After spending the weekend messing around with my "new" fdm 3d printer I've come to the conclusion that I was correct:
Cheapo FDM printing is fucking stupid.
Everyone I've ever met who ended up getting a couple of these Cheap chinesium printers to run kinda okay for over 12 hours was boasting about how super smart they are to figure everything out, and oooh you need to learn a lot more and you wouldn't understand half of it anyways, look at me I'm so shpeschial.....
Pretentius asswipes, all of em. The only reason FDM printing is considered a skill is because how insanely dumb the whole thing is... Spitting out hot plastic onto a barely hot plate that instantly shocks the material so it won't stick while the whole operation depends on it sticking, just to have to cool it off instantly at a later stage so it won't crush/sag/bulge... any air current messing up the temps and causing warping and delamination, any moisture in the material that wicks away moisture by design causing bubbling and errors in the finish... most of the "affordable" aka JUNK machines like the oh so popular creality enders are made from cheap soft aluminum cutoffs thrown away by some plant that makes clothslines, drilled and asembled by some 8 year olds, while the concept demands 0.01mm accuracy to be viable in real production environments as a prototyping machine, AKA it's original purpose for existance! And you are trying to do all of this for no money or less, cos paying for a decently engineered and built printer is haram...
It's just soo dumb.
Then there's the software side. There are 999 parameters to adjust. Not just for shits and giggles, you actually HAVE TO adjust because no one has thought hard enough for 5 mintues to connect these parameters and make em adjust to viable values dictated by, oh I dunno, simple 3rd grade maths?? WTF even is this Cura shit? Chinese spyware, yeah ofc like all slicers, but at least have the decency to make it useful and looking like something designed after 2000? FFS....
Good example of this utter stupidity, the reason why I spent half a day printing spagetti: you can select a preset profile for a 1mil head (default would be 0.4mm but I got mine with a 1mil), but the profile doesn't change ANYTHING apart from the head size. So the initial layer height was still set to 0.28mm while my layer height was 0.5mm due to the larger head. This resulted in the first layer trying to extrude so little material that it basically printed nothing on the bed, thus I had no material there that could adhere to the build plate lol...
I'm not even gonna go into how bad the materials are. None of these non-proprietary reels of literal refuse (what, you think they "harvest" PLA just for that? hahaha) adheres to any standards. Some will start burning up at 200 C while the next roll with the same material and color, even from the same brand, will only start working above 215C and won't stick unless the bed is a melting 90C... The one full roll I could snatch up during the weekend has more water/mm in it then a keg of budlight ffs... And it was vacuum sealed, in a box, all proper like.
Ah anyways, I finally got this piece of trash to stick and print, at least the 1mil head makes for a god aweful finish at full speed but is fast enough that I don't want to throw it out the window just yet. Made a couple of bathtub boats for the kids and some covers for sharp objects around the house they were prone to bump into one day.
tldr.: the "knowledge" and "skill" behind FDM printing is solving problems that shouldn't exist in the first place...
I wish the "community" behind it would stop acting like they are so above us all just because they have no jobs and could spend the time figuring those out.
Cheapo FDM printing is fucking stupid.
Everyone I've ever met who ended up getting a couple of these Cheap chinesium printers to run kinda okay for over 12 hours was boasting about how super smart they are to figure everything out, and oooh you need to learn a lot more and you wouldn't understand half of it anyways, look at me I'm so shpeschial.....
Pretentius asswipes, all of em. The only reason FDM printing is considered a skill is because how insanely dumb the whole thing is... Spitting out hot plastic onto a barely hot plate that instantly shocks the material so it won't stick while the whole operation depends on it sticking, just to have to cool it off instantly at a later stage so it won't crush/sag/bulge... any air current messing up the temps and causing warping and delamination, any moisture in the material that wicks away moisture by design causing bubbling and errors in the finish... most of the "affordable" aka JUNK machines like the oh so popular creality enders are made from cheap soft aluminum cutoffs thrown away by some plant that makes clothslines, drilled and asembled by some 8 year olds, while the concept demands 0.01mm accuracy to be viable in real production environments as a prototyping machine, AKA it's original purpose for existance! And you are trying to do all of this for no money or less, cos paying for a decently engineered and built printer is haram...
It's just soo dumb.
Then there's the software side. There are 999 parameters to adjust. Not just for shits and giggles, you actually HAVE TO adjust because no one has thought hard enough for 5 mintues to connect these parameters and make em adjust to viable values dictated by, oh I dunno, simple 3rd grade maths?? WTF even is this Cura shit? Chinese spyware, yeah ofc like all slicers, but at least have the decency to make it useful and looking like something designed after 2000? FFS....
Good example of this utter stupidity, the reason why I spent half a day printing spagetti: you can select a preset profile for a 1mil head (default would be 0.4mm but I got mine with a 1mil), but the profile doesn't change ANYTHING apart from the head size. So the initial layer height was still set to 0.28mm while my layer height was 0.5mm due to the larger head. This resulted in the first layer trying to extrude so little material that it basically printed nothing on the bed, thus I had no material there that could adhere to the build plate lol...
I'm not even gonna go into how bad the materials are. None of these non-proprietary reels of literal refuse (what, you think they "harvest" PLA just for that? hahaha) adheres to any standards. Some will start burning up at 200 C while the next roll with the same material and color, even from the same brand, will only start working above 215C and won't stick unless the bed is a melting 90C... The one full roll I could snatch up during the weekend has more water/mm in it then a keg of budlight ffs... And it was vacuum sealed, in a box, all proper like.
Ah anyways, I finally got this piece of trash to stick and print, at least the 1mil head makes for a god aweful finish at full speed but is fast enough that I don't want to throw it out the window just yet. Made a couple of bathtub boats for the kids and some covers for sharp objects around the house they were prone to bump into one day.
tldr.: the "knowledge" and "skill" behind FDM printing is solving problems that shouldn't exist in the first place...
I wish the "community" behind it would stop acting like they are so above us all just because they have no jobs and could spend the time figuring those out.
