Oh man I had forgotten about those PEEK hotends - stuff of nightmares... Starting with the UP mini as my first personal printer saved me so much suffering - the hotend was lightyears ahead. I might have not stuck with the tech if I had started with a solidoodle! Great demo of what it was like.
The first time I tried PLA on my Solidoodle it got fused to the inside of that PEEK barrel and destroyed it. Those were fun days when PLA was the cool new filament on the block!
Like alot of people I started with an Ender 3, and always understood that as primitive base model. This totally changed my perspective, knowing for a $400+ printer you not only didn't get a heated bed, you didn't even get the hotend, there was no heatsink or fan?!! Mad respect and gratitude for those that kept pushing the evolution along.
My first 3D print was in 1989 in Dallas, when I was in the early years of starting Haltech. I still have the print. Back then it was called stereo lithography. It was a 3D print of a throttle body design I was doing for Keith Black Racing in Anaheim. I now operate a factory that produces my own 3D products in Australia, which I export all around the world.
Interesting to see how things were different in Czechia (with Josef Prusa’s work). I got my first printer in 2014 (9 years ago) and it was MUCH closer to today’s printer: normal hotend cartridges, very basic but normal extruders, handmade hotends (but high quality full metal ones, made in my city) but almost V6 compatible. The printers ran Marlin (really really early, M600 was added in 2015 by the guy I bought the printer from) and RAMPS 1.4 (if you were lucky) with hand soldered components. We were using Slic3r and CuraEngine inside Repetier Host, though it didn’t feel too slow
Repetier Host was amazing. Having the menu option to open up a box with all of the EEPROM settings was fantastic. You could edit them all in one place without memorising the gcodes. I had to cut some stuff out of this video to get the length down but this printer as running RC versions of Marlin 1.0.
I'm still using Reprap Huxley and Mendel printers these days. With some modern modifications like E3D hotend, proper heated bed, TMC drivers, and with decent klipper firmware and latest slicer software, these printers still give good results. And I plan to continue using them for the next 5-10 years.
same here my Reprap Huxley and prusa Mendel 1 are still in use today so wht is they are old if they still work and print very accelerate then why change
I started in 2015 with a Monoprice Mini. I remember showing my prints to someone who’d cut their teeth on a Flashforge like the one you showed, and they were amazed at what I could do with a $200 printer. I eventually had to get this printer replaced under warranty, but I still occasionally use the replacement for small jobs.
This where nostalgic. My first printer where a solidoodle 2 pro too, printed only in abs back then. So fun to see this printer again. Used mine about 1 year before I sold it and upgraded to a Ultimaker 2 that I have since, upgraded to a 2+ and is still going strong with great prints today.
Gheghe. Lovely to see. And I am impressed by this pioneers work. I stepped in to 3d printing in 2016. E3d hot ends were already available at that time. All metal too. So I missed making hot ends myself. The kapton hell I remember well. With bad luck fresh kapton on the heated bed every other print. Thanks to pioneers like you and your teaching skills I learned to build and improve my own printers based on existing metal frameworks on the market. So as a result I feel comfortable in building, modifying and designing 3d printers or parts and the software and electronics. So your teaching helped me to find an independent way in 3d printing!
Another great video. I got my first printer almost 9 years ago and my how things have changed, and stayed the same as well. But like you said last week, massive changes are happening right now. My first printer was a MakerFarm Iv3 10". That was a great printer. I didn't know how good it was until I gave it to a friend and bought a Creality CR-10 lol.
2015. I was a VERY proud owner of a Printrbot Simple Metal with Heated Bed! I also had one of the 1st Ultimakers at work whose extruder was an absolute nightmare to navigate so I hardly used it. I tuned the hell out of the Printrbot and actually got really decent prints from it but it wasn’t very consistent. Also used capton tape (and printers tape before I installed the heated bed) to cover the heated bed and was still doing that all the way up until 2021. I only ended up replacing it last year for an Elegoo N3 and realised how far 3D printing has moved forward in such a short time. 3D printing is downright easy now and it’s an absolute pleasure. Some interesting numbers. The Printrbot Simple Metal (PSM) + heated bed cost me around $600 and took me 2 days to assemble and configure. The Elegoo N3 cost me €200 took 30 minutes to setup and configure and printed far better off the bat. I would have around a 1-2 failure rate with the PSM, the N3 up till now has never failed, any mistake have been my own. Luckily the PSM also had an auto bed levelling system, no where as accurate as the N3 but it was actually pretty good. The Ultimaker was still manual levelling and my failure rate was far higher. Honestly I hated that machine and it costed a fair wack more than the PSM. It was a ripoff imo. Tom Sanlanderer was my RUclips guru back then and helped me navigate through most of the 3D printing pitfalls.
Ah yes, i remember helping to keep the one at our hackspace running, going through Kapton and PETG tape and basically 90% of the time you weren't printing things you wanted but you were adjusting settings for that new filament roll, fixed bugs in that hot new firmware that totally wasn't compatible or were fixing issues with the bed not being level because that one adjustment screw got lose again(because no auto leveling), the nozzle shredding the kapton after dipping in 0.000001mm too low, and all the other fun stuff. This made me actually lose interest after a few years and now i'm at a point where i don't want to use plastic anymore and rather skip the prototyping and just do it in wood or metal right away.
Honestly I recognize some of the older names a lot of the time in your videos. I started a little prior to you, in the 2007-2008 era. It's amazing how far we've come.
Great vid. Had started a delta in 2016 but got to busy to finish. Fast forward to January 2023 and the beast gets built! Many mods later it's awesome and now trying to tame the Tronxy beast, slowly creeping to a VZBot. Thanks for all the knowledge you share!
