Thank you, Prusa  

RE: Thank you, Prusa

We started with a Mk3 - prints worked fine from the beginning; today, it's got 2,700h on the clock, and it's still a joy. The MMU2 we bought didn't get three-digit hours, and we sold it off. The Mini -from the first batch- was a pain, and never fulfilled the expectations formed by the Mk3 in terms of usability and reliability. The second Mk3 will be on order soon. We'll be looking at XL and Mk4 once they are matured to two years in the field. Thank you, Prusa for a good entry into FDM!

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@bodo

Sorry to hear about your Mini.  Did it arrive before January?

RE: Thank you, Prusa

I would not call the MK3S idiot-proof, but it's a quality product that performs as expected.  Getting good prints does require a fair amount of experience, RTFM-ing, and attention to detail.

As I said in the other thread, I believe in the 'You get what you pay for' saying, and that's why I went with the Prusa instead of any of various clones and work-alikes.  It was easy to assemble and has given me very good service.

I consider the prints from the MK3S to be superior to those produced by the TAZ-5 at the local 'makerspace' and the price point to be much better.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

No device is ever idiot proof, but Prusa's printers are getting pretty close...

My MK1 1.75mm was a pain, hard to understand, a nightmare to bed level and some poor manufacturing, but, Prusa helped and pretty much held my hand as I fixed things (mostly that I had done wrong)!

I upgraded to the MK2 via the upgrade kit and that went pretty simply and was so much easier to understand.  Again the early teething troubles were down to my own inexperience.  But Prusa were a great help in sorting the issues out.  What a difference, since then all I do is switch it on and print.  I've only had to recalibrate it once since it was assembled back in June 2016!!

I would expect the MK3S to be even better! Especially as both my MK1 and MK2 were first editions without refinements and tweaks!  The MK3S has had time to mature.

Personally I would never buy a Chinese knock off.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Posted by: @charles-h13

@bodo

Sorry to hear about your Mini.  Did it arrive before January?

Just before Christmas. And boy, did it hours; though the first MINDAs only lasted 30h-50h.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Unfortunately I have to say that I'm quite disappointed with Prusa.

I tried two Chinese printers first but they were bad and I decided to spent more and buy a quality product and help when something goes wrong. So I ordered an miss and waited 6 weeks for it. Assembly worked great, the instructions are really good. Printing worked great, I really liked the results.

So why am I disappointed? Well after 5 days and about 8 hours print time I had finished a print and removed the filament because I wanted to use a different one. It took unusually long to pre-heat. When I then inserted the filament, smoke started to come out of the nozzle and the filament was immediately vaporized. It still showed 215°C on the display. I turned it off and contacted support through email. They wanted a video, I provided it, and another one that showed that from about 150°C the hotend temperature was increasing much faster than the display showed. So far so good, problems can happen and a diagnosis is good to replace the right part. It took another week and more things I had to do and report the results until support decided it might be a faulty thermistor.  Almost 2 weeks after I reported the issue a new thermistor arrived (delivery only took a day) and I replaced the one in the printer and tried again. Same result, hotend is at 300°C while the display showed 196°C. Again, it can happen that the first guess what's broken is wrong. So I emailed back again and told the support guy that it didn't fix the problem. That was on Wednesday, until now I didn't even get a reply, I sent another email on Thursday asking if they need more data or if I need to try something different and just in case the last mail wasn't delivered, again, until now, no answer. It's now almost 3 days without a response and 16 days since the problem occurred on a 5 day old printer.

It seems to me that Prusa support is as bad as the Chinese printers. I was hoping for a much better experience. I understand that things can break or not work as expected, that's not the issue but stopping to reply and leaving me more than two weeks with an unusable printer I paid over 800€ for is really a big disappointment.

I'm totally lost now on how to get my printer fixed.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Posted by: @matthias_franz

[...] So I emailed back again and told the support guy that it didn't fix the problem. That was on Wednesday, until now I didn't even get a reply, I sent another email on Thursday asking if they need more data or if I need to try something different and just in case the last mail wasn't delivered, again, until now, no answer. It's now almost 3 days without a response and 16 days since the problem occurred on a 5 day old printer.

For best support, log into the online store and contact support 24x7 using the chat option. They will work with you through any problems. Email is usually reserved for specific requests. Chat is far faster.

It seems to me that Prusa support is as bad as the Chinese printers. I was hoping for a much better experience. I understand that things can break or not work as expected, that's not the issue but stopping to reply and leaving me more than two weeks with an unusable printer I paid over 800€ for is really a big disappointment.

