Yep. F360 is my go-to CAD platform. Integrates eagle now too, which is nice.
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I have a wanhao duplicator I3 plus and I love it. There are tons of knock offs of it as well (monoprice, cocoon,) you can get them on amazon for about $300-$350.
Theres a huge community out there for it and tons of mods.
Ok the time has come but I am in a dilemma. Creality Ender 3 which is really cheap and from what it seems very reliable but will need upgrades to print nylon or Prusa i3 Mk3 which is a lot more expensive but can print nylon out of the box
What would you do?
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This might not be what you want to hear, but I think itās worth investing in the i3 mk3. My experience with 3d printers in general is that you really do get what you pay for. Hereās the Creative Ender 3 review: https://www.google.co.il/amp/s/m.all3dp.com/1/creality-ender-3-3d-printer-review/ For me, the manual calibration and needed releveling are the main dealbreakers. Thatās extra time and hassle spent on the printer and less time on printing. What it really comes down to is- do you want to save money now, or time later? As you said, the mk3 (assembled) is ready to go right out of the box. Would you rather spend more time on the setup? Same goes for whenever you have to recalibrate?
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When getting an ender-3 make sure you get the new pro version. It has a magnetic heated bed and they fixed the issues that some people had with the extruder.
I decided to get the prusa i3 mk3 I even found it in stock in Greece with the textured powder coated bed so will go and buy it today. I will get the kit version as it is a lot cheaper. What filaments would you suggest to start with? I think the kit includes 1kg of PLA filament to start with, so apart from that, I will definitely need some nylon filament for wheel pulleys https://www.cableworks.gr/black-friday/1kg-yasin-3d-black-pa-1.75mm/
and some petg for enclosures ? https://www.cableworks.gr/black-friday/1kg-yasin-3d-black-petg-1.75mm/
What do you think?
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Skip the nylon for now. Buy some petg and start with that. Get a bunch of prints under your belt and reevaluate nylon later. I suspect petg will be enough for a wheel pulley anyway. Nylon has a whole set of water absorption issues you wonāt want to deal with initially.
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i just got a tevo tarantula last week and have been using it quite a bit. its been surprisingly good once i spent a couple hours getting the settings correct. i got the larger print bed version, it was $240 very well spent.
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+1 for petg
learn the machine by just printing random stuff with the pla. burn that whole roll before diving into the petg.
if you do get the nylon, donāt unseal it before youāre ready to print.
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Thanks guys.
I started assembly of my new 3d printer. I got the version with the textured powder coated table 
.
I got a 1kg roll of petg and a 1kg roll of PA (nylon) filament.
As advised I will first start with the supplied PLA, then try PETG and finally nylon.
It will take me a few days till I finish assembly though since I can only work on the printer 1-2hrs every day 
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I have the Mk2s Prusa and itās worked flawlessly for last 18 months since I built it (also got the kit as itās fun to build things).
Get familiar with Pla before trying other filaments otherwise you run the risk of getting frustrated early on and giving up. Pla is a piece of cake to use, but nylon can be a bit trickyā¦ Be careful not to let it absorb atmospheric moisture otherwise itāll be unusable.
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Printers I can reccomend for engineering purposes.
Prusa mk2/3 flashforge Creator Pro Ender 4 (WIth many many upgrades) Taz 6 with moa struder. any laser sinterāer.
in short.
Prusa mk2/3 is a great all round printer - great quality and relaiblity, with a decent sized bed
FFCP has a much smaller bed but what you loose in bed size, you gain back with the option of a second nozzle - dissoluble supports anyone?
Ender 4 - cheapest of the lot on its own, and is decent from the get go. Great for manually upgrading ( I have mine with a duet wifi mainboard, and a titan aero volcano hotend. its my best industrial machine now )
Taz 6 - just google it, youll like what oyu see, the moar struder is just a larger nozzle which gives stronger and faster prints.
Laser sintering - strongest, best quality and technically the fastest printer, but at a heavy price tag.
Would the ender 4 need those upgrades for it to print at same quality and speed as the prusa mk3 i3? I donāt see many suggestions for the ender 4
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He probably means Ender 3. The Ender 4 uses similar components (hot end, extruder, controller board, roller-wheel linear motion), but is a CoreXY design, which basically means more complexity but lighter print-head (faster acceleration without inertial print artifacts). In general, most of the criticism and praise you see about the Ender 3 also applies to the Ender 4 and the CR10 as well.
In my experience, the Ender 3 prints very high quality out of the box, more than sufficient for mechanical parts. For an educated user, itās easily 90% as good even without upgrades. Quality-wise, its really only surface finish where the Mk3 does meaningfully better. If youāre printing cosplay parts or models (where surface finish is important and youāre likely to sand, prime, and paint), itāll make a difference, but for us it doesnt matter. To get the Ender 3 to the level of the Mk3, you would need to swap the hot end for an e3d v6 ($70 for the genuine hot end, $10 for a clone) and change to a direct drive extruder (this isnāt actually an āupgrade,ā direct drive vs bowden is a design decision that comes down to precise control vs speed).
That doesnt mean the Mk3 is not a better printer than the Ender though. The Mk3 has a lot of quality-of-life features (better power-loss recovery, magnetic PEI flex-plate, quieter operation, automatic mesh-bed-leveling etc) that make it by far the default choice in its price range. It just comes down to how much you value things like that. For me, power-loss has yet to ever happen in my apartment, I slapped some magnets on my Ender 3ās fiberglass+buildtak bed to replicate the Mk3ās, I put it in the closet to quiet it down, and I print everything at >0.24mm layer height to increase mechanical strength which means I can get away with moderate bed surface inconsistencies and almost never have to re-level my bed.
With the Ender 3 and basically all Chinese printers, I do think its very helpful to replace the extruder with an e3d Titan extruder (or the TriangleLabs clone, only the TL one is any good AFAIK) if you plan on printing PETG as Iāve had no luck getting the stock ones to grip the material consistently, and replace the hot-end with an e3d v6 (or a PTFE lined clone, do not bother with all metal clones, or if you do, spend an extra $15 and replace the cloned heat break with a genuine e3d one) as the Makerbot style Mk10 hot-ends are prone to āheat creep.ā
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He probably means Ender 3
Nop, I do indeed mean the ender 4,
it fixes one of the largest problems that the 3 has, which is the binding of the z axis due to misalignment. I just find due to its H-BOT layout (not coreXY) it is more reliable than the 3 but not by much. other than that. the 3 and the 4 are pretty much identical other than the kinematic movement.
Interesting, I assumed it was corexy, havent seen a new h-bot in a while. Out of curiosity, what speeds and accelerations do you tend to print at?
The z-axis binding is pretty easy to fix, with either a printed adjustable z-motor mount, or with a cheap replacement motor coupling.
for my 3 I print with 800accel with 5 jerk. for the 4 I print at 1400 accell and 13 jerk. I find they give very reasonable prints even when pushing 90mm/s
PLA only? I find PETG is too viscous and gummy to go too fast, I wonder how ABS and Nylon perform at speed
Printed PETG recently and Iām not really happy with it, bit brittle. Also, you need a significant higher bed and nozzle temp, better check if your printer can handle this. Ours wasnāt able to go over 240 degrees C.
I print ABS at fairly high speeds, the secret is go slow where it shows and crank it where is donāt, this what I use -perimeters 45mm/s
- outer perimeters 35mm/s
- infill 80mm/s
- solid infill 80 mm/s
I would like to go higher, but at 0.2mm later with a 0.4mm nozzle Iām at almost the limit of my extruder of 10mm^3/s
Iām running some tests to see if I can push the rest more