Makerbot Method Xs are the worst 3D printers to waste $5K on

FIRST General Forum
1

My FRC team runs two Makerbot MethodX Carbon Fibre 3D printers. We’ve had them for about five or so years now, and for as long as I can recall, they are ridden with failures, no matter how much time is spent in maintaining them. I’ve contacted customer support four times, each without a response. Over 168 hours has been spent drying filament, over sixty hours of manual work disassembling extruders to remove massive jams of filament, and hundreds of dollars wasted in filament. Maybe it’s just ours, but at exactly 9:00 am, PST, February 1, 2024, they just conked out.

Bit integer limit?

Anyway, we are trying to get our district to buy us some Bambu Labs printers. If it doesn’t happen, I have to design and build one myself. (At least it will work, right?)

Anyone have a MethodX with lots of problems?

14 Likes
2

Makerbots used to be garbage because all 3D printers were garbage. Now, they’re garbage because that’s profitable. There are literally a dozen examples on the machine itself (and in service contracts) that proves this, but the hot swappable extruder on the Gen 5 tells the whole story.

That’s like having a hot swappable engine in a car…does somebody expect it to break often? Perhaps on purpose/from known garbage engineering? cough hyundai cough

Might not be a popular opinion, but I would steer away from Bambu in favor of Prusa. I have gripes with both, but Prusa has real people with faces, and is based in a country with relevant consumer protection laws, aside from the objectively more serviceable and proven printer platform.

26 Likes
3

It’s the biggest pile of garbage we’ve ever bought. We bought the platinum warranty and I gave up on it after the third unit they sent us.

I’m just waiting for the day where I can take it out the baseball field and recreate the printer scene from office space.

29 Likes
4

“Your favourite classic printer scene… REMASTERED in 3D!”

26 Likes
5

Whooo boy… As someone who works in a print lab where most of the printers are Makerbots of some form, this is a pain. Everyone working at the lab will try to use the Ultimakers if possible, which have their own issues, but that’s a topic for a different time. The Makerbots can only run PLA, which has its own issue, but the hot swappable extruders (we have roughly 30-40) sometimes just stop working randomly for some reason. Swap them out or even just reconnect, and they’re fixed. As far as I can tell, the only reason we still have the Makerbot Z18 if the sheer size of the damn thing. The Makerbots are all slow printers with some of the worst software I’ve seen (Can’t slice a large cube, uses a wildly inefficient slicing algorithm, proprietary nonsense, and apparently provides time estimates the same way I provide timelines for any project: Make a wild guess, multiply by a prime factor of 534,956, and then add on a randomly generated number in the next unit of time up. I’ve probably spent more time troubleshooting the printers I run than actually setting up prints to run, and I print more than everyone else combined at this point. Oh, and it appears that the stupid things can’t print a first layer correctly that isn’t ridiculously thick, so almost all prints have to use a raft. I’ve been trying to get a Prusa into this lab since I got here after I saw the average print quality (and failure %) of these things.

I’ll second this.
I have some technical concerns with Bambu, especially after their blog post that they’re recalling all their A1 printers. Which, honestly, props to Bambu for discovering the issue and choosing to recall while the issue doesn’t appear to be very widespread.
But back to the main point.
Bambu’s printers are pretty much completely proprietary, to my understanding. That just doesn’t sit right with me, especially since these printers don’t appear to be easily user-serviceable so you can’t fix much on the printer on your own. That’s one of the things I really hate about the Makerbots - about the only maintenance you can do yourself is keeping the machines clean and replacing the nozzle/hotend. If the printer breaks, good luck fixing it quickly and cheaply. That’s something about Prusas I love - they’re designed to be quick and easy to repair, with software you can modify if you want to make any modifications, not to mention the fact that Prusa has pretty much every upgrade you could conceivably add to your printer.
I’m also skeptical of any wireless printing tech, which appears to be the main focus of Bambu. I just don’t trust wireless tech, especially anything that communicates over WiFi.

7 Likes
6

Filament Load Letter… What the heck does that mean

7

Bambus are great but you can find some solid deals on eBay for used Markforged Onyx One’s if you’re patient. Have seen them go for a couple grand.