I started about 7-8 years ago with a Printrbot Play. In retrospect, the only real issues were the lack of a display and lack of a heated bed. It did have an inductive sensor on it so it did have auto-leveling, but with no display and no dedicated Z offset adjustment, as a newbie it was difficult to get a decent first layer without restarting the print a dozen times. I put the hobby down for a couple of years and later started over with an Ender 3, and have since gone back and used the Printrbot a few times as a demonstration because it’s tiny but sturdy. Always enjoyed watching Tom stand on it in his videos back then!
You're all my kind of people! 🥰 I still have some RAMPS, threaded rods and kapton tape around, even found a couple days ago a Diamond hotend never installed. Maybe a color changing old school Delta could be an interesting proyect.
First printer was in 2012, an Ord Hadron. Luxury for the time as it was kit of parts. It was fun tinkering with it then but don't miss that aspect of printing these days (Bambu X1C)
I remember some of this stuff. I came in 2014 on a FABtotum. It had steppers, it had a glass heated bed that was removable, it had a camera, it had an enclosure, web control with mobile interface and built in wifi, on-device slicing. I looked at it like "ah, this has some useful stuff" I didn't realize that nearly 10 years later, many of those elements would still be "hey, we have..." as opposed to standard. But I remember looking through forums and the RepRap wiki on how to do things. I remember seeing those hotends, using blue tape and glue stick for everything, etc. I printed PETG on glass without any interface layer because the people I chatted with hadn't come around to "don't do that, it will take chunks out of the glass". It was a wild time and is why I now rail against some machines I see now which basically are rehashing how things were done then, but with a fresh coat of paint. We've moved on. Just stop. I'll also casually note that working in tech means Slic3r is pronounced "slicer" and I will die on that hill... and remember when that was a new slicer too.
Our 1st 3D printer, circa 2016: my brother designed the 300 mm cubed Core XY, dual Z axis drive, I built up the bowden tube Stepper Extruder/E3D Heater system, wrote into Marlin the inverse kinematics which all was stuffed into a Mega/Ramps1.4 controls. What a learning curve! Obviously, we didn't know that there was a huge community such as Teaching Tech's Michael that would have offered help/ideas/etc. Live and learn: ANet A8 was next.
This video was awesome. Super cool seeing 'where we came from.' I didn't start that long ago, but even in the past 2-3 years its wild seeing all the advancements we've had. But seeing from 10 years ago is even more cool! Love it.
Very interesting. Thanks for taking us back in time. I got my first 3D printer in Feb 2018. This is a Creality CR10S. Creality supplied Cura as slicer. The printer had a lot of features for its time. I am still using it. I have done a number of upgrades. The only upgrade I may do in the future is install some type of auto bed leveling. I am amazed how much changed in the 5 years between your first 3D printer and mine. Dave.
I appreciate the dedication to alternating between the two possible pronunciations of Skeinforge. So seamless (unlike kapton tape beds. Horrible flashbacks when you scraped the failed print off... oh, long gone are the days of rotating and translating prints to avoid bad spots on the bed.)
Well, this brought back some bad memories. Back in the day i sold a car to get the cash to afford my first printer, I was one of the pre-orderers for the Makerbot Thing-o-matic. I really fell for the marketing: "Desktop factory!" "Best Prints yet!" "Easy to assemble and run!". They never bothered to mention that the batch function for printing multiples required manually editing the gcode, or that the new stepper powered extruder wasn't included with the pre-order kits, but was available 2 weeks after the delivery date for the pre-orders, for an extra 200 bucks for the upgrade, but it's included with all the ToM kits after the first batch. Could never get that plywood lemon to print reliably, ended up having to go to the hackerspace in Philly to get some help to get it running, all the adjustments for power to the steppers was manually controlled via pots on the board. When it stopped sensing the bed thermistor, tried fixing it with the addon control panel for another 100 bucks, on top of the 1300 dollars the kit cost originally. It left such a bad taste in my mouth, i swore off anything "Maker" related for years. If it wasn't for my Dad deciding to impulse buy an Ender 3 Pro at Microcenter, I would have stayed far, FAR away from 3d Printers. Still got to figure out what to do with the 6kg of 3mm ABS filament i got sitting around. On a related note, I hope Bre Pettis steps on a Lego.
This is timely, I completed construction of my printrbot Plus V2 10 years and 5 days ago. It's been hugely modified since then but is still printing exceptionally well in all its plywood goodness.
My 1st build was a Prusa Mendel, in 2010. I had the frame complete and had started on the electronics when I decided to make a MendelMax 1.5 instead. I remember I bought the necessary printed parts from a guy on one of the forums. It took me over a year to get the thing working, because I didn't know anything at all about what I was doing, I just knew I wanted to make it. This video brings back some nightmare memories of hobbed bolts, kapton tape 3mm filament and fried electronics. The RAMPS 1.2 Mega was the common board back then.
just goes to show how different everybody's experiences were- I started 3D printing in 2011 with the OG plywood ultimaker and I didn't have to do ANY of the stuff you mentioned. Aside from the usual "my print failed how do I fix it" type of stuff that was common back then there wasn't much to it. I think the first version of Cura even became available a couple years after I got it so slicing even got "easy", even though Replicator-G wasn't too bad. That said- my Ultimaker was a HUGE pain in the ass to put together. it came flat packed in a box like a piece of ikea furniture that you had to hand assemble (the average build took around a full day, usually two days). we're talking thousands of pieces. much of the plywood was still attached to the main laser cut sheet so you had to cut them out with side cutters like they were sprues on a model kit or something. It was pretty insane by today's standards.
Your extruder designs kept my Solidoodle 2 and 3 running for a long time! He's too modest to say it, but Lawsy was a legend in the Solidoodle community!
