In March, I finally placed an order for a Prusa I3 MK3 3D printer. I had been planning to buy a 3D printer for a while. At first, I wanted to get one of those cheap I3 clones, but after reading a lot of user experiences I decided to spend the extra money and get an original Prusa I3. Bottom line is: the cheap clones are ok printers, but you have to spend a lot of time to get them to print more or less decently, and I didn't want to do that.
The waiting game
So, like I said, somewhere early March I placed the order, and the estimated shipping date was mid-April. That gave me plenty of time to study the assembly manual and read user feedback. I found out some people had some trouble getting the frame all straight and perpendicular, but luckily this wasn't a problem that couldn't be fixed.
In the meantime, the shipping date moved forward a few times. The flu season hadn't spared the people at Prusa Research, and late April I finally got a shipping notification. Woo hoo!
The build process
I have documented my entire build in a series of YouTube videos. The entire assembly manual has nine chapters, so I made it a nine part video series. Also, this is the first time I'm actually talking in front of the camera, something I haven't done before (my other videos in wich I talk are all voice-overs). I'm not exactly the best public speaker, but I think I did a decent job without sounding too much like a blabbering idiot.
The entire build went pretty smooth. The mentioned problem with the frame geometry didn't happen to me. One this that worried me a little bit at first were the linear bearings on the Y-axis. During assembly, they were quite noisy, and I was worries I had over tightened the screws to hold them in place. Nothing that was beyond fixing, but if I indeed damaged them it would mean ordering new bearings and waiting some more. Luckily, during printing the noise is gone. I managed to damage one part, though. When I tried to snap the spool holder in place, the bottom part that snaps around the aluminium frame broke, and it doesn't properly stay in place. Not a big issue, since I'm also building an enclosure with a separate spool holder anyway.
My experience so far
I've had the printer for a few months now. I've printed quite a bit, and here's what I've encountered so far.
First of all, 3D printing isn't plug and play. Sorry, it isn't. It often requires some experimenting and trial and error to get things right. I've already experienced a few jams that required me to disassemble the entire extruder, and I'm glad I bought the kit and not a preassembled printer.
I have also built and enclosure out of Ikea Lack tables, so I can print with ABS and HIPS. There are a few problems with this. First of all, Ikea Lack tables are very unstable; especially when printing small parts, where the extruder has to move back and forth rapidly, the entire enclosure shakes a lot. I managed to get this more or less under control my attaching some steel corner braces. Second, the printers jams easily inside an enclosure with the doors closed. Apparently, this has to do with the design of the extruder, it has insufficient cooling, wich causes something known as heat creep. I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but it's a bad thing.
Prusa has designed a new extruder body with improved cooling, so that's on my to do list: printing the new parts, and then rebuilding the extruder. Again, glad I bought the kit, because I basically have to take the entire extruder apart and reassemble it with the new parts.
Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the printer. I've had a few problems, but this also happens on printers that cost three, four times as much.
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