9 Likes
8

Bambu can be operated just fine without using wifi. One of mine has never been connected to the network, and I just sneaker-net the files onto SD cards. The way it’s built is not very conducive to customization, but the replacement parts are also stupid inexpensive. This is the kind of printer that works better the less you try to “improve” it.

8 Likes
9

I would get a pair of Bambus first. I don’t like that they’re closed source, but they do sell replacement parts at a reasonable price, and the experience of printing on them is incredible. Even easier than a Markforged, using generic PETG filament on an P1S. Also much faster than a MF with any filament.

I despise markerbot. I think it’s a giant psy-op to convince people that desktop 3d printing sucks and that you need a $50k machine to get decent results. Whoever sells those should feel ashamed of themselves.

EDIT: the last used Onyx One I worked with smelled like cigarettes, had the imprint of a tiny gun on its bed, and refused to work at all. Prints could not adhere to the bed. Also, no warranty (because it’s used) so it ended up being completely useless as MF doesn’t sell replacement parts.

2 Likes
10

Every printer has quirks. As much as I love my X1C’s, I’ve had way more failures in fewer prints than I have on the Markforged. Markforged is still about as set it and forget it that I’ve ever found. Have also had to replace the bed and other components on them too though. All printers require maintenance and work to keep printing nicely over time and I’ve found if you don’t do this it’s when you start having problems.

Which part? I’ve bought just about every part under the sun for my Onyx One’s. Even replaced the touchscreen in one of them.

That being said - Bambu labs are absolutely the best value and are really great machines for FRC with a lot more flexibility in terms of material. Every team should own one.

6 Likes
11

Our team purchase a Qidi X plus 3 back in October. Little over 700$. I’m lovin’ it. It just works unless I’m stupid. Just printed some large PET-CF parts at 320c hotend , 80c bed and 50c chamber. Beyond capability of most consumer printers. Handles everything else. Every printer is going to need maintenance. Enclosed Core x y prints are much harder to perform repairs on compared to open cartesians. Qidi seams to have fair customer support But the end consumer drives them crazy.

1 Like
12

Glad to hear it. I still immensely dislike the fact that you need specifically Bambu software to use the printer among other things (bad experiences in the part with a machine that requires a specific software that you can no longer get without paying a lot of $$$), but I am a fan of Bambu offering replacement parts cheap.
That being said, I’m a tinkerer at heart and will tinker with any printer I own so I’m gonna stick with my new toy (old broken Airwolf HD2x that I’m completely rebuilding)

2 Likes
13

Last time I had an issue with a MF, the hotend was out, and it took months to get a nonfunctioning replacement through support. The used one I described had a messed up hotend and bed, and at the time MF didn’t sell replacement parts or I wasn’t aware of them.

Looking at their website, it would have cost me $300 for a new bed and $1200 for a new hotend. That’s more than what was paid for the eBay printer and as much as buying a brand new X1C from Bambu! So basically, if you get a used Mark One, you’re looking at spending $1500 for just replacing the two most worn parts.

The Bambu prints twice as fast for half the cost, so I could literally just print double the parts and still come out ahead with a handful of failures - and I really don’t think every other print on an X1C is going to fail.

14

Ah, if you purchased a Mark One that would be why. Mark One was one of the first printers made by Markforged and was later retired. I have one of these as well and it’s really hard to find parts for it. Onyx One and other parts you can just go buy from the Markforged store, admittedly at a premium.

But yep, most teams should be running a Bambu. Bambu prints Onyx like a dream as well, works great, no need to dry the filament for a full day like the Bambu PA-CF stuff either.

2 Likes
15

While they absolutely are trying to be the iPhone of 3d printers, unlike Apple they actually sell every part that you would need to repair your printer and provide guides on doing it. Their parts are also extremely reasonably priced.

This is not completely true. You can use your own slicer it just likely won’t have access to some of bambu specific features like the lidar.

5 Likes
16

Additionally, the Bambu slicer is free, open source, and actively developed community forks with added features exist. You’re not going to get locked out of proprietary software.

