An Ender 3 is the rite of passage for all 3D Printing enthusiasts. Yes a Bambu lab may be refined, convenient and clean but to become the ultimate hobbyist and maker one must burn their hands cleaning the clogged extruder of an Ender 3. One must blow more money on repairs than the actual cost of the printer in order to get it running.
3D Printing is not a simple technology. Man went through many struggles to take manufacturing from being subtractive to additive. Printers like the Bambu lab make 3D Printing child’s play. They are not machines but appliances, that you plug in and they are functional. The true spirit of 3D Printing can only be embodied by a half functional shitbox, that you need to disassemble, clean, lubricate and adjust every time you print.
Auto leveling is cool, but ever used a piece of paper ?
Dynamic flow is cool, but ever had to manually calibrate yours extruder ?
Wanna print from your phone ? Bambu’s got that covered. Meanwhile my Ender bros are flashing their firmware because someone disconnected the USB cable in the middle of a print (they lost the memory card reader and had to print from the USB cable)
Noise and vibration cancellation you say ? What about a frame with 7 loose nuts, a x-axis that’s barely held together, a print head that rattles, belts that are either too tight or too loose.
Its bad, its real bad. But it will print. And it will print anything with anything.
The kind of learnings and skills you can develop while barely managing to print with an ender, that can never be accomplished with a printer that just works on the press of a button.
A Bambu lab may be cool, and structurally sound but an ender is resilient. Resilient enough to take the beatings that come with 2 collegiate engineering teams operating in a dusty shed with a hole in the roof and a pigeon infestation. Did I mention that this 15x30 feet big space houses 20 or so engineers all aspiring towards the archetype of a satyr ? They’ve also got rocket fuel, an arsenal of epoxies and adhesives and power tools. With only a concrete pillar to shield it from the carnage the Ender has been abused until no end, it’s printed ABS in the middle of the north Indian winter covered with nothing but a cardboard box, it’s been run at 999x speed to make deadlines. The cardboard box it came in has carried an entire team’s project securely as they went across the country in a Rajdhani.
The people who had acquired it, they aren’t even in the country anymore (I think, I don’t know who they were). They graduated long ago and left their printer in the den of 3D printer abuse. Where it has lived since then, barely hanging on with new extruders, hot-ends, tubing, nozzles and firmware updates applied like patchwork. The kind of patchwork you see on a broken road. Screws were unscrewed and lost in the void. Upgrades were made, using CA glue and cello tape. The printer was disassembled and reassembled until it reached an equilibrium, fix one thing, break another.
Finally out of necessity, our team has acquired Bambu lab’s A1, finally putting an end to the ender’s misery (and ours too). And I’ve acquired an A1 mini (it fits my desk, and my stipend).