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You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.
Makes crime even better in comparison.
Here in Canada every major library I’ve been to has a 3D printer you can use, either for free if you bring your own filament, or for a very small fee to use theirs. I live in a small town of 70,000 people and our public library has a 3D printer.
I would just like to say that 70k people isn’t a small town. I live in a town with 9k people in it. Now that’s a small town.
The saving on the knob alone would pay a reasonable chunk of a basic but useful printer. Use it for a few more things and you’ll be in the black even ignoring the more fun things you might do. The time it takes to learn a CAD system can also be fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.
I’m proof. My first printer is currently worth like $25. Maker Select V2. Still works great. I learned FreeCAD and enjoyed every minute.
As someone who replaced his Maker Select Plus with a Bambu Lab P1S a few months ago…if you do get a new printer, be prepared to be angry for a moment.
I spent so much time and effort improving that thing over the years, and the modern printer was so much better right out of the box. 😅
(Not that I don’t still have a fond place in my heart for my old bedslinger. A friend has it now, so it’s still chugging along.)
Haha yea I did, actually. A few months ago I built a Voron 0.2. It’s soooo much better in every way. But the MS2 is still capable, especially with upgrsdes (just not with ABS). I decided against the Bamboo route because I loved the FOSS nature of the MS2, and building the Voron brought back those ‘first time building a PC vibes’. It was a great experience.
I’ve got a Sovol Max on order, so the MK2 will probably also be donated to a friend this year.
Nice! I’ve considered a Voron, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to dedicate that much time to the printer as opposed to the printing. (I feel like I got my fill of excessive tinkering already 😅)
But the closed nature of Bambu does bother me, I’ll admit.