When my Artillery Sidewinder X1 bed wiring broke, I went through a few cycles of sending and waiting for email responses. Response times varied between 24 and 72 hours. They finally agreed to send a replacement part. It arrived more than 60 days later. Considering that the wiring included AC bed cabling, they clearly haven't addressed the safety issues. I haven't had an issue that wasn't resolved with Prusa chat within 24 hours. Parts arrived within a week IIRC.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Helo @matthias_franz

the best is to login to e-shop and open the chat - fastest and most efficient. Do you have your printer still unde warranty?  If so ,than would be probably the best to send it for repair. If the thermistor is not an issue - I am not sure how technically are you educated , would be good to check the the thermistor resistance, if you can doi let me know, I can provide you a resistance values for some temperatures.

Does the thermistor in idle mode (after switch on )  showing reasonable (room) temperature?

The issue can be also a serial resistor, which is conencted to the thermistor.  Service centre has the best equipment to resolve the issue.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@matthias_franz I'm with @bobstro and @zoltan here - chat support is way more efficient than per email. We've had at least five tickets within the first six weeks with our MINI mostly over the MINDA cable, and trouble analysis/MINDA replacement was swift. We've even opened a chat support ticket after the email to support didn't get a response after three days (holidays included). Email support replied after the replacement part arrived.

I guess that's just down to chat having a higher priority than email in the support department.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@bobstro @zoltan @bodo thanks for the advice! I'll try the chat.

They had me measure the resistance of the thermistor before they sent one, I hope I did it correctly, the numbers didn't seem too far off the values in the instructions for measuring it.

Does the thermistor in idle mode (after switch on )  showing reasonable (room) temperature?

yes, that's the thing, when I measure the temperature at the nozzle with my multimeter while it's heating up the values on the display and the hotend are pretty close up to about 150°C above that the hotend increases at the same speed but the display slows down and just climbs 1 degree after a minute and more.

The printer is still under warranty, just 3 weeks old (stopped working after 5 days)

Thanks again for your help!

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@matthias_franz

I had several challenges in my first 6 months.  I was able to chat with chat and get past them  

RE: Thank you, Prusa

I think we need to remember as well that 3D printing is still very much in it's infancy!

If we swap 3D printers for cars, I'd say we are barely out of the Ford Model T era!  The first mass produced, consumer printers have only been around a few years, and a lot of development is still going on.  One day, I'm sure, all 3D printers will be mass produced to sub micron tolerances in dust free factories, will print so well you can't tell the difference between a moulded part and printed even with a microscope, and be able to print in almost any material at once.  Not quite Star Trek replicators but getting there.

But for now, we are all part of the cutting edge of home 3D printing, so there are bound to be issues along the way, by working together with companies like Prusa we can help create the next generation of printers!

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Posted by: @3delight

I think we need to remember as well that 3D printing is still very much in it's infancy!

Yes, it will be an evolving technology for some time.

It's amazing how far things have come, and how the price points have dropped over the past three years or so.

When I first got into this, the cost of the lowest-priced 'good' machine that our local makerspace had cost about US $3000 and was quite quirky compared to the MK3s.  No auto leveling and the manual leveling (I never did it but saw it done once) was several iterations of tweaking manual adjustments and rinse-repeat test prints.

The MK3S that I got last February was less than 1/3 of that and does consistently better prints.

One thing that Prusa is very good at is they have offered several upgrade paths to the Latest And Greatest [tm] when it comes out and does not leave you with an obsolete unit.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Thanks for all the replies! It's great to see that there's an active forum.

A short status update: after 3 days I had an email reply in my inbox this morning and they'll send a new board and want the old one back to investigate. I hope they manage to ship it soon. It's not that they aren't nice at the email support they are just pretty slow, maybe there are not enough people. Any way, I hope this fixes it and next time I'll try chat (in most other companies chat is normally pretty bad). As people said above 3d printing is still pretty new, so I think it's great that they want the board back to identify why it broke. 

RE: Thank you, Prusa

Probably short staffed due to Covid.

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@matthias_franz

The slowness is why everyone recommends chat support.  

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@matthias_franz

I keep my fingers crossed,let us know the outcome 😉 

RE: Thank you, Prusa

@matthias_franz

reading back  the posts, I was almost sure, we are talking about the MINI ,but at the end I gues you own a MK3S, don´t you?

Nevertheless i am happy, you get your issue resolved. 

update. This is the risk of general threads, anybody can take her/his own (sometimes mislead ) view 😉 

RE: Thank you, Prusa

short update: they provided me with a label to send in the board and I did, it should arrive there today and hopefully they then finally send the replacement and hopefully that fixes the issue.

Yes I have a MK3S, I thought I mentioned it but I didn't.