I just got one about 2 weeks ago! This is my printer, the Monoprice Select Mini. At $200 it comes pre-assembled and prints out at pretty nice quality! I'm a complete novice to 3D printing but this thing has been fantastic so far. Printer: https://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-Select-Printer-Heated-Filament/dp/B01FL49VZE My good friend ModBot also made a review over it which was responsible for me spontaneously purchasing it:
That has definitely been a bit of a hindering point for me admittedly. Several cool things I wanted to print I either had to scale down or scrap, most notably I can't print Xbox One controller faceplates because they're just a tad bit too big for my heat bed. I can say though this has been the most fun thing I've done with my free time in a while and I'm having a blast printing. I'm currently printing a glow-in-the-dark Totoro as I type!
I just bought a Anet A8 this past week. It is a Prusa i3 clone. Got it assembled this week. Been printing non stop since. Best $180.00 shipped I ever spent.
I have a few questions about the Anet A8 if you don't mind me asking! - Is that the first 3D printer you've ever owned? - Did you have any experience printing before? - How easy/hard was assembly? - Did you run into any hardware issues yet? - Did you replace any parts or did you use everything out of the box and slap it together? The Anet A8 looks great and has a big community of owners but I have yet to hear about anyone successfully utilizing the printer using only the out of box parts. Every case I see is something like "Oh the Anet A8 is great! All I did was replace the PSU, bed, [insert more pieces here], and it works fine!"
I would also like to know your opinion on the Anet A8, because it's the most affordable 3D printer I've seen with a 20cm³+ build area. It's only like $250 AUD including postage from this site: http://www.gearbest.com/3d-printers-3d-printer-kits/pp_337314.html There's an embedded video there where a guy talks about it, and he says that he had to print some extra parts to get it working smoothly...
First one I have owned. But have used numerous ones at our local maker group over the past few years. Assembly kind of sucked. Felt overwhelmed as I have horrible A.D.D. Took about 4 hours out of the box until was printing. Hardware wise nothing. Some of the heat sinks on the Mosfets on the board get a little warm for my taste. I am looking into going active cooling which works out because I am planning on printing the cover for the board and fan straps right to it. I used the parts that came with it. only thing I have printed to make it better is the cap for the extruder unlock. (Saves your fingers) 2 Caps for the top of the Z axis (vertical) The gears weren't long enough to go through the frame. I have put a 8"x8" plate of glass down on the bed because I was tired of using tape. Now just use glue sticks on the glass. Also makes it much easier to get the parts to release. Also I did a nozzel fan piece to replace the junk one from the factory. Overall about a hour on printing parts to help with it in the long run. Ebay to be honest. http://www.ebay.com/itm/252722414289 Is where I picked it up from took 5 days shipping. Only problems I really have had are my own fault. Trying to print too fast or not hot enough.
I own 3 printers and have access to another one at work, one is a prusa i3 clone I got in a kit for $200. I would actually recommend this sort of thing as it forces you to learn about how 3d printing works. You will not get good quality prints from them out of the box and must spend weeks getting it all set up. My second machine I built with parts printed on the first maching. Its a prusa i3 rework design with a frame I bought on eBay it runs a lot better than the kit. My third machine is a Flashforge Creator I picked up second hand for really cheap. Out of all of my machines that one prints the best it takes the least amount of time to set up and the bed only moves down so less stress on the part than a bed that moves the part. The printer I have at work is a XYZprinting Davinci pro. I do not recommend that machine at all.
I also have an Anet A8, got it for Christmas. Never had a 3d printer before. First of all if you do not like the idea of continuously upgrading the printer then don't buy the Anet and instead buy an Ultimaker. That being said it prints absolutely fine right out the box. My first prints were simply mesmerizing and jaw-dropping especially since I never had seen a 3d printer in action before. The quality is ok, yes you do see the lines from the different layers, it does not look like an injection molded part, but hey it was only $150 on sale. Now safety is one of the issues with a lot of stuff from China, the other one being quality control. So here are the problems I personally encountered: - two of the acrylic pieces for the frame were not cut straight, had to sand the edge so they would fit together at a 90° angle, easy fix but really annoying - the heatbed is a little bend in the middle, this seems to be quite common, so I use the glass front from a $2 picture frame on top of it As a precauting I did the following modifications after seeing pictures of those components failing on facebook: - replaced the included power supply with an $15 HP DPS600 PB server supply from ebay - installed an 80mm fan in front of the 3d printers mainboard to cool it - rewired the heatbed, removing the connector from the heatbed and routing it through a $5 mosfet directly to the power supply Things I still need to do: - lubricate all the bearings, didn't say anything about that in the build guide but now they make a squeaky noise sometimes - the 4 vertical rods are not exactly parallel to each other, the people in the facebook group seem to have a replacement part you can print to fix it but I have not read through all the info yet Overall I would say that if you want to learn more about 3d printers then the Anet A8 will be a good teacher. Personally I do enjoy printing upgrade parts but there also were the times when I wondered what kind of 3d printer I could have gotten for twice the money because the Anet A8 sure has a few flaws.
