I can second the U1. I got it after my modded Ender 5 that I fitted with a two-head toolchanger.
It’s night and day. The U1 isn’t quite as fast in real life as the marketing material says, but it’s still much faster than the Ender 5. It prints perfectly every time. Since I had it I had a single print failure, and that was because I didn’t clean the bed propperly and the print detatched from the fingerprinty bed. Other than that, every single print worked flawlessly.
The toolchanger also saves so much waste compared to a filament changer.
I know it’s beyond your stated budget, but I wouldn’t want anything else (except maybe a Prusa XL, but that thing is ridiculously expensive).
Btw, the U1 is rather open sourcy, and there’s a custom firmware that improves a lot of issues with the OG firmware.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Dooooo eeet! Let the filament flow through you! I am your father.
Seriously though, I have 6 printers spanning Bambu, Anycubic, creality etc. 4 of them are multi-color and none of them can touch the u1 on pretty much every metric.
The U1 is fast, prints amazing, has open source firmware and minimizes filament waste by a ridiculous amount.
The Kobra 3 Max is my most used printer, but it only gets more use because it’s a large format printer and I’ve been printing some large art piece stuff(if it wasn’t for the constant filament clogs with the crappy filament cutter system it would be great).
Don’t even touch my p1S anymore unless I need to print a bunch of stuff at the same time.
(Other printers are used for more industrial prints so multicolor isn’t something I care about with them)
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It is done. My fate is sealed. My bank account, reduced to atoms.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
While you wait for shipment, start printing an ikea lid mount for the u1. It’s not necessary but it’s great to keep dust out. I did the beaverworks because it was first but I don’t recommend it because there are better ones now. Beaverworks version has unnecessary extra material and needs toyou to unplug the hot extruders to install.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yeah I saw that, though I’ll probably just wait and print on the U1 when it gets here.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But from atoms, greatness!
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
And then that greatness reduced once again to atoms when I inevitably get a full color 3d scanner to start making perfect miniatures of everything. Luckily I’ve probably got a few years before there’s a decent markerless scanner in the hobbyist price range, so I have time to recover.