[detaro]

Would you do that tinkering if you could just buy a 3D printer cheaply that didn't need upgrading and worked perfectly?

You can probably adapt a printhead from a printer to your 3D printer today if you want a crappy DIY 2D printer and go from there.

[manyxcxi]

I got into it specifically because you can get good printers cheap. There is a manufacturer that offers an open source based printer that was better than it had any reason to be for less than $300.

My printer today looks nothing like the printer I started with, I’ve switched boards, recompiled my own firmware, the whole bit. I was confident in hacking on it for two reasons:

1) It was open source based

2) Replacement parts are inexpensive

I originally started with a Makerbot 2X which was closed source and $2500 (8+ years ago). Mind you, I didn’t have one at home- we had a couple at work for prototyping.

The slicing software was atrocious, the ability to fix it was hampered by what parts they sold, and the replacement parts were generally very expensive.

My $250 printer was better in every objective measure out of the box than the MakerBot was after years of practice and tuning.

This year my friend’s 2X died and a replacement motherboard was going to be almost as much as the cost of my printer new so he just gave it to me and bought a new printer.

With my newfound confidence from my “cheap” printer, I gutted the 2X and installed an open source motherboard and completely rewired it.

It all started with a printer good enough to be liked by the community and open enough to be modifiable.

[sleepybrett]

Nothing like a extruder that is not user serviceable and only prints PLA. When I was told that my office went through several of those extruders, I took some year end left over funds and purchased a lulzbot (Taz5). As far as I know that thing is still doing the work they need it to do.

[manyxcxi]

Luckily the Replicator 2 and 2X were when MakerBot was still trying (or pretending) to be open source. The hotends were standard-ish MK8 (or 10). Everything was pretty serviceable on them as long as you didn’t need to fix the motherboard.

The printers after that switched to the new hotends that are not user serviceable. It boggles my mind why any home user or tinkerer would ever sign up for that crap.

BUT...

My brother in law teacher, who teaches various middle school classes and groups use them. I asked why they would waste so much money and he had a response that made it all make sense to me. He doesn’t have time to keep them all running all the time (like we had to do with the old ones) and when one goes down he gets replacement parts from MB at a discount, slaps it in, and they’re up and running again. Apparently the latest ones are fairly reliable and it doesn’t happen all that often either.

So I guess I would sum it up as not for me, but I could see why some would.

[marcus_holmes]

Good question.

I run Linux (and on a Purism laptop so I can take it apart if I want to), so I guess I've made that choice already in a different context - "yes".

I haven't tried it, but I expect a commercial print head to be extremely specialised and adapted to the specifics of the printer it's in. And of course no documentation on what the connections are or how it hangs together. I think it'd be above my skill level to get this working.