There was a stretch of time I was looking at videos of budget gaming PC builds and they’d be like “How to build a gaming PC for $150” and a lot of them went like “Buy a used Optiplex for $120, max out its RAM for $30, then use this GTX 2080 I got from nvidia for free because I have two billion subscribers.”
Me: Should I buy a prebuilt 3D printer?
Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.
Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?
Reddit: Well, I’m still tuning it for all my filaments. I’ve been through about 40kg, and I’ve got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.
Yeah those communities are wild. Before I bought my own printer I thought 3D printing is mostly fixing your printer and buying better parts and bed leveling and tuning etc.
Wasn’t looking forward to it so I bought an off-the-shelf printer with minimal assembly from a “boring” Chinese brand - couldn’t be happier with it, it just prints without any hassle and I have no urge to switch firmwares or tinker with the printer itself instead of with the printed stuff. To each their own I guess.
(Still plugged in a raspberry pi for octoprint and did some initial calibration for the filament of course …)