I missed the build it yourself days, my first printer was an Up Mini, the original 2014 black enclosure version with perforated bed that meant a raft was essential and it could only really handle ABS. I still have it - carefully stored - and I plan to see if it will still work when I have space.
I started in 2017 with an original CR-10. At that point, it was bleeding edge tech for the price point and I bought it within hours of seeing MakeAnything’s review on it. I was really excited to get a proper 3d printer because I had gotten the original 3Doodler and was loving it, but wanted to be able to do more.
Bought mine in 2018 as my first try and pretty quickly moved on to a Prusa i3 mk3 when I realized how awesome 3D printing is. Still have the CR-10 with upgraded fans and use it occasionally when I need something bigger. Print quality is still rock solid, just pretty slow.
Loved the trip down memory lane.. I was lucky to have a Mendl thing and it was all threaded rods back then. Wade extruder certainly. Prontoface rings a bell and forget what the slicer was. Used to use whatever for CNC as well as 3D printing. Spent ages in the laboratory workshop drilling the brass nozzle used and adding a thread to the tube used. The heater was short cut off lengths of rod bar fire elements, with a brass tube (1/4" brake pipe ?) carrying the melting filament slid inside (as used same in PhD experiments too) The bed was some glass tile the glass blowers located resting on an aluminum sheet. None of it heated. I am sure used garden trimmer wire as the 'filament' as the real thing was way out of my price bracket then.. Used stepper motor drivers with YAG pumped dye laser so pretty sure reused same boards. I used to make filter and mirror mounts for experiments, nothing was very big and failure rates were huge.
It's crazy to see how things have innovated to where we are today. I'm sure back then you would never have predicted how much better 3D printing is now
Only been printing at home since early 2019 but played around with the ancient Makerbot’s we had at my high school before that. I look back at early me somehow managing to print ABS on an open air Monoprice Select Mini without too atrocious curling. Finally in the last year or two I’ve really gotten strong in the hobby and actually learned how to CAD. It’s crazy to look back at the things people did before 3D printing was mainstream.
This is such a painful blast from the past. Everything about this just made me have PTSD from my printers. My first printer was a kickstarter that was utter crap. I created the google+ group for it where we tried to bring it forward after the company died before all of them were delivered. I started maybe 6 or 7 months after you. After that horrid experience I got a clone makerbot replicator dual extruder clone and that worked much better, but boy were the various slicers were painful. Years passed and I got other printers here and there. Now I've got this Bambulab X1 Carbon and it is incredible. Night and day. I don't even recognize the hobby anymore.
Woaw I love this format "back in the day" ❤ my first 3d printer was a cr10 and I was using Cura back then. I think it was 6 to 8 years ago. But this seems nothing compare to the hardcore stuffs you mentioned in your video ^^. If I had to compared what I'm not missing from my early experience is the blue tape and the manual bed leveling :)
Yes! Finally someone sheds light in the Solidoodle! Way before its time. The fact we went backwards to bed slinger was a dumb idea. I mean, look back at repetier host. 10 years ago and we had Webcam, active gcode following in 3D. You could see what it was supposed to be doing as it was doing it! We still don't see that today. Octoprint does it in a 2d layer by layer, but not the same. I still have my solidoodle. I don't use it, but I have it. I now use my Bambu X1C every day. While Prusa's and ender's were minor steps forward, the Bambu has been a quantum leap. It changed my printing more than the previous 10 years of slow development combined I still have a massive roll of Kapton tape
I still have my solidoodle (2) and still use it. - updated the hot end to all metal years ago, - updated the bed to glass years ago. - jigsaw extruder finally gave up in a way that I wouldn't be bothered to recover at the end of 2023.
My first was a Prusa Mendel i2 - the a-frame style made from threaded rod and 20 bajillion nuts with a Sanguinololu board that came as just a pcb and I had to solder everything on the entire board. I remember when the bar to success was very low - it pooped plastic. We really weren't concerned about a "perfect first layer" or "z wobble" or "ghosting" or "ringing" - if you got a vaguely recognizable cube-like shape that somehow managed to stick to the bed the entire print(since we were mostly using ABS at the time), you had accomplished something!
i've been waiting for years to finally get into 3d printing, I just didn't have the time to invest to push through the early adopter hurdles. Finally in 2022, I got into it with an Ender 3 S1 Pro, really enjoying it
5 years of 3D printing, how time runs when in good company. The holow bolt with self made heating element is the top in my opinion. Great video/project as always 👍. Thanks for sharing your experience with All of us 👍😀
So, it was basically like a vape coil or rta for 3d printing lol. Really cool to see how far it had came and to think of how far it could still go. Thank you for all you do for the community.
Got a new subscriber! Really well done video, you went to a lot of effort with demos and physical demonstrations and it certainly comes through in the quality :)
Oh I still remember the first Creality printer I got, I spent more time leveling the bed than actually printing and the level distance changed every time the bed heats up, the extruded melted the bed sheet and all sort of issues. That put me off 3d printing for 7 years before picking up a Prusa.
I started off on a with a Makerbot Replicator v1 and that thing was a pain sometimes, the worst bit about these old machines was the warm up times and lack of control over the gcode from a gui. In all fairness it printed PLA as good as my current Ender 3 v2 just much slower and was a fair bit louder. A makerbot benchy took an overnight print to get good quality, something that my ender can do in about an hour 😂 Love the video, it brought back memories of watching the percentage creep across the cli window for what used to seem like eternity! ❤
Blue tape and plywood with a jamming Ubis hotend... Not ashamed to say im nostalgic for those days. The days of hour long slicer jobs, ABS on unheated beds and no enclosures, acrylic frames that cracked upon unboxing... Merely finishing a print was a story worth telling 😅
I still have my original stock solidoodle 2 with the original stock everything even including that kapton tape on the bed still intact. It has printed a lot too. Your guides back in the day were super helpful.
