Finally, have had five minutes to put together a short review of the Mk3
After a fair few months, my machine arrived all boxed up. the PSU was a little dented soon pulled straight with needle nose pliers but apart from that arrived in good shape.
I decided to build this indoors as the bad weather and space is a factor when dealing with 100s of parts.
this is not my first Prusa kit. the last one took well over 8hrs to build and I did this over to days and then there were a few hrs tinkering to make it print well.
after seeing a few live builds from some of the youtube celebrities. I started it took a lot less time to build than the last one think I had the machine build in around 4hrs. had to do this over a fair few days though as little one had a cold and was in need of daddy time. I blame this for me messing up a few steps. will talk about that later. the manual is epic and very well documented. I would, however, recommend using the online manual for bigger pictures and comments from users are always helpful.
after the build, I flashed the firmware to the latest version as there updating and fixing stuff all the time.
turned on the machine was greeted with would I like to run the wizard to configure my printer. said yes it runs through fans bed and got to x then failed with the axis being too short. this had me puzzled for a few days. changed belt tension made sure every this was aligned.
turns out that I had missed a step in extruder assembly and inserted 2 bolts the wrong way around and was missing a few square nuts. hence why I blame macs (my son) as he cannot answer back lol.
once this was corrected ran the self-test again and it flew through without issues. then calibrated z without an issue.
first layer calibration was a little awkward but think this was down to a firmware issue. as I have now updated firmware and my issues with prints not sticking seems to have gone away.
I printed an exhaust vent for my k40 laser it took 16hr to print. I did this as my first print as wanting to get as much done in a weekend so I can keep articles coming on the website.
I have now printed several of the test prints on the sd card see the images below and as always floorless.
I am yet to test out all the functions of the printer like power panic and was having issues with stepper motor crashes so turned it off as was messing up prints. I have not tested any of the functions since last firmware update. will add my findings to the review once I have tested them out.
my thoughts on the printer so far.
- price is mid-priced but worth the money for the support and the features
- quality is great every part fitted and there are spare parts just in case you drop that vital screw or nut.
- easy to put together great instructions if you read them all Doh.
- advanced features crash detection power failure and filament sensor I am yet to test but autoload works well just wish that they would implement the self-heat option when inserting filament.
I would recommend this to any hobbyist who is not experienced with 3d printers who want to learn and have a printer that will work out of the box without having to fix issues from poor manufacturing. this printer will produce high-quality parts in a lot of materials.
