hi all i would like to take advantage of your experience in 3d printing and specially with the ctc Bizer 3 …
i have several question :
1- is this printer good for a beginner and knowing that printer is my first !!
2- is it that slow ? 40 mm/s?
3- does it need lots of modding ?
4- does it face lots of problems ?
5- does it give good pla abs quality ?
hope u can help me decide !!
thank you in advance
For the ctc machines they generally need a spring loaded extruder a new thermistor (100k) for the bottom of the heated bed as the one that comes from the factory is incorrect and reads to cold you need to install a fan on the motherboard which requires a mosfet I wouldn’t do this unless your confident you won’t cross a connection as you will blow up your motherboard it’s not really a good first machine as they are quite high maintanence if you want to maintain a high quality and the linear bearings are really bad usually in them so if you want to get one go for it they can be amazing quality machines if you take care of them and 40mms is usually around high quality printing, abs is quite hard to print on ctc machines as they are not enclosed and without the heated bed fix the bed maxes at 95°c set at 130°c Pla is very good quality and reliable if you do normal prints I would recommend 55mms extruding and 80 travel if your not upgrading to sailfish
> 1- is this printer good for a beginner and knowing that printer is my first !!
I would say yes. I’ve no problems with that printer from the beginning
>is it that slow ? 40 mm/s?
It is a little bit slower than my default printing speed. I’m usually printing with 55-60mm/s
>does it need lots of modding ?
nope. But I recommmend an active cooling for your prints. And maybe put a glass plate on you heated bed (I’m more satisfied with that than capon, bluetape…)
>does it face lots of problems ?
nope
>does it give good pla abs quality ?
yes.
Also the heated bed warps over time as it’s just 2.5mm sheet aluminium and modding wise you can do ALOT to them eg aluminium arms, y axis belt holders, aluminium x arms and carridge for PLA you must have a cooling fan and abs you need to have a sealed box essentially and the nozzles on the machine are Impossible to find as they have a 3x2 ptfe liner I have loads if any one ever needs any and the nozzles have a 3mm throat / bore and you can’t really buy them anywhere else apart from ctc, if you do buy a ctc ask the seller if it uses a USB key timer as ctc thought instead of chipping the filaments they would make you use a usb style stick as a counter and it limits you to 300 hours of your printer being switched on and you have to buy more of them and you guessed it only come from ctc so be carefull and ask lots of questions
It’s a great first machine, I’ve modded mine quite a bit. For a really user friendly interface you can download MakerWare for free onto your computer and update firmware on your printer. The nice part of these machines is that you can easily build an enclosure around he printer for printing ABS.
NOOO!!! Don’t update ctc machines through MAKERWARE it will disable the use of your sd card and you will have to print over usb which doesn’t always work !! You would need to upgrade to sailfish through replicator g
All it does is reformats the SD card from FAT32 to FAT16, you just go reformat the SD card. Once you move past Makerware and onto Simplify 3D (or something better), you have the ability to change print settings on the fly like in Repetier … all of which is done through USB. And yes, upgrade to sailfish through RepG.
Yes I did that I couldn’t get a 512mb sd card to even read so I upgraded to sailfish best upgrade
I can’t begin to tell you how wrong that information is. Mbi firmware will not read any sd card larger then 2g. It does not simply just reformat the card. RepG is just as bad, a and has been abandoned for years, and should really ONLY be used for installing new sailfish. There are copies of makerware 2.4 floating around the internet, that was the last version that had any improvement for your printer. Newer versions just add bloat and 5th gen fiasco.
Here’s how I reformatted the SD card, you were right about the 2GB limit. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I use Simplify 3D with a USB connection.
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/MakerBot/How\_to\_format\_SD\_card\_for\_MakerBot
