Owning a personal 3D printer can be a challenging experience. But how bad can it be?
Personal 3D printing is still in its infancy, as as such one could expect things to go wrong from time to time. Unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong a lot more frequently than one might like.
There are some situations that reoccur, leading to frustration. Here’s our list of our “favorites”
- Finding the 16-hour overnight print stopped in mid-print, causing a lengthy reprint and some wasted filament
- Finding the 16-hour overnight print slipped off the print surface, causing a massive plastic mess in your 3D printer. And a reprint
- Finding the 16-hour overnight print slipped off the print surface, causing a massive plastic mess that attached to your extruder and burned or broke it
- A large print failed after only one 0.1mm layer, causing you to spent considerable time picking off the microscopic plastic debris off the print plate
- A very tiny contaminant in a plastic filament found its way to the tip of your hot end, causing an unremovable blockage, either permanently wrecking your extruder or requiring you to burn it out
- Waiting weeks for spare parts to arrive from [insert distant location] to fix your otherwise inoperable 3D printer
- Waiting weeks for spare parts to arrive from [insert distant location] to fix your otherwise inoperable 3D printer and suddenly discovering you owe USD$350 in customs duties to receive them
Are there worse experiences than these seven? Yes, indeed. We’d like to hear about them; please drop a comment with your story.
