others, I agree. That’s a good chunk of the way to the price of a brand new P1P, which comes assembled.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#214
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy is it to repair?

Parts for it are available from the manufacturer for decent prices. I've looked at some of the repair guides and they seem decently detailed.

I guess to some point, my qualms with Bambu are that they haven't been around long enough...

But at what point, I asked myself, how long does a 3d printer company need to be around before I'll buy from them.

My answer is 3 years for myself. Others might have a different opinion. Further, if they dogfooded their own printers, I would have a change of opinion.

I don't think it takes 3 years. But the Mk4 has 1M hours in Prusa's print farm for Prusa to iterate on.

the other thing is that as a general rule, I don't buy the first model of when it comes out. I'll wait until v2 or v3 of thing.

With that said, I'm certainly looking forward to what the Bambu labs carbon x1 v3 looks like.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#215

These look like very solid improvements over the MK3S+ (I personally have two MK3S+, and use them a lot), and I love their commitment to open hardware and for making upgrade kits available, but it's a bit disappointing to see still how far Prusa is behind truly next-gen printers like the Bambu Lab X1-Carbon.

Disclaimer: I own an Ender 3, heavily modified. Prusa printers are generally rock solid and their quality control is great. For 1k, I really think we should be looking at a CoreXY machine (or, at least, something that doesn't have a bed that moves, whatever the kinematics). That's a major speed limitation, and it also causes vibrations even in lower speeds as you are moving the bed and your entire model. That's the o…

The load cell is amazing BTW. I have one on the creality CR6MAX, prusa has talked about it being sensitive enough to actually do 3d scanning of low-profile objects with it. I doubt they will implement that into the slicer but I don't doubt they can actually print that flat orange perfect first layer with it.

I agree that sharing Gcode should end as well, I understand how they thought that might be a good idea given how daunting prusaslicer is for non-techies but that wasn't a good solution.

Although Corexy is clearly a more rigid form factor I wonder if the input shaping advancements will make that bed slinging i3 seem much faster than we are expecting.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy is it to repair?

I own replacement parts for every expendable and/or non-warrantied part. I’ve test replaced a bunch to prove it works (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works).

> (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works)

I appreciate this. I have seen though, particularly in the used car parts market, where parts are often unobtanium. Would the X1 Carbon be better with 4040 aluminum extrusion or their custom sheet metal bent parts?

The Mk4 still has the large metal frame. I wish they would move that to 4040 or some other available, easy to source material.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a proprietary versus open source argument. You can build a mk4 clone for much less than the price of a Prusa-branded one, as everything is open source. The higher price tag is like a donation to open source. I would say the higher price tag is more like "Prusa" using its name as a quality assurance system where if you want to get something working without much hassle (since nearly every other mk4/mk3s clone th…

> since nearly every other mk4/mk3s clone that has been out there really really sucks except the ones from Prusa I have had an Ender-3 V2 for a few years and it definitely doesn’t suck. I did add a BL Touch sensor for auto-leveling, and OctoPrint for remote printing/monitoring - which are great convenience upgrades. But the printer itself is very reliable and the only maintenance I’ve needed to do is to replace a few…

Not to mention that to a large extent, you can spend the difference between stock unit prices making an Ender-3 v2 nearly as capable as a $799-$1,000 printer. Does it make sense? Overkill? Depends what you want to get out of the hobby. Can’t scoff at those who want to learn the fundamentals of 3D printing through the experience of modding and tuning ad nauseum because it’s _just not quite there yet_. I’m one of those Ender-3 V2 folks who can’t stop tweaking and modding and it’s been a frustratingly awesome and educational ride for the last year and some change. No regrets. I’ve gotten great prints along the way. But now, if I add a printer in the future that promises to “just work” and it doesn’t, I can diagnose/fix pretty quickly. Which I might just do.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#219

Not quite on topic, but I wanted to start 3D printing for a long time, but it feels there’s a huge gap from where I am (0 knowledge of 3D modeling and obviously 0 experience with printing) and where I want to get (design some custom parts that would make my life easier, e.g. a custom support for my Magic Trackpad that integrates with my keyboard). Does anyone have a good recommendation to go “from zero to hero”?

I think FreeCAD or equivalent is the best place to start. See if you can find some sketching and parametric modeling tutorials in FreeCAD and follow them, then design your part. FreeCAD because it's free, open source basis and parametric.

Re: Original Prusa MK4

#220
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its more just a brand thing, Prusa was one of the early big names in (hobbyist) 3d printing scene. I don't think this printer coming from any other brand would have reached the front page

This is the truth. Prusa used to be in front of the line a couple of years ago, but since then they've dropped the ball and other manufacturers have caught up. And with much better open-source alternatives like Voron printers, very few people are ready to shell out money for Prusa printers. Plus, there's a big fanboy community around this brand, a lot of which might just be genuine shills (maybe not here on HN, but t…

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