Brief Summary of my foray into 3D Printing
I've been prepping to get my Elegoo Mars Pro for about 2 months now. The journey into MSLA printing was started after I realized that my prints just weren't high enough in quality. I've been 3D printing for about 6 years now. My first 3D printer was from a Kickstarter by a now defunct company called New Matter. The idea of the 3D printer was supposed to make it easy for anyone to get started. The printer didn't require any leveling, only printed PLA, and had a super simple slicer. The printer worked well for a while but eventually gave up the ghost and I was left with no spare parts because the company had gone out of business.
2 years later I scrounged up enough money to purchase a Monoprice Maker Ultimate, which was just a rebranded Wanhao Duplicator 6. I sunk a lot of money into that printer and learned a lot about how 3D printers function and how to troubleshooting issues. I had a lot of fun with it, upgraded almost every aspect of the printer and then I was finally at a point where there wasn’t anything left to do. The tinkerer in me was not satisfied and wanted to move on to something that was more open sourced and had a bigger community behind it.
Enter….The Prusa MK3S, or rather a clone of it.
At the time when I started looking around at different printers, they had become a lot cheaper. The Ender 3 had come out and was a tempting choice at around $200. I had my eyes set on the Prusa MK3S for the longest time, but could not think of coughing up almost $800 for a 3D printer (Even though, after all the upgrades, and modifications of the Maker Ultimate, I’ve already spent over that). While on Reddit in r/3dprinting someone mentioned “Prusa MK3S clone from TriangleLabs”. I was instantly intrigued. I had bought parts from TriangleLabs before and was impressed with the quality of parts they sold. After doing more research, I decided to take a leap of faith and order one from AliExpress. This ended up being probably the best thing I ever bought. Things that people said I should worried about like the quality of parts, support, etc. I didn’t heed because I’ve never been the guy who only used what the manufacturer recommended. I was fine with trying to figure things out by myself and buying new parts if I needed to. One thing that I always believed was, at the end of the day what makes a Prusa MK3S is the motherboard and firmware, which was the Einsy Rambo. The board was open sourced and so it was obviously cloned as well. There is a part of me that feels bad for not purchasing a genuine Prusa MK3S, but at the end of the day I felt like I would have ended up sourcing all the parts to build my own anyway, so it was just convenient that TriangleLabs had a kit assembled. Not very long after I got the Prusa MK3S, I upgraded it to a Bear which is just a MK3S in a sturdier 2020 aluminium extrusion frame. I also bought the frame from AliExpress and was again surprised at the quality and the finish. Every extrusion was the right length down to the millimeter.
I have done multiple upgrades and changed a lot on my Prusa MK3S clone since then, and it still runs like a champ. One of the best experiences I’ve ever had with a 3D printer and the awesome thing is that there will continue to be community upgrades and the wonderful thing about open source is anyone can modify the design to improve it. I have a few reviews coming in the coming days, but I just wanted to give a brief summary of my adventures into 3D printing.