So this weekend I finished off my £120 3d printer off eBay.
For that kind of money, I wasn’t really expecting much but have been seriously impressed with the results to date. The quality is far nicer than my Up!Mini – but then I’m using a completely different toolchain, and since about 90% of 3d printing is about the software and settings you use, it’s not really a fair comparison.
I’m not sure I’d compare it to a £2k Ultimaker. But for just over a twentieth of the price(!) – yep for 5% of the cost of an Ultimaker – the results are pretty good.
No, ok, this one wasn’t.
But that’s because I moved it from the nice warm house, into the (at the time) cold and unheated workshop, then set it printing a test print without re-calibrating the nozzle height and leaving the bed for long enough to heat up properly. But it did demonstrate one thing – the actual hardware in 3d printing is only a tiny part of getting it right!
After an hour or so of fiddling with setting values, I was getting some pretty decent prints.
There’s almost no “banding” on the vertical walls and the bottom is only ragged because I ripped off the skirt/brim, rather than cut it cleanly with a knife. I printed a few test/calibration cubes and measured them. This one was supposed to be a 20mm cube:
Allowing for plastic shrinkage, I don’t think anyone is going to complain about the missing 0.15mm on this (on the long side it measured 19.91 and the height was 20.02mm).
All in all, I’m really impressed with this Tronxy X3 printer. I’m not using the best filament in it (I bought some trendy eco stuff and tbh, it’s not as good as “virgin” filament) but the printer copes well with it. The controller has online and offline modes (I prefer offline – I don’t know why so many people are down on printers than require an SD card to print from; it’s my preferred way of working).
In short, if anyone is looking at getting started with 3d printing (a few weeks ago I was a complete noob – although I do have experience in make robots and machinery and electronics, but had never really taken much interest in 3d printing) for the price, I can’t recommend one of these enough!
(edit: for those – like me – who don’t know, it’s a Prusa i3 mk3 clone with Repetier/Marlin firmware and I’m using Slic3r – with adaptive layer heights – to prepare the g-code).
