Look at Sovol or Anycubic in that price range. I don’t have direct experience with either. A good friend of mine had two Anycubics at one point last year and he said they were easier than his Creality.

My third printer, I paid $70 for, used (ender 3 pro return). It was missing several small components, one big part (top aluminum extrusion) that required some machining with a drill press, and had a bad thermistor.

I don’t think you can get a beginning printer for $100 unfortunately. Sovol and Anycubic make printers among the cheapest that are more beginner friendly (I think) than Ender, for roughly the same price. I have a friend with a Creality and an Anycubic Vyper, and the Vyper seems to be more beginner-friendly. I have two Crealitys and I love them, but both required a ton of modifications to become reliable.

Can you check your area for a local maker space? My local library has 3D printers for anyone under 18. Universities typically have a few of different technologies (SLS, SLA, FDM)

This looks like it would work with any E3D V6 heat break, right?

After CNC Kitchen’s review of the orbiter, I want to add one to my CR-10 V2. Its OEM heat break is an E3D V6 design.

3D Print General had one video where I recognized an AR-15 lower being printed in the background. The voice over was on the printer or filament (I forget).

Hoffman Tactical is still on YouTube. I was made aware of this channel when researching CF Nylon. HT has several promotional videos of his 80% printed AR rifle, and long discussions about which filament to use for which part of a rifle.

It’s very inconsistent.

The one thing I didn’t like about klipper firmware on my CR-10 was the default filament runout setup. One of my first big prints (with expensive ApolloX filament) ran out. The default klipper setup waits something like an hour, with the hot end still hot, then completely shuts down.

So my home position was lost, and with a partial part on the plate, there was no way of re-homing, so it was a wasted part.

Make sure your filament runout timeout is set to 24 hours (and I think I might have made the temp lower so it didn’t burn?)

I like klipper on mine, too. I do wish the default mesh would be loaded at startup, but it doesn’t load any mesh. Which doesn’t really matter, I guess. I have four build plates, three different styles, so I’m running bed levelling pretty much every print anyways.

Polymaker polylite PLA pro. The Polymax PLA is more expensive and less rigid. The PLA pro is only $2 more a kilo than regular polylite PLA and significantly stronger. Many colors are more matte than esun PLA + which is similar in cost and performance.

Second this. If it’s PLA, improving layer cooling might help stiffen the last layer before the next is applied. If it’s not PLA, slowing the print down can reduce the horizontal forces for slower-cooling filaments like PETG/ABS. If there’s any warping or over extrusion leaving little blobs on the surface, your nozzle can bump into them, breaking cantilevered features like this one, or breaking the part off the build plate. Getting retraction to blob less or making sure no over-extrusion exists could help. If it’s PETG or Nylon, printing slightly wet (where the surface doesn’t look bad) can cause blobs on the top layer that the nozzle hits and causes those horizonal forces.

Drooping like this means something is too soft (speed up cooling on PLA, reduce print speed to give more cooling time and better layer adhesion for any material)

Prints like this aren’t impossible. I’ve printed a PETG storm drain that had vertical slots like this when I couldn’t buy one I needed. It turned out great but I had to print really slow.

My first PETG print was amazing. One of the best prints I ever did. Then I had 10 failures in a row. I went though 3 half rolls (kept changing them thinking it was cheap filament).

I had a CR-10v2 with the OEM bed springs. I stiffened them by adding a bunch of washers since it’s recommended to upgrade the OEM springs. Suddenly I had mostly good prints. I bought a filament dryer and started printing directly out of that. That solved most of the rest of my problems.

PETG is the “second easiest to print” because it can print below 250 and doesn’t need an enclosure, but that’s only part of the picture. It’s really picky with your first layer height, it doesn’t stick to itself very well with a layer fan on it, and it absorbs moisture (I live in a swamp, I have to print PETG out of a dryer).

I find ASA easier to print than PETG with most prints, with only a few warp-prone shapes where ASA is difficult. I try ASA first and keep more spools in hand than PETG.

I’ve got one now with a V6 knockoff hot end, steel PEI print bed, and running klipper firmware. It was backup printer, and now it’s the backup to the backup (purchased Comgrow $70 used Ender 3 pro).

I’d like to give this to a friend that’s interested in printing, but I’d have to flash back to stock firmware. The buttons and display don’t work with klipper, and I don’t have a spare raspberry pi.

It’s still relevant with the upgrades I made to it, except it’s still has really noisy steppers, and the build volume is so small it’s really limiting. I think the Prusa mini is still large enough to be practical. The monoprice is mostly relegated to toys.

I need some 18650 holders for a project which the mini can do great with, but I need a lot and printing them two or three at a time won’t cut it.