My first printer was a PrintrBot Simple metal back in 2013, it was awesome because it actually had a PCB Bed heater! ... that could get to 60°C if the room was already at 30°C, so it never printed ABS very well, the bed was a block of aluminum with Kapton on itm the heater was exactly as you described the solidoodle's (though I never had to rebuild mine fortunately). While it had micro-stepping motors it never seemed to utilize them and it screamed like a banshee. After college I got a Prusa i3 Mk3 and haven't looked back, it just works so much better with all the modern conveniences like a spring steel sheet, a hotend that doesn't suck to use or change, and software that actually functions.
I think the hardest part of learning to 3d print back in the day would've been not having your channel to walk us through everything step by step. At least that's the biggest reference I used!
The reprap forums have been around since 2004, just about everything in the 3d printing world FDM wise initially came from there including marlin. Though back then most people were using arduinos and erector sets or whatever they could find at homedepot for their builds.
@@nikushim6665 true the forums were definitely there, but watching a video showing exact equipment with step by step instructions is much less daunting to a new user than a wall of text with some pictures in a forum. I'm by no means discounting the value in those forums, but there's a reason 3d printing had exploded the way it has on RUclips
In those days, I was about to graduate college and I heard about 3D printing and wanted to get into it but I was not in a financial position to do so. Every so often, I'd think back to it but life gets in the way. Now here I am making repairs and upgrades to a broken printer I got on OfferUp and it's running better and better. This makes me realize how primitive but impressive it used to be compared to the more polished machines of today.
Cool video, i only started printing about a year ago for work and with many hours of learning its been fairly easy to jump in. I mean easy in the way of hardware assembly and reliabilty. We have a ultimaker printer at work and i have a modified ender s1 plus at home, and for the most part they just kinda work. I was thinking about the early days of printing when i was changing an extruder, its just a few screws and a ribbon cable. Im lucky that i happened to need printing now and not 10 years ago and greatful to all the people who dealt with all this crap and figured everything out and shared it so that i can just spend about 600$ and make whatever i need. Great video, i ve been curious about the history of printing , this satisfied my curiosity,now im gonna print a little drone frame cus im on vacation. Have a good weekend!!
Built my first in 2013 off of the original RepRap threaded rod monstrosity... I remember trying to get everything working in repeiter.. and Slicer.. and various custom one-offs.
The introduction of Cura engine was probably the biggest time save for the 3D printing hobby, imo. It was thr first slicer that let you slice a model twice a day without needing to run errands between the jobs 😂
The moment you pulled out the threaded rod, i expected to wrap the wire directly around the thread then seal it in with something like the cement you use. I gather that the wire rod combo might become conductive without the cement layer in between. Interesting scary periods of discovery...
April 2011 was my start date. I built a 1x2 Repstrap, mostly with parts from the hardware store, and Gen6 electronics from Camiel. I bought my first roll of filament direct from Adrian Bowyer. Used it to print a Prusa i2, and still use the X axis and a J-head for printing 3mm filament! I remember using RepSnapper more than Skeinforge for slicing. And the RepRap forums, a lot!
Thanks for sharing, some amazing tid-bits there! The idea back then of a buying all of your 'vitamins' from a hardware store and printing the rest seems so foreign.
I started 3D printing on 2019, on a Graber i3, used Marlin 1.x with RAMPS 1.4, glass bed mounted on top of circuit board heater, and J-Head clone as extruder with direct drive. I remember how exciting it was on every good first layer and finished print, but also remember the countless hours of troubleshooting without hope as well! Now I have poor's man Mingda D2, but looking for a X1 Carbon... The hype got me!
I've got my first 3d printer around 2010. It was the original UP! from pp3dp. At that time it looked like the best option from budget printers, and I must say that it aged very well. I used it for a long time, and the main reason why I completely stopped using it was that the old software became unusable, and the manufacturer started to push hard for cloud BS in new releases. That doesn't mean that the printer sits unused: I upgraded the controller to Dutet2, and the printer still extrudes plastic with most of the mechanical parts in their original form.
I started 3d printing really late, my first one was made using cdrom drives, with 4x4x4 cm building volume. At the time a friend recomended using Cura instead of Slic3r or Prusa Slicer. Today I still use a Graber i3 printer (basically a Prusa i3 version with MDF frame), using Arduino+RAMPS 1.5 and a Pi3b running Klipper. And surely I spent more time tinkering with the machine then actually printing something, as I intended from the start.
Solidoodle 2!!!! w/ the upgraded heated bed... so that means I started 10 years ago. That taught me a lot since ABS was the only filament I could get my hands on.
I started almost exactly 10 years ago with a printrbot maker kit in 2014. Repetier host vs modern slicers reminds me of windows device manager then versus now. The ever expanding tree was fine, but hard to find specific stuff.
Black to 2013 the Folger I3 was my second 3d printer after a Prusa Mendel. Folger's extruder/hotend was rubbish. I replaced it with a Jhead then by a E3D V5. Slicing was done through Repetier Host with Cura or Slic3r engine as both were available. Folger's carried a MK2 heated (disposable at this time) and we were printing on 5mm mirror with ABS juice or PVA glue. This solution was preferred over painter's tape and Kapton tape which was, as Michael said, nearly a single print solution. PLA was barely available, but ABS was reasonably cheap 12€/kg. Obviously bed leveling was manual. Then comes the Tevo Tarantula which was a very successful printer way before Creality established. Who still remember about it ?
My first printer was an Afinia h480 back in 2014. Sliced up my hands all the time scraping rafts from the perfboard hahaha It doesn't connect to windows 10 machines so I haven't used it in at least five years, but I'd like to try and make it work again some day.
