Hello hello! Just ordered on Sunday night! It's gonna be my first 3d printer!

The first thing I'm gonna print is a cube. A really, very awesome cube. It's gonna be epic.

Then, I've got like... six doohicky things that I need to have for a few things. Something to arrange the cords for my laptop better, a stand for my phone, a little cupcake sculpture for a girl that I think is cute...

She's gonna shoot me down. But that's okay, the cupcake sculpture is gonna be awesome.

Gonna do a pencil holder for my daughter's colored pencils, too... Bunches of other stuff... I'm so excited, can't wait.

And yet, I must. The suspense is killing me.

 

The only question I've got is: what do I do with myself while I wait? I'd go to the carrier's page and feverishly hit the refresh button, but I don't have a tracking number yet.

 

Poor OP is *never* going to get laid if he things 3d printing a gift is something romantic.

Print her this and give it to her instead, OP. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:827266

 

Sounds like a wonderful idea, Dan, but I don't know if she likes cups or eggs.

 

Read the comments on that thingiverse listing and maybe you'll figure out what it's actually for.

 

How have you been enjoying your printer so far?
PS Dan, that is funny!

 

S-Fly,

Within half an hour of unboxing, I was printing a doohickey for my daughter's computer charger. Honestly, the initial setup was about as challenging as setting up a paper printer. There was an SD card with video and software, but it was corrupted or something. I couldn't get anything off it, so I had to download from the website (no biggie.)

In my excitement, I completely forgot about a cube. I didn't put anything down for adhesive, and I expected it to fail. It worked flawlessly for that first print. It failed for the next one, though. Seems that glue is important. I spent that starter roll of filament messing around with different things from thingiverse. I had issues with the z-homing switches going weird and the y-belt going loose, but those issues just required turning of a couple of nuts or a screw and everything was back to good as new. I burned through the first 300g of blue started PLA, giggling like a kid.

I had gotten into the habit of printing from an SD card, rather than keeping the printer connected to my computer. That way, my laptop isn't tied to the printer. The SD card slot is positioned in such a way that one can easily lose their card in the bottom casing of the printer. I plan on modifying the case so it doesn't happen any more, but it feels like a design flaw that I need to fix rather than a simple opportunity for customization.

I had purchased the black friday special, which was the R1+ and 3 rolls of filament (wood, carbon, and glow). When I ran out of the blue starter plastic, I figured I'd try out the glow-in-the-dark. That's where some frustration occurred...

Changing the filament was complicated by the fact that I had the last bit of the blue PLA in the hotend. It's an easy fix, but you have to know how to do it and it's not described in the manual. It seems like a somewhat big thing not to have instructions for, as a clogged nozzle is a common enough complaint.

Once I got the filament changed, I could not, for the life of me, make it adhere to the bed. Chunks of the plastic would roll up as the nozzle passed over. I went into the settings for slic3r, and messed around speed settings, couldn't make it stick. Glue, hair spray, piping hot bed, all failed. If I just let it go, it MIGHT work, or it might not, or it might fail in the last 20% of the print (which makes for a fun-looking-drunken-spiderweb thing on your print.). It ended up being an extrusion temp issue. Standard PLA, per the manual, should be printed at ~210 degrees, the glow in the dark PLA seemed to work best around 195-200 degrees, though I'm still getting a bit of contraction around the corners of a small cube. There's no information in the manual or robo3d's website that suggested that the glow-in-the-dark PLA needed to be treated differently from standard PLA. There might've been something in the forums, somewhere, but I didn't really dig that deep.

Now, the lesson here is that, when printing with a new and unfamiliar material, do some test prints. But, it would have been nice to have a better idea of where to start with it.

All things considered, I was prepared for much more frustration than I got. It's been a lot of fun so far, and I'm very happy that I've made the purchase. I'd recommend it to anyone, so long as I could make them understand that there's a learning curve involved.