Just some thought on my newly assembled i3 MK2S  

Just some thought on my newly assembled i3 MK2S

Just a little bit of a back story and sorry for it being a bit long. I originally wanted to get into 3D printing around 2 years ago and decided to buy a cheap kit from Geeetech. Horrible mistake on my part there. Building instructions wasn't very clear, to put it mildly, and calibration instructions was basically not existent. I could never get anything to print correctly and was really frustrated. So the whole 3D printing thing was put on the back burner. Fast forward to the beginning of this year and I saw the Monoprice Select Mini 3D Printer on Amazon. The price was good and the reviews were also good so I decided to grab one since it was assembled already. Printed the fortune cat that was on the provided SD card and was quite happy with the print.......till the 5th print. Some how the extruder got so jammed up I couldn't get it to clear no matter what I did. Frustrated beyond belief, also having some budget flexibility, I decided to do some deep googling to see what other option are out there. At the time I think it came down to 3 choices: Flashforge (or some variant of it), Makergear M2, or the i3 Prusa. Choose the i3 Prusa because I didn’t want to spend more then $1k and the calibration features seems to be what I needed. Ordered the kit back in March and used the saved money from not ordering the assembled ver. to grab the Multi-Material kit also. It arrived in late Sep. So here are some of my thoughts after assembling and printing my 1st print in no particular order.

1) There really should be a recommended tool sections, specifically a Caliper. A side cutter or a small filer recommendations would also be good too but not as needed as a caliper. I get the feeling that you guys seem to not want to put a recommended tool section just so you can market the printer kit as something you can build with everything in the box. The 100mm for the frame assembly especially but other areas would benefit from having a caliper lying around.

2) The belt holder under the heatbed was an issue for me because of the X axis endstop. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t hit the endstop unless I used some force on the heatbed to push it in a bit, the bearing was hitting the frame corner before it hit the end stop. It took me a while to remember that the belt holder screw holes isn’t exact and there was some wiggle room. Was so stumped that I was about to post on the forum.

3) I didn’t get any horribly mis-printed parts like some stories I read on the forum. However the black parts seems to be not printed as well as the orange parts? I had some issues putting the nuts into their sockets on most of them and had to sand them down with a small file. The worst was the bracket holding the cables from the heatbed. I couldn’t get the nut into the grove to the point where I use too much force and the piece cracked. In the end instead of putting the nut into the grove I just screw it under the heatbed to hold the bracket piece in place. See pic.

4) The Pinda holder definitely need some redesigning. During the XYZ calibration I was worried about puncturing the heatbed due to reading the forum so I was really cautious about it. To move the Pinda I had to use some significant force to move it due to the threading on the 3d printed holder and the Pinda. I had to use the plier and was really worry about damaging the Pinda itself.

5) During the 1st 4 point of the XYZ calibration I think I spent a hour doing the paper drag method cause the paper seems to catch the bottom left corner of the heatbed during the initial start up of the calibration. Everything else ran just fine but I was really worried for a while there and kept redoing the calibration. After an hour I just basically made sure there was no scratch mark on the bed and kept the calibration going and it worked fine. Is there something wrong or was I just worrying too much?

6) Maybe a bit more detailed pictures on the cable management in the Rambo box. Not really an issue but at the moment it’s basically a rat nest inside.

7) The assembly instruction is pretty clear though I do get the feeling as you get into the later steps the person who wrote it was clearly thinking “Yes, I’m almost done writing!” 🙂

Overall I am satisfied with my purchase of the i3 Prusa MK2S. It took me basically 2 days to assemble and calibrate. Print quality after 3 prints are excellent. I didn’t assemble the Multi-Material upgrade yet cause I want to get familiar with the printer 1st and to get some prints in.

The only gripe I would have atm it’s that the MK3 was announced just 1 week after I got the MK2S in. If the MK2S wasn’t shipped yet I would’ve probably waited for the MK3 instead cause the upgrades looks great.

Anyways this got really long. Thanks for reading!!