Who has a 3D printer? Recommendations

There are 2 basic types of consumer 3d printer - resin (like the Mars) which is recommended for wargaming miniatures, and then FDM printers which is more suitable for almost everything else! (I.e. much more versatile, though I’m sure resin would be ok for your garmin clip too)

Any of the low-cost resin printers are probably fine, they’re really low-tech at the end of the day! Maybe google Reddit etc for user reviews. I have a Prusa SL1S which is great but not really a toe-in-the-water machine!

I get loads more use/value out of my FDM machines but of course it’s nice to have both.

I've just got my first 3D printer - literally today. It's an Creality Ender-2 Pro. Cost £100 on offer a couple of months ago, took 30 minutes to assemble. First print became detached from the bed, I cleaned the bed with isopropyl alcohol and raised the nozzle temperature to 65c.

I'm very happy with it so far, especially for the money.

Finished bunny, took about an hour. The ears aren't perfect as there was a power cut but the printer has a resume function so when the power came back on I could finish it.

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Anyone use one with wax for investment casting?

Like Zilog said, it's absolutely horses for courses, I have an ender 3 which is still I think the king of the budget printers, not because it's great but because it's got absolutely superb community and aftermarket backing, which makes all the difference. It does good work out of the box, it doesn't instantly need upgraded but you can make it basically anything you want with a visit to aliexpress 😉

But like any fdm it's the wrong method for miniatures- you can with a lot of effort get half-decent models but that's really a throwback to when resin was expensive and cranky, it'd be mad in 2023 to start out that way. The Mars looks like a smart option, though, do give some thought to cleaning and curing too- you don't need a washing/curing station but it seems like just about everyone that actually sticks with it and prints a lot of stuff, ends up getting one.

OTOH fdm are still good for shitting out terrain and other larger parts. Want a tablefull of classic 40k ruins or similar? Get a roll of carbon filament (to reduce the layer lines) and just get brrrring. And like any tool, you tend to find other uses for it- storage frinstance, all my paint stands and mini painting stands are printed frinstance

Best of all worlds is definitely both, but, that's 2 learning curves too. For most gaming purposes the modern, decent-sized volume resin printers are the way to go.

That'll be bed temperature of 65 degrees, the nozzle wants to be between 200 and 215 for PLA. I tend to use 215 but it does depend on the brand of PLA.

maybe i want my cake and eat it, but I don't really want to faff about with settings and the like, i really want one that is plug and play. I've read many see printing as a hobby in itself, for me really I'm just looking for a bit cheaper and more flexible way of getting the pieces I want, not to be messing about with stuff

any like that or are they all big bucks?

I run everything from fancy Ultimakers and huge CreatBots to Creality Enders. None of them are plug and play, I think I’ve messed around more with the £6.5k Ultimaker than my £200 Creality Ender 5

If you want a home printer get an Ender every time, but you’ll need to learn how it works and mess about with it

You can get good runs of months without touching anything but you’ll also have times when you want to throw it out the window, which doesn’t sound like what you want

Markforge is the closest to plug and play in my experience, but the beds are tiny, you’re locked into their filaments and slicer and the fact sites list price as “POA” tells you a little bit about affordability

That's absolutely true, currently my Ender three pro is printing beautifully but then you'll have a run of prints that just don't work and its quite frustrating (and time consuming) trying to track down the issue.

I recently purchased a Sovol SV06 for £190, which seems to work well. Careful setting up is required and loads of settings to learn and tune to get optimum results, but starting results were pretty good out of the box. Definitely not plug and play hobby, but relatively easy to learn if you dedicate some time to it. Print is also very slow, lots of patience required!

Sovol sv06 is what I was looking at too. Seems unless you’re spending 4 figures it’s still kind of a hobby in itself with plenty of tweaking.

I like the concept of resin printers and they produce fantastic miniatures etc but I don’t like the solvent washing / curing bit.

Resin is really the best option for miniatures though. There’s also a lot less to learn than with FDM but still frustrating when it doesn’t work of course 😂 The mess/faff is greatly helped with a dedicated cure/wash machine but it’s still messy, you want a corner of your garage etc to do it in really rather than setting it up in the dining room like you might with an FDM printer!

