I’m trying to find the best quality Prusa i3 kits to help me decide on my first 3D printer for home use. I’d prefer a kit to keep the costs down and also to learn more about the machine I’m investing in. I’d like to keep the cost with shipping under around $700 USD. I like what they offer over at the Prusa official site (prusa3d) but I’m looking for other options. A few things I would like to have are:
1) Aluminum frame, possibly steel
2) Heavy duty aluminum build plate, 24V heater
3) Quality steppers that can print high speeds without dying
4) All metal hotend, good up to 300°C for printing with most filaments
5) Good controller, 32-bit if possible but otherwise just looking for good quality controllers
6) Threaded rods, linear rods, bearings, etc. of good quality
7) Legitimate 150mm/sec max printing speed, at minimum
8) Free shipping to the USA
With those qualities in mind, do any of you have any suggestions?
Hello, Past avid builder of Prusa i3s, so hopefully I could give some useful input. Easily the best Prusa i3-based kit I’ve worked with is my own self-sourced P3Steel. It’s rock solid and holds perfect 90 degree angles, both of which most Prusa i3s don’t do. It’s also easy to work with. With mine being self-sourced, the quality of the other parts depended on the parts I chose, but there is a kit available from a European site with the P3Steel frame. Welcome kitprinter3d.com - BlueHost.com 210 There will be extra costs because it ships from the EU, but it should come in a fair bit under 700USD. (violates your free shipping rule, I’m afraid) If you’re going that route, make sure you select the P3Steel frame and the E3D V6 hotend. I’m not sure but you MAY have to buy an MK3 aluminum heat bed separately since by default most Prusa i3 kits ship with the MK2 PCB heatbed, but in my honest opinion the MK2 with a glass plate is better on the P3Steel than an MK3, since the MK3 will still most likely require a glass plate to be ideal but it has more mass than the MK2, slowing it down. That brings up an important point: 150mm/s printing speeds are extremely hard to attain on any Prusa i3-based design, even for experienced Reprappers. It’s just not designed well for high speeds, due to the comparatively huge mass of the print bed moving along the Y axis. I’ve gotten my P3Steel (although, granted, with a higher-than-average mass for the bed) up to 120mm/s, but any higher and backlash starts to affect the bed way too much to print well. (not to mention that the forces present start to shake whatever table you’re putting the printer on) If you really want high speeds, you’d be much better off with a Z-axis traveling bed and the Ultimaker cross gantry, but that’s pretty much as far from the Prusa i3 as any printer could be. That’s all I have. I hope my little rant has helped a bit. -Karl
I bought the P3steel kit from www.kitprinter3D.com 74. The steel frame is fine, but the rest of the parts are about as budget as they come. In particular the 3D printed parts are dreadful quality, especially the tensioner in the x-idler (very poor printing) and the x-idler itself which had some delamination. The wire lengths were wrong, the Arduino not genuine (OK that’s fairly routine) and the RAMPS had a fault which blew the Arduino. The linear bearings didn’t fit the y axis mountings well… I could go on and on.
On a positive note, the vendor is very quick to respond to emails. He gave me a refund for the RAMPS and Arduino - a total of €43 including refund of the €13 postage it cost me to return the items. Unfortunately, the replacement genuine Arduino and decent RAMPS I bought cost me a lot more than that.
I recommend the frame, but you would be better researching and buying the rest yourself. I am about to do just that with a P3 Steel v4.0 frame from Poland (eBay).