I did not have part cooling on my Mendel 90 as at the time I only printed ABS, once I could get a hold of some affordable PLA though I also got a MK8 hot end, which came with a part cooling fan, it was a real MK8 hot end not the Creality hot end that a lot of people seem to think is a MK8 but only has the nozzle of a MK8, also back in those days I only printed functional parts that I could not make easily on my lathe or mill, it was treated as a tool and only got used when I needed to, ABS filament was not as cheap as it is these days
8:30 About a year and a half before the local Fry's Electronics crashed and burned, they sold sheets of adhesive Kapton for this purpose. I had access to a Prusa by then, so I bought it to use for flat flexible circuits.
I built a RepRap back then and could never print anything useful with it. I gave up 3D printing for almost 20 years until I bought a Prusa last year. I really don't miss tinkering.
I love that Skeinforge is described as having a "Simple, intuitive graphical interface." That surely had to be written by someone involved in the project. No normal user would call Skeinforge's interface as intuitive.
Indeed id say whoever designed a such interface muct have been drunk when he did it. But I also never have seen or heard about these early programs. I got my first machine 2021, an Ender3 V2 and the slicer (Cura) reminded me instantly about how you run a laser or waterjet machine. It works just like the toolpath generator in those machines including an animated preview of the toohead movements before you start the cutting cycle as well as setting all the parameters for the cut like material, speed ect. Its exactly the same process with a modern 3D printer slicer so I recognized the process imediatley after I had played around with an OMAX machine a while ago at an exhibition and had no problem operating that machine. Even I had never used a waterjet machine before I could easily load the CAD, generate the toolpath and start the cutting cycle all by myself. Seeing that a modern slicer program is just similar to this (although actually a bit more advanced, multiple layers and quite a bit more options to set compared to the cutting machine) I got into it very easily. I would not have had a such easy time with Skeinforge though. But everything have to start somewhere and this was a really interesting flashback how it was done back then including you having to build the toolhead from scrap metal and loose parts and wire more or less. At least it worked and kicked of a great revolution for in home manufacturing.
My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake. I still have it around though it has been out of commission for a long time, and that Solidoodle is ages more advanced than the Cupcake was. I think I got one successful print out of it before it got replaced with one of Printrbot's first all wooden DIY kits.
Wow. I remember Skeinforge was quite useless because it wouldn't extrude, it would just move the toolhead. Countless people had this issue, and there was no solution to the problem in spite of playing with configurations. Later on I finally used Repetier and the ancient version of Slic3r and it worked as close to perfectly as you could get in 2011.
I did own a Cupcake CNC from MakerBot (SN 00862). Its Hotend did not use cement. The hollow Screw was insulated with Kapton, then the NiChrome was wrapped around. Then this was heat-insulated with ceramic tape, kept in place with Kapton. In comparison with today, the printer was horrible. It had a XY-moving 10x10cm build area. The build surface was unheated Plexiglass. Adhesion was a big problem. Instead of a Brim, you used a raft. Better 2 Layers high, because the first layer was super-inconsistent. No wonder, because you could not level the bed. You needed the adhesion, because the default Filament was 3mm ABS. And as the printer neither had a Fan nor an Enclosure, warping was the next big problem. If your part printed successfully, there was lots of stringing, because it was hard to control the flow rate. The filament drive used a DC gear motor instead of a stepper. It was adeventourous! Times are much better today.
Ha, I've been finding old printed parts, machine parts and the first few videos of my old printers in the past couple of weeks as I'm doing a rigorous cleanup. I also found ancient versions of Slic3r and some other, more shady slicers from before 2013. It's amazing we've been in this hobby for so long. I started with a 'Prusa Air 2 XL'. Someone totally ripped me off, selling mediocre sets that didn't really work. I spent around 600 euros on a kit and then I probably spend some 800 more to buy all the tools and upgrades it needed. Eventually I built myself a MendelMax 1.5 which totally changed how I printed back then, but those J-head hotends were nothing compared to even the v6 that most people use right now.. Thinking of it, 3D printing kinda sucked ten years ago, but for me at the time it was the coolest thing I could think of. I was living a fantasy! Haha. Anyway, this makes me think how we will talk about 3D printing in ten years. We will probably say 'man, 3D printing sucked in 2023'.
I started building a Hypercube back in 2017 after a work friend of mine lent me one of his printers for a while. Ive since built my own much bigger hybrid version of the Hypercube (look up Tech2C if you want to look into that). I've since modified that machine several times since to have a Linear rail for the X axis, and will probably do the same for the Y axis at some stage as well. Ive been using Fusion 360 to build things (doing just that as I was watching this video) for most of those years as well. I use Simplify 3D to drive the printer, and have recently been playing about with Cura, but it's proving to be a very different slicer to set up and use, there's a lot I really prefer Simplify 3D for. I love my Hypercube, I honestly wouldn't change it for another printer on the market, maybe a Voron, but I could modify the Hypercube into a Voron anyway, so...
i remember breaking some of the horrible acrylic pieces of the TEVO tarantula back in 2016. the frame was as solid as a wet noodle and the control hardware was as stable as uranium. fun times.
I started 3d printing in 2018 with an Anet A8. When I bought the kit I'd done extensive research so i bought upgrade and safety parts alongside the kit. I still have the parts from it, but they are in a custom built i3 style printer of my own design. I remember using repetier back then. I still use it but only for loading gcode sliced in Prusa slicer. I like the 3d printing view of repetier.
I started in 2013, but i splashed out a bit on a leapfrog creatr with a Simplify3d licence. Honestly, it still holds up pretty well even by todays standards although it had no part cooling fan so you could only print large PLA prints and no enclosure so you could only print small ABS prints and that was your obly 2 options for filament back then. Still had loads of fun with it
We sure have come a long way since the days of hollowed-out nichrome-wrapped hotends, hobbed bolt filament drives, and Skeinforge. I got started with my first printer build in 2012 and can still remember many long sessions watching entire prints, enthralled by the way Slic3r generated lines and made my jalopy of a machine produce real plastic objects. Modern printers are still very much the same in a lot of ways, only much more refined and lower cost. If we can make as much progress in the next 10 years as we did in the previous decade that would be amazing.
