3d printer Recommendations?

Cool!

Running my first print!

Hopefully you fine people can help me out. I am finally ready to head into the printer world, mostly for Wargaming stuff. Resin is out of the question. I have a little kid and no dedicated workshop area in the house to set up. In fact, I would have to set the printer up in the same room I am sleeping in, which by all accounts is not a great idea. Hence I am looking for an enclosed printer or a printer for which there are enclosures available, that have built-in filters. Additionally, it should have not a bigger footprint than 50x50cm. And finally, I am not a tinkerer, hence I would prefer an easy one that I don’t have to upgrade a dozen things for before it works. It has proven very tricky to find one that ticks all boxes. Any suggestions welcome.

An Ender 2 Pro?

It’s small, simple and portable with none of the toxicity issues with resin. You won’t get as great detail as with resin, but nicely set up FDM printers can get good results.

All of the Enders are terribly fiddly and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone who doesn’t want to tinker. I’ve spent more time on my ender 3 pro working on it than it has printing.

Yea, I checked out the Ender’s, as they are recommended everywhere but they are clearly in the tinker category. If I had more time I would jump on it as it sounds fun. But I just can’t spend the time on it. Looking at things like Adventurer 4 but they don’t have a filter from what I see.

I’m pretty happy with my AnyCubic Vyper, which has auto-leveling and a filament sensor and has been dramatically less quirky than the Monoprice I replaced.

They just released a new series, the Kobra, that has even more quality-of-life features, and I’d imagine you could get an enclosure for the smaller one:

Well, I’m going to throw my Monoprice Mini v2 in the dumpster. It jams on every print. I’ve replaced the nozzle and heating tube three times, and it always just jams again immediately.

And even when it worked, the prints almost always failed.

My entry-level AnyCubic Mega S still needs a lot of tinkering. I don’t think there is a tinker-free model yet.

I had that feeling, which is why I went with the CR6-SE as a budget, see how much I use it before stepping up with either upgrades, or a higher end printer.

First print went really well, even tho I didn’t do the full dissasemble and verify the whole mobo recommendations from the community. didn’t install the community firmware either - basically seeing what it can do straight out of the box.

Will do a couple more prints this week and see how it goes.

My Maker Select V2 was a pain in the ass. I don’t miss it. I got some great prints out of it, but it was a combination of luck, trial and error, and always printing a raft to deal with the poor leveling.

Ender 2 Pro not a good starter one for $220 CAD?

He didn’t ask for a starter one, he asked for one with some requirements and that wasn’t for tinkerers. My experience with the Enders are that they require a ton of tinkering. It put me off the hobby a lot and I wish I’d have paid more money for a better printer (I’ve spent a ton of money anyway making it into a “good” printer). So it depends on what you want in your starter model. If you want cheap and want a platform to make modifications etc to, then I can recommend the Enders. If you want something that just works, I would recommend against. Looks like maybe a different model may be better than the pro 2/3/5 though.

Auto-leveling. If you look for one feature, look for that. Trying to level 3D printers is horribly annoying.

If I was buying today, I’d get this:

I haven’t used it, but I’m happy with my Vyper, and this improves on that in a number of ways, though it has a slightly smaller bed.

That’s pretty much what my research indicated to me, hence the step up to the CR6-SE. Even then, the documentation was rather sparse on getting started with both assembly and the first print.

Yeah, Creality is very much an open source darling in the way that Linux is an open source darling. You’re going to have to compile your own kernel at some point.

Yea, that’s not for me. I like a bit of tweaking fine but not more then that . After some more information gathering during the weekend I am strongly consider the Prusa Mini+. Though I am hesitant because it uses a boden tube and from what I gather a direct drive would be better. The bigger Prusa would be my top choice alas it’s out of my price range right now.

Prusa has a great reputation, and I see they’ve added auto-leveling. That’s a really small bed, but if the stuff you’re printing will fit, looks like a great option.

Mostly going to do wargaming and RPG terrain and some miniatures. The bed is a bit small but I figure for starting out and learning it should do well enough.

Still love my Prusa 3mk3s+. Very glad I went with it instead of some of the cheaper options, though building it took like 10-12 hours. The Mini looks to be considerably easier to build from the kit form, but it’s all 100% doable with zero experience if you take it slow. My one tip if you do go with the kit and assemble it yourself is you use the online manual and look at the comments for each step. Some valuable information there, especially if you quickly go over them before you start.

It’s hard to explain how demoralizing it is to have a print job screw up half way through or near the end, given how slow these machines are. The Prusa can and does still screw up but all of them have been issues on my end, not understanding what needed supports, a raft, etc.