I am starting a 3D printing business to accompany my brothers business as well as grow beyond. My brother has a booming company making and selling RC Quadcopters. He is currently spending over $6,000/year just in 3D printed parts! These parts are small and relatively simple. Many of his parts also require being made with TPU which I know can be difficult to learn.
Currently I am leaning towards the Lulzbot Taz 6 with my budget of $3,000 or less. Is that a good printer for my needs? It seems to have a large build volume while keeping tolerances low enough to make the small parts from ABS and TPU as needed.
I am currently in the research phase and learning a great deal. Looking forward to getting my hands dirty and printing useful parts. Any info and help is greatly appreciated!
SOC3D
2
Something non-prusa style with an enclosed build area might work better, ultimaker, flash forge, fusion f400.
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Thanks for the insight. I am new to this, so going to ask an ignorant question. Why do you not suggest the open style?
Too many environmental variables? I really like the large build space and modular heads so I can print ABS and TPU. They also have great customer service and an open software platform so it can really be customized. But if you think that an enclosed printer is the way to go, I will take that into serious consideration.
Thanks!
SOC3D
4
High temp materials prefer a heated build chamber. If you plan to print large parts, parts with thin walls, or parts requiring temps over 200 celcius an enclosed build are may work better. The fusion is a bit outside your budget, flash forge is not known for their customer service. The bcn3d sigma, ultimaker, zortrax and a few others might work. I forgot the most important thing! Best 3D Printer Guide 2023 | Hubs The 3d hubs printer guide.
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Hi,
Closed print chamber is a must to print with ABS otherwise warping and cracking will occur in the prints.
My recommendation is buy a Zortrax M200 with cover panels, its still one of the best FDM printer to print ABS. Its just works perfectly 99% of the time and using their materials you can have perfect quality prints all the time. It’s a closed system so you can’t thinker a lot with its settings and their slicer program is a bit slow, but they are perfected the configurations and settings for you so you need to just load the model slice it and print it. It’s a perfect work horse printer if you willing to run a 3D printing business.
Here is review video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGPWSye7eto
The only downside of the closed system that you have to use their filaments, but it will always produce great prints with them. There is hack to use other filaments (hacking the print head temp.) http://www.z-temp.co/
So you will spend around 2300-2400 dollars on this printer with a starter pack of filament.
For the rest 600 dollars go out and buy a Chinese kit printer for 300-400 dollars, like an ultimaker clone printer (Please i am bagging never ever! buy a Prusa style printer witch bed is moving in the Y direction they all can have print quality issues due to the moving plate witch can hard to deal with it).
This will be your test horse printer and also a backup printer if anything goes wrong with the Zortrax and you will have orders to complete. With this cheap printer kit you can thinker with it and play with the settings and modify it heavily to accept all kind of filaments. If you make this printer perfect and tweaked the slicing settings then you can maybe reach the quality of the Zortrax’s prints (yes it so much better then anything else in the market, specially for ABS)
If you are interested in this solution let me know and I can recommend some kits to buy.
Regards,
Tamas
(P.S.: I have 3 printers but not a Zortrax but I made some compare print tests with Zortrax prints and my printers can reach that quality after spending several months to find the perfect settings.)
You can build an enclosure easily for the Lulzbot. Thats what I did and I can print abs fine., https://ohai.lulzbot.com/project/cat\_guard/accessories/
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Or just buy a Zortrax for 2000 USD witch prints ABS perfectly out of the box (okay with optional side panels) as the Lulzbot TAZ 6 is 2500 USD + few hundred for the enclosure… don’t think its worth the money.
In the long run the Taz will be cheaper. You dont have to buy proprietary filament. You can use any filament brand and type. Zortrax you are limited to what they provide. If the company goes belly up or ends support of the printer than you are screwed. Everything on the Lulzbot is open source.
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For biggest return for your investment, Id have to suggest putting in enough effort into actually building your own printer. Whether this be from scratch or from a kit, the knowledge you will learn alone is invaluable. If you do hope to start a business, then it’s in your best interest to be able to troubleshoot and maintain your printers your self, in house, rather than having to contact an external expert which can very quickly add up in prices depending on the luck you have with the lifespan and breakdown rates of whichever printer you had bought.
Even if you don’t purchase all of them, I’d highly suggest just buying one kit, both of my printers are the cheapest ones possible off of AliExpress and honestly it compares so well to expensive printers (Directly comparing it to the Makerbot Replicator 2 as I have one at my disposal).
They’re a lot more work but you will learn a ton more in the process.
Hope this helps!
(Sorry, somehow my previous post posted twice…)
Smoldy
11
From what I have read, the Zortrax doesn’t print TPU. I could be wrong!
This is a major downside for me. Otherwise it does look like a solid option.
Smoldy
12
Thanks for the insight. I had not even considered this. I will research this option more and make a decision. But it does seem that building one is the best way to get exactly what I want for the least amount of capital.
Smoldy
13
I made the decision to go ahead and purchase the Lulzbot Taz 6. Immediately I was able to print ABS at a better quality than what my brother was previously buying from a large 3D printing company. Just using the basic “high quality” setting, this thing prints ABS amazingly.
Now I have switched my efforts to printing Semiflex for his GoPro mounts. This material is much tougher to print, but I have pretty much gotten all the settings dialed in and now it prints these complex shapes extremely well in Semiflex.
No enclosure is required d/t the heated build plate (bed). The Lulzbot Taz 6 is an amazing machine!!! Pics attached.
