| I own a PrintrBot, 1st generation laser cut edition. I was just reminiscing about spending most of Memorial Day Weekend in 2012 building it. But, I never got a decent print from it. A bunch of reasons: - When the PrintrBot first came out, despite its marketing as being newbie-friendly, it required mechanical engineering experience and familiarity with RepRaps. The build instructions weren't bad but it took about 20 hours to work through them and they assumed familiarity with tuning things like the tension on the extruder assembly that a newbie like me didn't have. Lots of terms were used ("hobbed bolt") that aren't garden variety Home Depot things. - The kit I got had crappy parts. PrintrBot's Kickstarter was wildly successful, so much so that the strategy of printing pieces for rewards using PrintrBots took too much time. Half of the plastic pieces I received were resin-cast and not cured for long enough so they cracked. The other pieces weren't QCed - my main gear had major flaws in the teeth which several hours of shaving with an xacto haven't fixed. The control board wires were designed for the smaller all-plastic model, so my z-axis wires rub against the print bed and strain for high (x, y) coords. I've grown grey hairs leveling the print bed and calibrating the z axis but the unit jerks during operation so much that it's impossible to print anything requiring more than 4 passes of the print head before the head starts dragging through the already printed material. Some of the provided bolts weren't the right type, which I exchanged at an industrial lab where I worked but which would not have been sourcable for a hobbyist. My kit came with incorrectly sized linear bearings, too - my local maker space had just enough stashed in the back, thankfully. Overall a negative experience for me. That being said, the PrintrBot community is supremely kind and helpful. I just don't have the time, experience or materials to replace the bad parts, calibrate the printer and keep it calibrated. What I've seen of newer and higher end hobbyist units, even the Makerbot 2, is that you need to really grok the mechanics to keep it tuned and running. Even some of the low-mid range industrial printers require horse-whispering to keep them happy. It's nowhere near print-and-forget. I look at what it's possible to produce on even the high-end consumer units: you can make pixelated toys, but how much will you use them? |