I need help with buying a 3D printer

Hello everyone! I'm a uni student and I'm starting a personal project with some friends, we're going to be building a drone. I've checkout the densities of plastics that 2D printers use and it's all good, so now I'm looking to buy my first 3D printer. I have a limited budget(£300 GBP) and I need one print axis to be at least 200mm. Now I've found this [www.reprap.cn] , but I'm on the fence about buying something cheap from china. Will the one I found be ok, if not what would you recommend? Thanks for reading!

I'd avoid Delta printers like that one. You'd be better off with a cartesian printer that has a print bed of at least 200mm in one direction. I'd also go with a heated bed. Investigate PETg as a material for printing drone parts, PLA is too brittle (and heat intolerant), while ABS warps when printing larger parts.

As Nebbian said, you are probably not looking for a delta printer, I have a delta and it's very heavy on calibration and can be a bit overwhelming for a first printer. You would be best looking at a Mandle design, the Prusa i3 is pretty much bullet proof. When sourcing these kits it's important to keep in mind the quality of the parts, as an example, in my design process I tested almost 20 different bearing manufacturers before settling on my supplier.

I recommend a Prusa for ease of use and functionality, moving from there you can find a kit that fits your budget or source yourself.

You can print drone parts in both PLA and ABS, however, you will want to design and print these parts for your application; PLA can be very strong depending on how you design the part. Additionally, ABS does warp on larger parts, however, this is easily solved with a good bed level and adding 2-3 layer thick "tags" to the corners of your model to prevent lifting...also...hairspray... .

Good luck!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2016 12:25PM by Sgriff08.

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Hooklet3d/Bad Code LLC
www.hooklet3d.com

That printer is too small. It prints only an 80mm radius circle.

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nebbian
I'd avoid Delta printers like that one. You'd be better off with a cartesian printer that has a print bed of at least 200mm in one direction. I'd also go with a heated bed. Investigate PETg as a material for printing drone parts, PLA is too brittle (and heat intolerant), while ABS warps when printing larger parts.

Thanks, I'll look into the plastic.

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Sgriff08
As Nebbian said, you are probably not looking for a delta printer, I have a delta and it's very heavy on calibration and can be a bit overwhelming for a first printer. You would be best looking at a Mandle design, the Prusa i3 is pretty much bullet proof. When sourcing these kits it's important to keep in mind the quality of the parts, as an example, in my design process I tested almost 20 different bearing manufacturers before settling on my supplier.

I recommend a Prusa for ease of use and functionality, moving from there you can find a kit that fits your budget or source yourself.

You can print drone parts in both PLA and ABS, however, you will want to design and print these parts for your application; PLA can be very strong depending on how you design the part. Additionally, ABS does warp on larger parts, however, this is easily solved with a good bed level and adding 2-3 layer thick "tags" to the corners of your model to prevent lifting...also...hairspray... .

Good luck!

OK, thanks for the advice!


So I will be going with a "traditional"? 3D printer. I will also be doing more extensive research into plastics and will probably be mixing and matching them for different parts of the plane. Thanks again for your help guys!

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I will also be doing more extensive research into plastics and will probably be mixing and matching them for different parts of the plane.

abs has the advantage of being lower density, so you'll get a weight benefit for a given sized part. Carbon-fibre reinforced abs would probably be neat for that application, but the price is a bit of a pain. Nylon gives very robust parts which I would expect to stand up well to impacts, but the density is 10% higher.

I can only advise you based on my experience. About 6 months ago I bought a cheap in price wooden framed, Prusa I3 CTC Euroway Printer. This printer turned out to be expensive garbage. I had BIG problems with z-axis wobble. If you watched the machine while the z-axis threaded rods turned you could see the wood contort up and down, back and forth. I tried everything on the forums to try to fix this problem, to no avail. I finally replaced the frame with a P3Steel frame and my models come out perfect.

Moral of this Story:

If you are looking at a cheap Prusa, stay away. Spend a little more money and get one with a metal frame.

As far as pre-manufactured, non-opened sourced machines, many have very small building plates. Unless you want to make only trinkets and tchotchkes you will probably want a bed of at least 200 X 200 mm, probably more. I feel quite constrained with my 200 X 200mm building plate.

Stuart

I agree with what the others have said here. If you want to print things that are 200mm long/wide, you will need a heated bed. With some careful design, and a quality printer, you could print smaller items and glue them together (epoxy, superglue?) to make up the 200mm.

Avoid a cheap plywood frame... you *will* have to take it apart to repair it, and each time you do, it will loosen and weaken.

If you buy a cheap (below say $1000) printer, you have a big learning curve. Not that that's a bad thing, but you had better be more interested in 3D printing than drones. Probably you'll spend more effort learning to print than printing an airplane.

Cheap, accurate, reliable... choose any two.