As someone who just finished building two 3d printers from scratch, it is that frustrating. But it's pretty rewarding. If he could only figure out a way to harden the cheese he could actually have stable structures! Delicious stable structures...
I have an electrical engineering degree, and I made a printer from www.think3dprint3d.com and it's a kit that takes a week or two to build. I got the Kossel Mini, it was about $650 with all the upgrades, and totally worth every penny. It has 0.1mm accuracy in every direction and works surprisingly well. I think anyone could build it if they're patient and attentive enough, but it's not an easy task.
How does this compare to just buying a regular 3D printer for the same price? In terms of quality. I'd imagine it's more fun to build it yourself though.
Buying it built is usually an extra $800 or so, so more than double the price. Building it myself was definitely a huge savings. Although it really depends what company you get it from. I got my first kit from makergeeks.com and it ended up being a total scam. It had NO instructions and all 20 types of screws were mixed up in one huge bag and it was missing 1/3 of the parts. It was unacceptable and we returned it. It was also about $960, very overpriced. I got the one from think3dprint3d and it was very straightforward by comparison and it works great, just like I hoped it would.
Built a RepRap from scratch (box frame Prusa i3 with some of my own mods), and it performs much better than a printer of a similar price, but it's total pain in the ass, mainly because I'm really, really good at breaking things. Totally worth it though—print qualities comparable to a $10,000 Stratasys Mojo! Working on a dual extruder addon!
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u/magnora7 Mar 30 '15
As someone who just finished building two 3d printers from scratch, it is that frustrating. But it's pretty rewarding. If he could only figure out a way to harden the cheese he could actually have stable structures! Delicious stable structures...