Hey all, keen to hear if there is anyone else out there printing with a prusa i3 mk2 or above. I have the 2s and am just updating it to a 2.5. I would be interested in hearing about any mods you have made or issues you have incountered.
I can personally vouch for these machines and use mine a lot! So, if you got anything to add let’s start a chat…
Thanks all.
Jonathan
3D printing with a prusa
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I’ve recently assembled a MK2s from the Original prusa to mk2s upgrade kit. It’s seriously the best printer I’ve assembled and used. (IMHO the MK2.5 upgrade is bit pricey for what you get)
Things I love. It’s the overall awesome precision of the print it produce playing with 3d printed thread is almost a guilty pleasure. No more fear to print really large object (however some of those where printed on my other workhorse) as the bed auto calibration work and the PEI sheet is awesome.
Despite a few custom parts it run the original firmware and got all the important part as the original printer so I dare to call it “Mk2 trueish clone”
So yes it’s not an original Prusa I’ve outsourced all the part I needed and I had most of them already for other printer project so if you interested this is roughly how much it cost me but beware that doing that way require to be pretty experienced as you need to adapt as you go along and need lot of parts and finally IT IS NOT cheaper than buying a kit see below the cost breakdown
Custom part:
LCD mount to the top to accommodate the shorter cable that come with cheap LCD2004 (annoyingly the rotary encoder is reversed on mine 
)
Off printer filament spool holder my design so ping me if interested
Custom PSU cover
Anti vibration feet with packing foam under them
New filamentspool holder currently work in progress but I can share it if interested.
Finally credit to @Dermot he asked me how much building a cheap but good prusa I3 would be so I started this cost estimate and got a post write up ready to submit in the project section.
So for About £130 you can assemble an I3 and for an extra £150 you can get a clone mini rambo, clone mk42 bed and pinda probe So one of my next project is to assemble one of this and see how close I can get it to my mk2s
The price estimate would assume group buy for some of the parts to keep the price low. But it’s a ball park
As you can see more than happy to talk about it 
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This looks like a good deal - can anyone who knows about these things comment?
Hm, lots of these even cheaper on ebay. I’m guessing your Cheap Prusa kit would be a better bet Laurent?
The challenge when you try to go with the cheapest kit out there is proportionally related to how knowledgeable you are. When you assemble a kit like this there is lots of unknown that are sometime difficult to overcome because well you assume the kit as been put together without flaw or hidden problem.
This is the skeptic in me talking but lot of people report good things about those printer once you go over the long hour of frustration and shameless hack you use to make it work.
If you are serious about building a cheap prusa based on what I started to list above I’ll happily start a project post (to clarify the bom and describe the step) and we can organize to start building one maybe even do it in a few evening session at the space. 
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I’d be up for your
build 
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I just got through setting up a cheap prusa kit over the long weekend, it’s still not perfect but I think I learned a lot about the fundamentals of how they work by doing a kit rather than buying something that’s ready to go. That said I’m a “tinkerer” by nature and if I was looking to get something just to be able to print stuff straight out of the box I would have been quite frustrated.
I wish I had seen this before I ordered the kit, would have been cool to to go through the steps of building your custom one.
funny I almost wrote exactly what you mean in my previous post.
Let me know if I can help, don’t hesitate if you have any question to ping my brain
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Is it really worth building a clone when an original prusa kit is still not that much money… the support is excellent and is worth paying the extra for anyways…
If you do a custom build, I have some spare parts including the heated bed and pinda from my i3 mk2s…
I definitely buy the pinda and and bed from you as I’m about to start that custom build.
I agree and hopefully made it clear previously the mk2s clone I’ve built was only cheaper because I bought the upgrade kit more than a year ago when they were £100 less. But I recommend to everyone who has the budget to buy the kit from Prusa itself
However the cheap prusa project would be to make a Prusa I3 for under £150 and I think for £300 you can get a clone mk2s but it will require a serious amount of tinkering (firmware wise and some other thing) so for the member with a tight budget there is option 1) £150 and for bigger budget there is option 2) £300. But if anyone prefer a out of the box painless experience the Original Mk2s would be my recommendation I hope this clarify things a bit further.
That sounds good! I’m happy building a kit but it would be good to benefit from your experience in terms of quality parts, parts for accuracy and reliability, stress points, etc.
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Seems to be £569 on the Prusa website, which is significantly more than ~ £150. 1 month waiting time too.
I don’t know if I can justify spending so much on a first printer as I don’t know how much I will use it yet.
However I would want something accurate and reliable, so maybe it is necessary to spend more money for that?
I should probably just wait until I can use the printer at the makerspace, but i don’t see any inductions on the horizon…
Slightly off-topic but I’m also a bit wary of putting more plastic into global circulation, does anyone know if there are recyclable filament materials?
Which one did you get Jim?
I got the Creality Ender 3. I like it so far, the only real issues I’ve experienced were the z-axis motor being a bit out of alignment with where the lead screw goes through x-gantry(I think that’s what it’s called) and the heated bed is a bit warped. I shimmed the z-axis motor with some cardboard until I could print a proper bracket and got a piece of glass cut for £3 and clipped it onto the bed, so there were cheap solutions for both. Still playing with settings to get the quality dialled in but have had a few prints that I’m happy with.
If we assemble properly and don’t bash the printer around after calibration it will produce accurate print. When it come to reliability my custom build
has been printing for hundred of hours and I only need small bed calibration once every 6 month and you always need to keep an eye on extrusion rate or flow this is maybe me but it vary from any filament you load in. Mainly it all depend on how precise you assemble and calibrate it. After that it’s up to human error and knowledge to pinpoint failure often help.
PLA is biodegradable actually a more precise description is compostable, PETG is widely recyclable but ABS is not and I’m not 100% sure about Nylon and polycarbonate.
Printer looks great!
Most of the marketing around this is greenwashing. The compostability of PLA is dependant on it making it into an industrial compost facility which it probably isn’t unless you are explicitly taking it to one or paying for it to be taken to one. PLA and PETG are both in theory recyclable but face the same issue of not really having anywhere to take them. If you are putting them in your recycling bin they are likely being filtered out and ending up at the incinerator or landfill. There might be some specialty places that will take it and recycle it, definitely something I should look into.
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Would be interesting to see what quantum waste make of PLA. Composting is theoretically their reason d’etre
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At a permaculture convergence a few years back, I heard about a fungus which can turn any biodegradable/compostable material into compost in 2 weeks.
I’m almost certain someone will argue but my Anet A8 seems pretty good. I’ve just made a shelf for it, so soon I’ll be testing one of my current 3D models to compare speed and quality with the SLMS Ultimaker.
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I’m aiming to make a start on the “Cheap Prusa” shopping list. Anyone interested in group buys?