MakerBot Support Problems

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by magnets

My personal experience is that the makerbot is a poorly engineered, low quality 3d printer. A few years ago, that was okay because it was the only cheap 3d printer. Now, there are many more 3d printers out there that have equal price but are higher quality.

IMO, the makerbot is a toy for people who think 3d printing is super cool, but don't know anything about manufacturing. From an accuracy/repeatability standpoint, the makerbot is pretty low quality.

As a RepRap printer builder, the MakerBot was never the cheapest choice in town. It wasn't even the cheapest fully assembled option.

When everyone was getting them last year I tried to be civil and stopped short of calling MakerBot out for doing everything they could to basically get their product embedded into the schools so they could tap that revenue in materials and repair parts. I really think that was the ultimate goal.

Maybe that would be not so bad if support was decent but really it is extremely hit and miss.

I give MakerBot respect for many of their efforts, but these printers and my support experience for them has been very bad.

I suspect future MakerBot printers will continue to integrate more and more single source parts that only MakerBot can provide further deviating from the RepRap traditions. Surely MakerBot will argue that their printers are not really RepRap printers but really...if you look at the electronics..they are exactly that with some predictable modifications.

On the other hand again I'd rather spend $800 for a printer that will eventually be obsolete but might offer parts and assembly knowledge to future printers, rather than $2,500+ for a printer that tries to sell you a slight variation to merely change materials from PLA to ABS.

I have 18 different materials for my Up! printer with a temperature selector on the extruder. If I understand MakerBot's design properly I guess I would have to buy 18 different MakerBots to do that. For $36k I can buy a Stratasys printer and then I have to get more expensive cartridges with materials from them to maintain the warranty and operation. Those cartridges often have left over material in them when they 'run out'.

So really this is not much of a deal at all. I agree that MakerBot is trading on the reputation, not really on the merit of the performance or quality of their support.

Oddly the Cube is not exactly the greatest print quality I have seen. It does use expensive materials if you do not hack it. However at least it has printed from the time we took it out of the box and continues to do so despite exposure to many students messing with it. Yet I see people giving them away and not taking them? I guess reputation means something even if it's not backed by stability in the results.

[AllenGregoryIV]

We had a Makerbot z18 at work and ended up returning it. It had issues from day one.

We replaced it with a Rostock and have been very happy so far. Ours uses an E3D v6 hotend.

On Spectrum we got an Airwolf 3D HD2x a little while ago and it's been pretty good to us. We've been pushing it's limits working with a lot of polycarbonate filament so it hasn't been perfect but it's handled our abuse pretty well. They also have fantastic customer support, I have about a 45 email thread going with one of their customer support people, nothing particularly wrong, just asking questions and getting answers back pretty quickly.