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Hi everyone,

I’m looking at getting started into 3d printing, nothing commercial, more just printing design prototypes. I want to start by saying I know nothing about 3D printers except for the concept.

I’ve been looking at two printers, the Buccaneer and the Prusa i3. They’re both in the price that I’m willing to spend, but the Prusa has a larger printing area, which I definitely prefer.

Does anyone have any recommendations? Or perhaps another printer to look at?

If I sacrifice on build volume, and wanted to print something larger than the print area available for me, what are the options?

Thank you all in advance!

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Hi Frase, glad to see someone else getting into 3D printing!

The Buccaneer doesn’t really have a great reputation due to its botched Kickstarter rewards. I don’t know too much about the product itself, but just from looking at it, it seems to be a bit less robust and extremely limited in features compared to other 3D printers on the market. In particular, the non-heated bed and the non-adjustable print head temperature are enormous limitations; you’re really limited to PLA.

The upside would be that it does seem easier to use and would have a much less steep learning curve. The downside to that is that once you’re over the learning curve, you can’t do much more with it,

The Prusa i3 is really almost the polar opposite. I own two Prusa i3-based printers, and what I can tell you about them is that they use powerful (though industry-standard) hardware, and due to their completely open-source nature, they’re limitless in terms of future upgrades and features. Heated bed is standard.

However, it is not in any way easy to use. My first Prusa i3 kit took about 4 hours to configure and calibrate to an even semi-working state, and fiddling with Repetier Host and Slic3r added a few hours on top of that. It then took several weeks before I gained the knowledge and my printer benefitted from that knowledge enough that the prints could be what I would call high-quality.

It’s really a printer that gets better with more experience. Get it only if you’re willing to spend hours tinkering with it and trying to fix or improve it.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can check out the 3D Hubs buyer’s guide. However, I’ve heard good things about the Printrbot Play (unfortunately not listed on the due to how new it is), and it seems to be fairly easy to set up and use while still having the feature set of a fully fledged Reprap (as the Prusa i3 is). It’s quite affordable, and will probably be under your budget, so it could be worth checking that out.

Hope this helps!

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Hi there. I recently got an original Prusa i3 just before Christmas. It took about 7 hours to build the kit with my son. Then just a little time the following day to dial it in. I have had no issues printing things. Took a bit from me to learn things though but once I got a handle on the settings I was able to use Slic3r and print. Going strong since. But it all depends on what you want to do. To get larger items to print, you’ll need to split the meshes into parts. There are several programs out there you can use. Best of luck.

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I keep it short,

Go for the Prusa I3,
It maybe look not as good as the Buccaneer, but that the only thing.

All other aspects are better with the Prusa