I intentionally didn't get into 3D printing until the Ender 3 for basically this reason. Everything I saw earlier either required a huge time & learning investment to setup & get working, or was proprietary & klunky meaning it'd be a dead end when you hit the klunkiness.
In 2013 i got my first 3d printer, the qu-bd revolution xl. On paper it was the best printer out there... not on paper it was pita to use. If you could get the bed level(3 tiny m2 screws under the bed) it could print very fast for its time and even today, as long as the extruder didn't bind or the z-stop didn't fall out and nozzle jam the bed. I printed a few things with it but it was a huge headache, i have 2 machines collecting dust in the garage, first one was damaged in shipping so they sent another one. Current printer is a tevo tornado and thinking of the creality k1 as my next upgrade.
We definitely have it easier then those getting into it 10 years ago. People getting into the hobby now have it so much better as far as tech / support.
I was interested in 3d printing around the wooden ultimaker days but they were too expensive and making your own hob gear extruders for the mendels kept me away from those. It wasn't until the Ender 3 was out about a year or so I finally picked one up and got into the hobby.
Oh man I had forgotten about those PEEK hotends - stuff of nightmares... Starting with the UP mini as my first personal printer saved me so much suffering - the hotend was lightyears ahead. I might have not stuck with the tech if I had started with a solidoodle! Great demo of what it was like.
The first time I tried PLA on my Solidoodle it got fused to the inside of that PEEK barrel and destroyed it. Those were fun days when PLA was the cool new filament on the block!
Like alot of people I started with an Ender 3, and always understood that as primitive base model. This totally changed my perspective, knowing for a $400+ printer you not only didn't get a heated bed, you didn't even get the hotend, there was no heatsink or fan?!! Mad respect and gratitude for those that kept pushing the evolution along.
Been printing since the blue tape days. Those were dark times.
Blue Tape + Ikea Mirror. I hate the old days
now we're in the Hairspray Era
lol
My robotics teacher has a printer that still uses blue tape
I don't like magnetic beds because they allow some materials to curl up even though they're stuck to the bed
Painters tape directly on the aluminium bed plate=))
My first 3D print was in 1989 in Dallas, when I was in the early years of starting Haltech. I still have the print. Back then it was called stereo lithography. It was a 3D print of a throttle body design I was doing for Keith Black Racing in Anaheim. I now operate a factory that produces my own 3D products in Australia, which I export all around the world.
Woah that’s nuts. My dad used to be an old jet boat racer and never hesitates to refer to Keith Black and Arias like they were Gods.
You have explained perfectly why I waited to pick up this hobby as back then I did not have the time to sink into it.
Interesting to see how things were different in Czechia (with Josef Prusa’s work). I got my first printer in 2014 (9 years ago) and it was MUCH closer to today’s printer: normal hotend cartridges, very basic but normal extruders, handmade hotends (but high quality full metal ones, made in my city) but almost V6 compatible. The printers ran Marlin (really really early, M600 was added in 2015 by the guy I bought the printer from) and RAMPS 1.4 (if you were lucky) with hand soldered components. We were using Slic3r and CuraEngine inside Repetier Host, though it didn’t feel too slow
Repetier Host was amazing. Having the menu option to open up a box with all of the EEPROM settings was fantastic. You could edit them all in one place without memorising the gcodes. I had to cut some stuff out of this video to get the length down but this printer as running RC versions of Marlin 1.0.
I'm still using Reprap Huxley and Mendel printers these days. With some modern modifications like E3D hotend, proper heated bed, TMC drivers, and with decent klipper firmware and latest slicer software, these printers still give good results. And I plan to continue using them for the next 5-10 years.
same here my Reprap Huxley and prusa Mendel 1 are still in use today so wht is they are old if they still work and print very accelerate then why change
I still have a working Huxley too. :) It was the first printer I built back around 2012.
I have Mendel Mono but i iam replacing it with voron 2.4 this month.its time to upgrade :D
That's impressive and really great that you guys still keep them in service.
Still have my medel, sadly it doesn’t work
Thumb nail = "'3D printing before it was cool" - DUDE EPIC GOLD!!! Been trying to convince the family for years it cool.
I started in 2015 with a Monoprice Mini. I remember showing my prints to someone who’d cut their teeth on a Flashforge like the one you showed, and they were amazed at what I could do with a $200 printer. I eventually had to get this printer replaced under warranty, but I still occasionally use the replacement for small jobs.
This where nostalgic. My first printer where a solidoodle 2 pro too, printed only in abs back then. So fun to see this printer again. Used mine about 1 year before I sold it and upgraded to a Ultimaker 2 that I have since, upgraded to a 2+ and is still going strong with great prints today.
I am so grateful for you and all of the others who helped to get us to where we are now. Thank you!
Gheghe. Lovely to see. And I am impressed by this pioneers work.
I stepped in to 3d printing in 2016. E3d hot ends were already available at that time. All metal too. So I missed making hot ends myself.
The kapton hell I remember well. With bad luck fresh kapton on the heated bed every other print.
Thanks to pioneers like you and your teaching skills I learned to build and improve my own printers based on existing metal frameworks on the market.
So as a result I feel comfortable in building, modifying and designing 3d printers or parts and the software and electronics.
So your teaching helped me to find an independent way in 3d printing!
Another great video. I got my first printer almost 9 years ago and my how things have changed, and stayed the same as well. But like you said last week, massive changes are happening right now.
