Looking into buying a 3D printer and these are the three I’ve narrowed it down too. Any suggestions on which one is the best?
I have a lot of experience with the form 2 as I use it at work. While it’s great for aesthetic pieces and prints very very accurate to models, I wouldn’t use it for anything supporting load in FRC without the high strength materials if at all. Makerbots are decent printers, but everyone seems to have issues with them and they’re very overpriced. We use ultimakers on 1836 with lots of success, and for FRC applications, I strongly urge you to get the ultimaker over the other two mentioned.
So then within ultimaker is there a specific model you would recommend taking into the account prices and trying to get the most bang for your buck.
Skip all of those printers, they are just toys. Go with the markforged printer.
Especially at the price range all of the listed printers are at…
If a markforged is in your budget 100% it is way better than almost anything else on the market, but to be fair the filament is expensive and at least the onyx one can only do onyx filament.
Between those 3, definitely an Ultimaker 2. Time and time again I hear terrible things about Makerbots and while the form 2 is great, the Ultimaker is much more applicable to FRC.
My team is considering an Ultimaker 3 Extended. Can anyone lend some insight into how the Ultimaker compares to the Markforge since they are in a similar price range. Why is the Markforge so popular over other printers in it’s price range?
Thanks in advance!
The markforged just works. Literally “just works”. Our team hates 3d printers on the low end <3k range because to us they are just toys and the parts don’t make it on the robot. But last year we were super jealous of our friends on 125. They were printing parts left and right, overnight builds etc…
So this year we made the leap and bought a markforged printer and could not be happier. It helped us get 2 robots done in about 4 weeks. We printed about 5-10 percent of our overall parts which is huge for us. Maybe even more.
More or less time is money, having a machine that just works and prints out high strength parts is a huge plus for us. By the time you waste your time on the low end printers you couldve gotten something legit.
I guess what I’m saying is if youre spending 1-4k just save up and buy the markforged. We are getting another 1 or 2 this year.
Were the parts you printed for your robot reinforced with continuous fiber, or just the Onyx filament?
1072 doesn’t rely totally on printed parts, but we have a few on the robot printed at SCU (Ultimaker 3) and 115’s shop (also Ultimakers). They’re good printers. I don’t know if they’re as trouble-free as Markforged, but fixes are very easy and once a print gets going, it doesn’t fail. Plus, we only pay about a sixth of the cost compared to the Markforged filament.
You pay a high price for reliability. Sometimes it’s worth it. There’s so many 3D printers nearby I don’t think we’ll buy a Markforged until the rest of our shop has everything. YMMV.
Do you have any picture of the parts you have printed and the estimated cost of those specific parts? I saw someone else’s post that the software gives you an estimate of how much the print will cost.
While I think Markforged is probably the way to go for FRC, the benefit I see with a more standard FDM printer like the Ultimaker is the wide variety of filaments you have access to (most of which are cheaper than the Onyx you are stuck with should you go with Markforged).
No fiber for us. Might get the upgrade later so we can make cooler stuff. For us having 2 or 3 of the intro models is better than one with the fiber. We were printing a 12-24 hour build a night for 3 weeks straight. Printed so much that we had to borrow material from 1678 :yikes:
I don’t have prices rn (traveling) but some links from the team FB page.
I’ll try and get the students to put up some of the other parts we’ve made. A lot of the parts are integrated plates and spacers, blocks etc… Stuff that just takes forever to make manually.
The key value is having parts being printed overnight without any fear of a print failing. More or less 125 was ahead of the curve, we are just catching up.
If you don’t mind me asking, where were those gears used (how much load were they taking)?
Those gears were used purely for 1:1 encoder reading on our swerve. They take practically zero load. I personally wouldn’t use plastic printed gears on anything but an encoder stage.
But they worked well and they were custom made for what we wanted. Main feature was we were able to control the hex size.
we have an ultimaker 2 and i can’t say we are satisfied…
there are “mishaps” all the time with it, and it’s never the same thing getting broken twice, every time it’s somthing else.
it’s practicly impossible to avoid stringing with it in my experience.
if you are about to go with anyway, at least go with the ultimaker 3 which have a USB port and not those god-forsaken SD card inputs 
So with mark forged should I get the onyx one printer?
A makerbot should not even be in your list of options for what they cost and how unreliable they are.
There’s days where I literally can’t look away from a print on ours because as soon as I do, I swear to god it knows and immediately ruins the print.
Our school librarian got an Ultimaker 3, and it’s a very nice printer. It’s well supported and documented and it’s easy to get it working, and it can print in a variety of materials, including printing nylon with soluble PVA support, for example. It’s $3500, though, so it costs twice as much as a lot of other good printers. It does not print abrasives unless you install an all metal head upgrade ($400). It prints at a higher resolution than most printers, so that increases the cost for something that isn’t the top priority for me. Even though it’s a really cool machine, it isn’t what I’ll choose whenever I order another printer for our team due to its cost.