Even with moderate usage, no joke, I’d recommend getting a flammables cabinet to store IPA. At the end of every weekend, I drain our washing station back into two three liter jugs and put them in the flammables cabinet. I drain them while the washer is running to get the solid stuff out of the washer. They’re stored correctly, the cabinet prevents light from reaching the jugs, and the solids settle to the bottom of the jugs over the weekend. On Monday I carefully pour the top portion into the auto washer and top it off with new IPA. The settled layer gets poured into the waste container.

We have two printers at work, one wash station and one cure station. And we have 8x jugs of IPA in our flammables cabinet.

Before we started settling in the cabinet and decanting our wash solution, we went through an incredible amount of IPA that we had to deal with as waste. And this is from two SLA printers, which we use in addition to our Prusa MK3 and SLS nylon printers, so we don’t always use the resin printers.

I have about a 30% success rate bottling with flip tops. I normally keg but wanted the flexibility to bottle, but I had a lot of flat beer that I had to pour into a mini keg and force carbonate.

Because it’s the harder skill, IMO. People find out I can print and start asking for really custom stuff, like all I have to do is picture it in my head and it will print.

I can draw a little in CAD, because that’s part of my day job. But I don’t know how to make a model of Mario dabbing.

Happened before. I can’t find the story though. I think it was someone who showed up in Europe claiming to be a government official for a South American country. They commissioned printers to make a lot of currency notes. They vanished and it was discovered they weren’t part of this countries’ government.

Most US counterfeit US Bank Notes are printed in Colombia these days.

Thanks for the link.

It wasn’t an issue with my monoprice, so I might have skipped over some warnings. Then I didn’t read up on all of klipper documentation because I was familiar with it. Maybe I’m warning others about something that’s in the documentation anyways.

The stupid thing is that I’ve had this happen with my Ender 3 Pro when hooked up to pronterface. I had forgotten it had happened.

I’ve used formlabs printers at work. They are great, but using them has persuaded me to not purchase my own. Most prints, I use three pair of disposable gloves. That resin and the IPA wash (which has a lot of dissolved resin) make really annoying messes. We’ve already lost one Form Wash due to people being careless and leaving the lid up. The IPA with resin will set over time.

You can’t pour the stuff down the drain. One user tried putting really contaminated IPA in a tray and sticking it in our chemical hood to dissolve (while myself or the lab manager wasn’t there to stop him). We had a surprise safety audit like we do on occasion and were cited for leaving this huge batch of flammable material out in the open.

We ended up getting a dedicated flammable cabinet for resin IPA. At the end of the week, I’ll turn on the Form Wash and let it stir the wash IPA for a few minutes. While it’s still stirring, I transfer it to a couple of three liter jugs and place them in the flammables cabinet. It sits for a couple of days and a lot of solids settle to the bottom of the container. Then the top 80%-90% of the IPA is carefully poured back into the wash chamber without stirring up sediment on the bottom. Fresh IPA is used to top off the wash. The cloudy wash in the bottom of the jug is poured into yet another jug. Once that jug is full, it sits for a week to settle in the flammables cabinet. We can usually capture the top 10% and pour it (through a filter) back into our main wash solution, the rest is capped and left exposed to light for several days/weeks to set, and then is disposed of in our hazardous waste.

Even with all of this settling to keep our wash solution as clean as we can, eventually, it will become too contaminated to use (formlabs recommends changing the liquid at a particular density).

It’s a messy process and people still get gloves damp and touch the cure station and get resin prints everywhere. We leave IPA wipes on the counter and go though a pack of those every two weeks trying to keep the resin print area clean. I like the print quality and ease of getting a print. But after using the one at work, I decided not to get one at home.

Benchy also verifies your print settings are correct. Not as great as a temp tower/retraction test, but decent at detecting major setting problems

It happens faster with high humidity. But it will happen in drier air too. A dry box will keep PETG dry, but not necessarily dry it.

It’s not uncommon to have PETG with problematic moisture content directly from the factory, even shrink wrapped with desiccant.

I print PETG from a dry box set to 55C. Even when my print is done and it sits for a weekend (rare), I keep the dryer on. If I have to swap a spool, it goes in a dry box that I keep below 20% RH. I also use a lot of cheaper PETG, though. It’s my least favorite filament to print so far, but one of my favorite to make functional held objects since it’s one of the densest polymers used in printing and feels heftier than most 3d printed objects.

PETG is a diva. If something’s not perfect, it refuses to print. My CR-10 had the infamous first version of the Creality bed springs, and vibrations would cause enough movement of the tramming springs, the print would fail. Even watching it put down a perfect line of filament, it would move and fail during the first layer on a larger print. My problems mostly went away after upgrading bed springs.

Also, I live in a swampy area, I have to print PETG out of a heated dryer set to 55 degrees all the time. That took care of almost all of the other problems.

PETG is softer than PLA, so the extruder “bites” it differently. Calibrating my e-steps for PETG was the final key to printing great PETG parts.

I still think ASA is easier for me to print than PETG.