There was a stretch of time I was looking at videos of budget gaming PC builds and they’d be like “How to build a gaming PC for $150” and a lot of them went like “Buy a used Optiplex for $120, max out its RAM for $30, then use this GTX 2080 I got from nvidia for free because I have two billion subscribers.”
Me: Should I buy a prebuilt 3D printer?
Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.
Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?
Reddit: Well, I’m still tuning it for all my filaments. I’ve been through about 40kg, and I’ve got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.
Building a 3d printer is really its own hobby. You don’t build a 3d printer because you want to print stuff, you build one because you want something to tinker with
- Average Linux user
Yeah those communities are wild. Before I bought my own printer I thought 3D printing is mostly fixing your printer and buying better parts and bed leveling and tuning etc.
Wasn’t looking forward to it so I bought an off-the-shelf printer with minimal assembly from a “boring” Chinese brand - couldn’t be happier with it, it just prints without any hassle and I have no urge to switch firmwares or tinker with the printer itself instead of with the printed stuff. To each their own I guess.
(Still plugged in a raspberry pi for octoprint and did some initial calibration for the filament of course …)
There is no world in which that machine is under a million dollars.
Hear me out: what if you made it entirely from parts created by a larger CNC machine?
Self replicating CNC Machines. That’s not even a guy operating it, it’s 3 smaller CNC machines in a trench coat and hat
You see, there is this unwritten agreement between the creator and the viewer that they like stuff explained to them, but they don’t actually replicate anything shown in the video. At best, they half-arsedly order some materials and then never get to it.
It’s the same contract we have with all cooking shows and food videos.
man you’re following the wrong channels then, there’s a good chance any food videos i watch will at least give me ideas for how to improve my own cooking
That machine costs well over $381k. We had a much smaller 3 axis lathe installed in the machine shop I worked in during my early 20’s and it was $3M. That was 25 years ago, so it probably costs infinity dollars now, given recent inflation. Hell, you probably can’t even buy them now, just lease them on a subscription for eleventy bajillion dollars per year.
My first thought, written by someone who has no concept, likely a kid.
