Anyone have any advice for a 3D printing novice. ? Any suggestions on good sites for printers / info ? Thanks
1. Learn CAD first.
2. Proper calibration is more important than anything else.
3. Spend more on a printer than you think you can afford or you'll spend dozens of hours trying to fight the cheap printer you bought instead of learning how to properly print.
2. Proper calibration is more important than anything else.
3. Spend more on a printer than you think you can afford or you'll spend dozens of hours trying to fight the cheap printer you bought instead of learning how to properly print.
On that third point, my first printer was a delta kossel, and it was just way too complicated for someone's first printer. I switched to a Tevo Tornado which is a pretty bog standard xyz printer similar to an ender3 or cr-10, and it was just a lot simpler working on it, and it tended to stay good when I wasn't working on it, unlike the delta where you'd spent an hour tweaking and calibrating to get a single good print and when you go back to print a day or two later you'd have to do it all over again, my printer is solid enough that I can leave it alone for quite a bit and with a bit of bed leveling just start printing again.
Would I suggest a Tornado, ender3, or CR-10? Of course not. Those models are 10 years old at this point and the field has moved on. Look at trustworthy reviews of something much newer and you'll have 10 years of R&D you'll benefit from.
Oh, and if you can, try to stay in free and open source ecosystems. One of the things is that if you learn a tool like tinkercad which is free and online, it can go down (and almost did a few years back). If you learn a tool like Fusion360 that is commercial with a free option, then they can mess with that free option at any time and have. Even if you pay for your software, Autodesk has absolutely taken software you paid thousands of dollars for and shut down the activation servers when the software got too old, and suddenly you don't have access to your servers anymore. Also you'll want to be thinking this way for slicers and device firmware, since they might need updates at some point and you don't want to be reliant on a vendor who may not even exist for some critical new feature that changes everything.
Would I suggest a Tornado, ender3, or CR-10? Of course not. Those models are 10 years old at this point and the field has moved on. Look at trustworthy reviews of something much newer and you'll have 10 years of R&D you'll benefit from.
Oh, and if you can, try to stay in free and open source ecosystems. One of the things is that if you learn a tool like tinkercad which is free and online, it can go down (and almost did a few years back). If you learn a tool like Fusion360 that is commercial with a free option, then they can mess with that free option at any time and have. Even if you pay for your software, Autodesk has absolutely taken software you paid thousands of dollars for and shut down the activation servers when the software got too old, and suddenly you don't have access to your servers anymore. Also you'll want to be thinking this way for slicers and device firmware, since they might need updates at some point and you don't want to be reliant on a vendor who may not even exist for some critical new feature that changes everything.
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