The desktop 3d printing community has a real “open source or bust” streak due to its history, which can be a good thing for a lot of reasons, but I think it leads to a level of unfair skepticism about companies who take an approach like Bambu, even though they’re still delivering a level of open information, self-repair capability, and above-and-beyond to make things right when they screw up that would be fairly unprecedented on a lot of other types of consumer device. In part, because it’s the right thing to do, in part because it makes their products better, in part because they understand the tone of the community they exist within and that they would get eaten alive if they came up short on supporting self-repair. People preach against them anyways on high-minded philosophical and moral grounds, and then that leads to consumers doing research perceiving hypothetical problems that could arise from closed-source platforms, as active, ongoing issues adversely affecting the experience of owning a Bambu printer, which just aren’t the case right now.

In terms of sending a message with my dollar, there are maybe better choices, but in terms of functional capability added to an FRC program per dollar spent, and added ability to make a direct impact there, they’re the clear leader as of now.

Makerbot, on the other hand, …whew, yeah they’re one of the prime reasons the 3d printing community tends to be hostile towards closed source printers. Started out as a leading hobbyist open-source printer back in the days when printers were made of wood, transitioned to a closed source model, rested on the laurels of their name while falling further behind, got bought out by stratasys, whose aggressive patent enforcement is generally considered to have held hobbyist printing back. Their sales model largely targets schools and other situations where the person doing the purchasing is likely not the person who will be using and maintaining the printer, who is going to buy from Makerbot simply because it’s the Thing You Do For A STEM Program.

Again, the potential exists for Bambu to fall down a similar path, as with any company. But thus far, they have gone to great lengths to not go down that route.

12 Likes
17

If I ever have money to burn one day, I’m going to buy one, put it out in a snowy bank, strap some dynamite on it, and blow it to kingdom come. For all they’re worth.

1 Like
18

After some digging around, I found something intriguing.
A Makerbot Employee had alleged that the company had purposely released faulty designs when releasing the Replicator, and caused a lawsuit. This lawsuit was dismissed after it was found that the allegations were too vague to be supported. The design of the Smart Extruder+ solved the issue and is similar to the design to that of the Method’s swappable extruders.

These swappable extruders, cost about three hundred dollars and aren’t worth anything. Not only do they have a bad design that allows filament jams, but they also tend to give false readings with extruder jams. They are a waste of money, and not worth buying new ones. My institution allowed me to disassemble and regularly fix them, but this is a pain.

Makerbots are the worst printers to have and waste time and money on.

5 Likes
19

This explains a lot.
I still don’t understand how printers that go for $5000 on McMaster-Carr (only place I’ve found Replicator 5th gen’s in stock) with $300 hot ends don’t have the capability to print anything other than PLA, don’t have a heated bed, and don’t even have the decency to include filament spool holders.
Prusas are the complete opposite: A lower cost for 5 hotends that can print pretty much anything you can print with, a heated bed, and new hotends that are really quite cheap.
Heck, I can buy like 20 different hotends that cost less than $300 and are significantly better quality.
The fact that these printers are similar in reliability to the average Ford from a while back doesn’t help at all.

1 Like
20

My school recently purchased Dremel printers for the engineering rooms and they are really bad. First they have an internal filament storage so you are locked into their smaller sized rolls (both diameter and width). It practically limits you to only Dremel filament and they only sell PLA. They are also super slow, have an inflexible build plate, and are fairly small build volume. They are also super expensive, about 2k a piece for the model we got.

Personally I have a Prusa mk3.9 (mk3 with upgraded motors and slides) which works pretty flawlessly. It is super fast and really easy to use. It does have wifi so you can upload prints and watch the temps. Also if you have an old smartphone you can set that up to be a camera for the printer.

The team recently got a Bambu X1C. It has been pretty easy to use with good print quality. We haven’t been able to run any of the wifi things because of the restrictions on our school wifi. We attempted to work with the IT guys to figure out how to unblock it, but it hasn’t worked yet. The AMS makes it really easy to run in different materials without any additional work. We did get filament stuck a few times but it was fairly easy to fix with the included tools.

2 Likes