My first printer was a MakerFarm Iv3 10". That was a great printer. I didn't know how good it was until I gave it to a friend and bought a Creality CR-10 lol.
2015. I was a VERY proud owner of a Printrbot Simple Metal with Heated Bed! I also had one of the 1st Ultimakers at work whose extruder was an absolute nightmare to navigate so I hardly used it. I tuned the hell out of the Printrbot and actually got really decent prints from it but it wasn’t very consistent. Also used capton tape (and printers tape before I installed the heated bed) to cover the heated bed and was still doing that all the way up until 2021. I only ended up replacing it last year for an Elegoo N3 and realised how far 3D printing has moved forward in such a short time. 3D printing is downright easy now and it’s an absolute pleasure.
Some interesting numbers. The Printrbot Simple Metal (PSM) + heated bed cost me around $600 and took me 2 days to assemble and configure. The Elegoo N3 cost me €200 took 30 minutes to setup and configure and printed far better off the bat. I would have around a 1-2 failure rate with the PSM, the N3 up till now has never failed, any mistake have been my own. Luckily the PSM also had an auto bed levelling system, no where as accurate as the N3 but it was actually pretty good. The Ultimaker was still manual levelling and my failure rate was far higher. Honestly I hated that machine and it costed a fair wack more than the PSM. It was a ripoff imo.
Tom Sanlanderer was my RUclips guru back then and helped me navigate through most of the 3D printing pitfalls.
Ah yes, i remember helping to keep the one at our hackspace running, going through Kapton and PETG tape and basically 90% of the time you weren't printing things you wanted but you were adjusting settings for that new filament roll, fixed bugs in that hot new firmware that totally wasn't compatible or were fixing issues with the bed not being level because that one adjustment screw got lose again(because no auto leveling), the nozzle shredding the kapton after dipping in 0.000001mm too low, and all the other fun stuff. This made me actually lose interest after a few years and now i'm at a point where i don't want to use plastic anymore and rather skip the prototyping and just do it in wood or metal right away.
Honestly I recognize some of the older names a lot of the time in your videos. I started a little prior to you, in the 2007-2008 era. It's amazing how far we've come.
Great vid. Had started a delta in 2016 but got to busy to finish. Fast forward to January 2023 and the beast gets built! Many mods later it's awesome and now trying to tame the Tronxy beast, slowly creeping to a VZBot.
Thanks for all the knowledge you share!
I started about 7-8 years ago with a Printrbot Play. In retrospect, the only real issues were the lack of a display and lack of a heated bed. It did have an inductive sensor on it so it did have auto-leveling, but with no display and no dedicated Z offset adjustment, as a newbie it was difficult to get a decent first layer without restarting the print a dozen times. I put the hobby down for a couple of years and later started over with an Ender 3, and have since gone back and used the Printrbot a few times as a demonstration because it’s tiny but sturdy. Always enjoyed watching Tom stand on it in his videos back then!
You're all my kind of people! 🥰
I still have some RAMPS, threaded rods and kapton tape around, even found a couple days ago a Diamond hotend never installed. Maybe a color changing old school Delta could be an interesting proyect.
First printer was in 2012, an Ord Hadron. Luxury for the time as it was kit of parts. It was fun tinkering with it then but don't miss that aspect of printing these days (Bambu X1C)
I remember some of this stuff. I came in 2014 on a FABtotum. It had steppers, it had a glass heated bed that was removable, it had a camera, it had an enclosure, web control with mobile interface and built in wifi, on-device slicing. I looked at it like "ah, this has some useful stuff" I didn't realize that nearly 10 years later, many of those elements would still be "hey, we have..." as opposed to standard. But I remember looking through forums and the RepRap wiki on how to do things. I remember seeing those hotends, using blue tape and glue stick for everything, etc. I printed PETG on glass without any interface layer because the people I chatted with hadn't come around to "don't do that, it will take chunks out of the glass". It was a wild time and is why I now rail against some machines I see now which basically are rehashing how things were done then, but with a fresh coat of paint. We've moved on. Just stop. I'll also casually note that working in tech means Slic3r is pronounced "slicer" and I will die on that hill... and remember when that was a new slicer too.
I've never heard of that printer but it sounds way ahead of its time.
@@TeachingTech looking back, it was. But it also tried to do CNC and scanning. "jack of all trades, master of none"
Our 1st 3D printer, circa 2016: my brother designed the 300 mm cubed Core XY, dual Z axis drive, I built up the bowden tube Stepper Extruder/E3D Heater system, wrote into Marlin the inverse kinematics which all was stuffed into a Mega/Ramps1.4 controls. What a learning curve! Obviously, we didn't know that there was a huge community such as Teaching Tech's Michael that would have offered help/ideas/etc. Live and learn: ANet A8 was next.
For my FPV hobby, Joshua Bardwell is the channel to go to for learning. For 3D printing, Teaching Tech is the man.
This video was awesome. Super cool seeing 'where we came from.' I didn't start that long ago, but even in the past 2-3 years its wild seeing all the advancements we've had. But seeing from 10 years ago is even more cool! Love it.
Very interesting. Thanks for taking us back in time. I got my first 3D printer in Feb 2018. This is a Creality CR10S. Creality supplied Cura as slicer. The printer had a lot of features for its time. I am still using it. I have done a number of upgrades. The only upgrade I may do in the future is install some type of auto bed leveling.
I am amazed how much changed in the 5 years between your first 3D printer and mine.
Dave.
I appreciate the dedication to alternating between the two possible pronunciations of Skeinforge. So seamless (unlike kapton tape beds. Horrible flashbacks when you scraped the failed print off... oh, long gone are the days of rotating and translating prints to avoid bad spots on the bed.)