FDM printers for a few hundred quid are very much the BSO end of the market - nothing wrong with that but the designs are very old with little in the way of tech to make things easier. There’s been a lot going on at the upper end of the hobby market lately, the new-ish Bambu Labs machines have been very well received in terms of ease of use straight out of the box (however they are quite proprietary which is not for me and maybe leaves questions over longer-term use, repairs etc) and Prusa have just released their new mk4 machine which needs no manual adjustments whatsoever. Neither machine should need any tweaking and are significantly faster than cheaper options but also both cost over £1k. There’s also always going to be a learning-curve around the software, how to process files for optimal printing, different materials etc which will only come from experience (and getting things wrong!) However if the machine behaves itself this process is significantly less frustrating!

maybe i want my cake and eat it, but I don’t really want to faff about with settings and the like, i really want one that is plug and play. I’ve read many see printing as a hobby in itself, for me really I’m just looking for a bit cheaper and more flexible way of getting the pieces I want, not to be messing about with stuff

any like that or are they all big bucks?

You don't sound like you want to faff - you just want to get your hands on a 'thing' after pressing a few button and without imparting any learnt knowledge to getting it to print the best it can for that shape. Fair enough, we are all different.

But....do you actually plan on doing any actual designing either? i.e. do you plan on any of these 'things' having been drawn by you, altered by you, or even maybe modelled by hand and then 3D scanned for printing by you? Or are you just planning on going to thingyverse or wherever you get wargame models and downloading and printing? If you don't think you can handle/enjoy some 3D printer tinkering it might well be designing is not for you either.

If you don't want to faff AND you don't plan on doing any actual designing to be honest I'd just buy your models from Amazon or wherever folk buy wargame models from. Or download them and then upload them to one of the 3D printing houses if the models you are after can't be bought as a physical thing.

no I don't want faff, I imagine some love the geekery involved in fixing stuff, but I don't. if it doesn't work I'll get pissed off with it. design wise I might get into it later but to start with I just want to print others designs.

it costs a fortune to get others to print and post large scale terrain pieces. a 3d printer would pay for itself within a handful of pieces vs paying someone else to do it for me.

maybe I need to wait another 6 months or so for trickle down to start improving more budget printers. there is no reason they should be designed for loads of faffing. I imagine the wysiwyg market us much bigger than the tinker one

Not 100% plug and play (you occasionally get failed prints or jams) but the XYX Davinci and Davinci Jr series have been excellent at our school.

3 Davinci Jrs (PLA only, and nominally limited to their filament, but you can chip them very easily to use 3rd party) and a Davinci Jr Pro (can use ABS as well as PLA + any 3rd party filament)
All been great.

maybe I need to wait another 6 months or so for trickle down to start improving more budget printers

You'll be waiting a couple of decades. As above the £4k BCN3D I also use gives me more hassle than the 8 Creality printers we have as a bank for easier stuff.

Best analogy I can give you is a frying pan and your cooked breakfast. To cook food you actually want to eat you have to think about the temperature the pan is at, putting the different foods in at different times so its ready all together, maybe learn the (very) basics enough to flip the egg. If you think cooking should just be throwing all the stuff in at once at an indeterminate temperature, walking away, returning for it to magically become a perfect fry up you are probably best off going to Maccy Ds. But at the same time if you bought a frying pan it's no real biggie getting your head around making something edible without getting all Michelin star and your life's obsession about it.

DT78
Free Member

maybe I need to wait another 6 months or so for trickle down to start improving more budget printers. there is no reason they should be designed for loads of faffing. I

People have been saying that since at least when I got my OG tevo in 2016-ish. TBF even 2d printers are often a mare to live with and 3d printers just do a much more complex job. So there's going to be a fair amount of faff no matter what, but, it's all relative. Like, when I got my first one it was a race against time to print loads of bits for it to replace the bits that were definitely going to crack after a few dozen hours of printing. OTOH my Ender's taken some setting up but it's now close to faff-free in everyday use, I can comfortably just throw a filament I trust into it and drop on a 3 day print without any stress. But there's a fair amount of time invested in getting it set up really, really well.

Something not mentioned yet....they are not that cheap to run. Filament pricees have gone up a bit (especially if not printing in PLA) but it's also the leccy. Basically on an FDM printer you have a built plate you are keeping heated to say 65 degrees throughout the job - then a bit more for heating the printhead and the moving parts. The little room at work where the 8 Crealitys do their thing can get properly toasty. I used to bring the BCN3D home with me from time to time - either to do stuff from me or to monitor a long work job. That's got an A3 paper sized platform and uses some proper electricity on a 2 or 3 day job....so it does it exclusively at work now!