Ebay Reprap pruse i3

So I feel completely beat by this thing... If anyone ever sees this thread.. STAY AWAY!. The only time I've been truly happy with it was when it came to my porch in a box. After 2 days of assembling this Aura version with absolutely no instructions! I ended up with a hot mess.

After Assembling it, Cura was not compatible with what ever controls this thing. I had it connected but when i ran the bed leveling wizard, it makes grinding noises as the stepper motors are trying to move the bed when at max (opposite end of the stoppers). I tried leveling the bed myself and printed an STL which somewhat worked except for the curling (ABS issue.. not printer). after making some abs juice and printing various other cubes, my nozzle became clogged. I disassembled the nozzle and removed the clog but it keeps clogging up now no matter what I print. For the first layer! I tried printing circles and yet it still prints squares.

I'm totally beat lol did you guys have these issues on your legitimate reprap? lol This is a giant rip off!

$400 dollars down the drain

Please don't take this wrong, as it is not meant as an insult, as this is for anyone who is considering getting into 3D printing at home:

Buying a kit is intended for someone who is ready to dig in and solve problems. If they are not willing (or able) to become somewhat intimate with the printer's parts, operation, tuning and firmware, they should look at prefab, ready to print units like those offered by MakerBot or Lulzbot. Then, they would have a pre-built unit with a nice manual and customer support. Of course this comes with a premium price.

Spending $400 instead of $1400 means that YOU are supplying the $1000 worth of construction, troubleshooting and support. We are largely a DIY community that support each other when there are questions. Please ask - we will get you going in no time

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-David

Find me online at:
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Check out my FolgerTech Prusa i3 (plexi) at MindRealm.net

Hang in there man. I have the Aurora Z-605. Until I added a fan to cool filament where it enters nothing worked right. Haven't had a clog since. Good luck.

Have to agree with mindrealm, everything seems to move to thats the first hurdle taken, the rest is google or already in the forum

I strongly disagree ! A kit is meant to be easy to build, with no configuration or exploitation issues. Build. Plug. Upload. Play. There's somme good maker's kit that makes things easy. And you won't pay $1400 for that ! It's pittyful some people sells kits that cannot works first time anytime. If a kit brings much more problems than to follow a BOM, what is that kit about ? If a kit is only a box randomly filled with the cheapest items the seller can get, it's not a win-win relationship. And there's too much kits of this kind today. I can't understand why some people can spend hours to make a rubbish printer works approximately, and think it's the way it should be. And worst of all, they recommend it !

My first experience with 3D printing was with the same kit MindRealm owns. I spent a lot of time to get approximative prints. Without any experience. I could think it's a standard 3D printer. Then I go to a fablab and discover the print quality you can get with a proper reprap. Their printers did a lot better than mine and a lot faster ! So I spent extra money to make mine prints as good as theirs. Of course, with the components provided in the kit I could not be able to reach that quality. Worst of all, it's not that expensive to provide better components in the kit. It's maybe about $3 extra per motor, $7 extra for a good wade extruder, $5 extra for a good hotend. Nothing impossible to make a fair kit.

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Collective intelligence emerges when a group of people work together effectively. Prusa i3 Folger (A lot of the parts are wrong, boring !)

Safe to say that most of us here are of the type (smartest guy in the room). We love the technicallity of things. Buying a $400.00 kit was both exciting and terrifying. My kit had the worst instructions ever. Thanks to Google and this site for guidance. On that note, had my kit worked out of the box I wouldn't have learned so much so soon. Getting my first pretty dammed good print was like discovering America for Chris. Exciting to put it mildly. It took months. These amazing tools of ours keep our little grey cells occupied. So newbies, keep on asking and digging and soon you'll be knocking out some awesome prints. Unless you are selling prints, these cheesy little machines are pretty good fun. You could be vegging in front of the tube.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2015 01:16AM by elwood127.

I too bought the ebay (folgerTech) kit Jan 1st. Just today finally started my first print amd still have problems. I has better luck getting answers here than from the folger support guy....who is an idiot lol. Even though I know little about these right now, I still knew his solution was wrong...like he didn't even read my description of the problem.

Anyway.... you cant learn much if everything worked out of the box. I'm glad I'm learning more, but still won't recommend them or give feedback. I won't leave negative or neutral....Just won't give any.

I've had my folger kit for two weeks now and have had some very pleasing prints with it , with what I read on the site about it before it arrived it was a snap putting it together and configuring it , you just have to dig in and not give up when things don't go right .