Cheap Prusa for Home

Hi All,

Just had a look on ebay and I can see a few very cheap kits (<£200) on ebay now. I've built and ran an Ormerod 2 for work and have a reasonable basic mechanical / electronic / software compliance with a good measure of patience!

Has any one used or had experience of the Geeetech or Tronxy kits?

Thanks,

Wesley.

After looking through the reviews on these it looks like you'd struggle to update firmware on the printers. I'll look for a UK based kit supplier I think and save a few more pennies!

TronXY X3 will be fine with a few upgrades. A bit smaller but Creality just came out with the Ender-2. Awesome.

Thanks for the tips. I think I had perhaps posted a bit soon. Not quite feasible for home at the moment, but the H-Bot or CoreXY design does look good for a work project!

Quote
WesBrooks
After looking through the reviews on these it looks like you'd struggle to update firmware on the printers. I'll look for a UK based kit supplier I think and save a few more pennies!

You could buy a Prusa i3 kit and upgrade it to Duet electronics, which you are already familiar with.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Fair point. I'll have a look for some updated suppler lists.

Edit - for the electronics.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2017 04:53AM by WesBrooks.

I'm running an acrylic Geeetech Prusa i3 Pro B which I purchased from Amazon, (4.9 stars from 48 reviewers!) and must say I'm quite impressed. I checked out the straightness of the smooth rod and Z axis screws straightening them slightly with an arrow straightener before assembly which seems to have paid off. I fitted the aluminium Mk8 extruder kit to allow me to adjust the filament pinch roller pressure (I was getting the infamous "clicking" poor feed problem - this cured it)

I've only been printing for a two or three months and after learning quite a lot about Slic3r settings; rafts, brims, supports, speed settings, etc, I'm starting to produce what I think, are pretty decent prints. I'm now learning about FreeCAD and designing stuff of my own as well as printing bits from Thingiverse and other sources.
I spent 15 years of my working life maintaining vector photo plotters used for producing printed circuits, Integrated circuit masks, photo masters for map production, etc so I'm quite happy with the tinkering aspect.

I found the Geeetech build videos on YouTube pretty good and had viewed them all by the time I got the kit so knew exactly what I was doing. I haven't had to burn new firmware, Repetier Host installed flawlessly on my Mint 18 Linux system and I print directly using a USB link. No faffing about with USB serial port problems, it just works out of the box. So... All in all I'm very happy with my Geeetech printer!

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2017 08:46PM by Soadyheid.