alt Hacker NewsAll of this was on a Bambu A1 Mini?
These are the types of things I want to print. My Ender 3 was so finicky, I only got a few out before I gave up.
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I picked up a P1S for Black Friday. I’ve been printing non-stop since December, including some stuff I modeled myself. Only failed prints have been because I printed the wrong thing. It’s been flawless with PLA. Haven’t done PETG or ASA yet.
I just got a Bambu P1S (they are / were on sale since the P2S came out) and the difference to my Ender 3 is truly night and day. I almost never used the Ender, since it always resulted endless tinkering and even then, the prints never came out well. The Bambu worked flawlessly out of the box.
I had an Ender 3 Pro, and it was also very finicky, ~18 months ago I replaced it with a Bambu P1S and that thing is just a (nearly) fire and forget machine. I've been super happy with it. In the 18 months I've had it, I've probably gone through 10-20 rolls of filament, in the 4 years I had the Ender I went through maybe 3-4 (because every time I wanted to print something I knew I'd have to spend an hour fiddling with it). A coworker has the Ender 3 though and his has been reliable, so it seems YMMV.
It was indeed. Honestly, it’s been more reliable than any inkjet 2d printer I’ve owned.
I got a cheap Ender-3 V2 with a few modifications (extruder moved to the sled, CR-touch sensor mounted) which - after redoing the wiring which the previous owner somehow messed up, replacing some mismatched bolts, putting nuts and washers on the bolts underneath the hot plate, putting the springs in their correct locations, removing a metric ton of hot glue, aceton-glueing a few broken ABS details, installing more capable firmware [1] and tightening all bolts - seems to work just fine. Thus far I've only used PETG to print spare parts to repair broken appliances, this started out with some hiccups but works fine after installing the mentioned firmware. It isn't particularly fast, it isn't particularly pretty but it does work for my purpose: create parts to repair and build things. I have no doubt that a more modern printer can make life easier but thus far life hasn't been hard with this Ender: design a model, slice and dice it and send it to the printer which does the rest. I've printed some fairly 'hairy' models which came out fine (i.e. not hairy/thready) even though I'm using PETG. For those with some technical aptitude - in other words for people who are wont to build and repair stuff - these machines are an affordable step into the additive manufacturing world with the promise of 'spare parts at your fingertips'.
Yup, my Ender 3 Pro has had a lot of time and attention.
My Ender 3 Pro (and all it's upgrades and parts) will be given away for free shortly. It was great for learning/awareness of all the kinds of issues and details that modern 3D printers have solved.
Bambu has the reputation for "Just Works", but assumedly others are making significant progress too. Bambu printers by default are now largely linked to the Bambu online presence. Though "LAN only" modes, slicer workarounds, community firmware and such might get you what you want but do that research.
I was lucky my printer was offline when they sent the firmware update to require use of their slicer software. It will never go online again and I don't mind.
I don't want to tinker with the printer anymore. I want to just print things.