This blog post is based on our experience in 3D printing for the last 4 years. Please do some research of the printers mentioned to determine what might work for you.
Running a small 3D printer farm brings about some questions about 3D printing. One of the most common questions we get is "what 3D printer is easy to use?" This is always a tough and easy question to answer. Now your asking yourself how can this be both tough and easy? Lets start with the easy part of the answer.
The Prusa series of printers are hands down the easiest to use. Now this applies only to the original Prusa printers built by Prusa Research. The Prusa I3 design is an open source design and has been copied and made cheaper by many other companies. Prusa tests all the parts of the printer and includes a print out of these tests. Prusa also creates and tests the printer firmware and slicing software. Prusa runs a massive printer farm to produce parts for their printers, in doing this they find problems quickly and push out firmware fixes once tested. Support from Prusa is always a chat box away. Keep in mind these are still machines and will need maintenance, clog nozzles and have parts break. In our printer farm experience the Prusa machines have needed less maintenance, had fewer clogged nozzles and have had less parts break than any other printer model we have used.
I'm sure you are currently on board and ready to buy your Prusa printer. Now the difficult part of recommending the Prusa is cost and availability. The Prusa I3 MK3S kit is currently $749.00 and the fully assembled option is $999.00 before shipping. The Prusa Mini is a great affordable option at $349.00 but if you ordered your printer today it currently has a backorder log until July to August 2020!
Prior to purchasing the Prusa printers we currently have, our go to printer has been the Creality CR-10S. Typically we have found these printers in the $450.00 - $600.00 price range. In total we have gotten 16 various versions of the CR-10 series printers and have only had 2 that we were not able to get them sorted out and working at all. These printers don't need modifications to get good cookie cutters from them but you will have to keep up on the maintenance. Our biggest maintenance item is clearing clogged nozzles and finding quality replacement nozzles. There have been times I've put a brand new nozzle in and had the printer clog up on the next print! The newer Creality printers have become more robust and have had less parts breakage.
From our experiences the Prusa i3 MK3S, Prusa Mini and Creality CR-10S are the only printers we would currently recommend. Now let's talk about other printers that we have used but would not recommend.
First we'll talk about a super cheap and super popular printer that really should have been good, the Creality Ender 3. The main components of the printer were identical to the original CR-10 that we loved at the time of the Ender 3's release. It used the same motherboard, hotend, motors and even upgraded the extruder parts (this upgrade was done to the CR-10S model). These printers worked great for the 1st month. After that we started having a lot of intermittent problems that just could not get solved. We gave 2 of our 3 Enders to friends with the understanding that they needed some work. The last just sat in a closet for a while and had some parts robbed for other printers. A few months ago I decided to get this printer back to printing after seeing some You Tube videos. I ended up having to spend $150 replacing parts to get it printing and while it is printing the quality is just not getting up to par with our other printers.
Our next bad printer may not really be to bad but we got it at a bad time in our 3D printing journey. The CR-10 was just killing it for us and Tevo released the Tornado that had a few better options and was just a tad cheaper than the CR-10. This printer came from the factory with a print on the bed so after assembling and adjustments I started printing out cookie cutters. Initial prints were coming out on par with the CR-10 prints. Then we started getting some really bad layer shifting. This made for some interesting but unusable cutters. After researching and adjusting the y axis vref we were back to getting great cutters from it. The next problem presented itself and became this machines death. We started just getting filament everywhere on the bed and it was messing up the cutters. Digging into the hotend I found that it was leaking filament. At this point into 3D printing I hadn't taken apart a hotend. In taking apart the hotend I ended up breaking the thermistor cable and now the hotend was unable to heat up from the printer. At some point I plan on using the frame and building this into a custom printer.
The first 3D printer that we purchased was a Monoprice Maker Select Plus. This printer was just purchased to help Crissey save some money on cutters, then turned her business into producing cutters! To be fair this could be a good printer but it was the one I figured things out on and experimented with different ideas on how to make cutters. We ran this printer pretty hard for just over a year before the big trouble began. Eventually the bed stopped heating and I traced that problem to a broken thermistor wire. This was an easy replacement but during the repair something happened and I was never able to get the bed re-leveled. This printer is a re-branded Wanhao Duplicator I3 Plus which is a tweak of an earlier Prusa I3 design.
Because of how much we liked the Monoprice at the time we decided to make a big plunge and bought a bunch of Wanhao Duplicator 6 printers. With the design of these printers we could print cutters at a faster print speed. This was great for production and even though these were the most expensive printers we had purchased, $900 at the time, within a month of printing we started experiencing a lot of underextrustion. I started with tweaking slicer settings but had no change and started to get clogging. This printer had very little community support and no support from Wanhao. Thankfully Ultimate 3D Printing Store that we bought them through was able to help get us back on track. The solution was to spend and additional $120 per printer to change the extruder to a Bondtech extruder. The Bondtech extruder got them back to printing and was even giving us better quality at the higher print speeds. We decided to pick up some more of these, even though between the purchases we got the og CR-10 and loved it. After a few months of printing and contemplating buying more of the D6 printers to standardize the farm every one of them started clogging in the extrusion block on every print. This issue just couldn't be solved and we ended up just replacing all of them with CR-10S printers. I briefly had one of these working well with ABS for non cookie cutter projects (don't ever use ABS or ASA for cutters) but while extrusion problems are gone I am now having problems with prints sticking to the bed.
If you've made it this far you may have forgotten what we recommend. Those would be the Prusa I3 MK3S, Prusa Mini and Creality CR-10S. Even if this is not your first 3D printer purchase do some research on these printer to see what will best fit your needs. 3D printing videos are huge on You Tube.
Great article. My first printer was a Monoprice maker select V2. It worked “OK” for a few month but once I started printing tons of PPE in May 2020, it was not performing at all. Clogged nozzle, impossible to keep the bed level. So frustrating!!
I bit the bullet and ordered the Prusa mini and I love it, everything about it! Well worth the price and the wait. Highly recommend the Prusa :)
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Love this article. My Ender 3 pro worked fine the first month, fast forward four months and it’s been down for a month and a half with so many replaced parts and time spent tweaking so many things and it still doesn’t work.