That wasn't intentional, I just don't know the right way to say it and my brain was playing up :D
A great trip back in time! I just got into this "hobby" 3 years ago, and we've come a long way even since then!
Well, this brought back some bad memories. Back in the day i sold a car to get the cash to afford my first printer, I was one of the pre-orderers for the Makerbot Thing-o-matic. I really fell for the marketing: "Desktop factory!" "Best Prints yet!" "Easy to assemble and run!". They never bothered to mention that the batch function for printing multiples required manually editing the gcode, or that the new stepper powered extruder wasn't included with the pre-order kits, but was available 2 weeks after the delivery date for the pre-orders, for an extra 200 bucks for the upgrade, but it's included with all the ToM kits after the first batch. Could never get that plywood lemon to print reliably, ended up having to go to the hackerspace in Philly to get some help to get it running, all the adjustments for power to the steppers was manually controlled via pots on the board. When it stopped sensing the bed thermistor, tried fixing it with the addon control panel for another 100 bucks, on top of the 1300 dollars the kit cost originally. It left such a bad taste in my mouth, i swore off anything "Maker" related for years. If it wasn't for my Dad deciding to impulse buy an Ender 3 Pro at Microcenter, I would have stayed far, FAR away from 3d Printers.
Still got to figure out what to do with the 6kg of 3mm ABS filament i got sitting around.
On a related note, I hope Bre Pettis steps on a Lego.
This is timely, I completed construction of my printrbot Plus V2 10 years and 5 days ago. It's been hugely modified since then but is still printing exceptionally well in all its plywood goodness.
My 1st build was a Prusa Mendel, in 2010. I had the frame complete and had started on the electronics when I decided to make a MendelMax 1.5 instead. I remember I bought the necessary printed parts from a guy on one of the forums. It took me over a year to get the thing working, because I didn't know anything at all about what I was doing, I just knew I wanted to make it. This video brings back some nightmare memories of hobbed bolts, kapton tape 3mm filament and fried electronics. The RAMPS 1.2 Mega was the common board back then.
just goes to show how different everybody's experiences were- I started 3D printing in 2011 with the OG plywood ultimaker and I didn't have to do ANY of the stuff you mentioned. Aside from the usual "my print failed how do I fix it" type of stuff that was common back then there wasn't much to it. I think the first version of Cura even became available a couple years after I got it so slicing even got "easy", even though Replicator-G wasn't too bad.
That said- my Ultimaker was a HUGE pain in the ass to put together. it came flat packed in a box like a piece of ikea furniture that you had to hand assemble (the average build took around a full day, usually two days). we're talking thousands of pieces. much of the plywood was still attached to the main laser cut sheet so you had to cut them out with side cutters like they were sprues on a model kit or something. It was pretty insane by today's standards.
Your extruder designs kept my Solidoodle 2 and 3 running for a long time! He's too modest to say it, but Lawsy was a legend in the Solidoodle community!
Ahhh the memories! Thanks for the nostalgia Michael, i never mastered the cementing process :(
I missed the build it yourself days, my first printer was an Up Mini, the original 2014 black enclosure version with perforated bed that meant a raft was essential and it could only really handle ABS. I still have it - carefully stored - and I plan to see if it will still work when I have space.
I started in 2017 with an original CR-10. At that point, it was bleeding edge tech for the price point and I bought it within hours of seeing MakeAnything’s review on it. I was really excited to get a proper 3d printer because I had gotten the original 3Doodler and was loving it, but wanted to be able to do more.
Bought mine in 2018 as my first try and pretty quickly moved on to a Prusa i3 mk3 when I realized how awesome 3D printing is. Still have the CR-10 with upgraded fans and use it occasionally when I need something bigger. Print quality is still rock solid, just pretty slow.
Loved the trip down memory lane.. I was lucky to have a Mendl thing and it was all threaded rods back then. Wade extruder certainly. Prontoface rings a bell and forget what the slicer was. Used to use whatever for CNC as well as 3D printing. Spent ages in the laboratory workshop drilling the brass nozzle used and adding a thread to the tube used. The heater was short cut off lengths of rod bar fire elements, with a brass tube (1/4" brake pipe ?) carrying the melting filament slid inside (as used same in PhD experiments too) The bed was some glass tile the glass blowers located resting on an aluminum sheet. None of it heated. I am sure used garden trimmer wire as the 'filament' as the real thing was way out of my price bracket then.. Used stepper motor drivers with YAG pumped dye laser so pretty sure reused same boards. I used to make filter and mirror mounts for experiments, nothing was very big and failure rates were huge.
It's crazy to see how things have innovated to where we are today. I'm sure back then you would never have predicted how much better 3D printing is now
Crazy if you think where we'll be in 10 years
@@shaka89xx Without Bambu machines, we would be the same as before COVID, everyone just got awakened from their slumber XD
Only been printing at home since early 2019 but played around with the ancient Makerbot’s we had at my high school before that. I look back at early me somehow managing to print ABS on an open air Monoprice Select Mini without too atrocious curling. Finally in the last year or two I’ve really gotten strong in the hobby and actually learned how to CAD. It’s crazy to look back at the things people did before 3D printing was mainstream.
This is such a painful blast from the past. Everything about this just made me have PTSD from my printers. My first printer was a kickstarter that was utter crap. I created the google+ group for it where we tried to bring it forward after the company died before all of them were delivered. I started maybe 6 or 7 months after you. After that horrid experience I got a clone makerbot replicator dual extruder clone and that worked much better, but boy were the various slicers were painful. Years passed and I got other printers here and there. Now I've got this Bambulab X1 Carbon and it is incredible. Night and day. I don't even recognize the hobby anymore.
Woaw I love this format "back in the day" ❤ my first 3d printer was a cr10 and I was using Cura back then. I think it was 6 to 8 years ago. But this seems nothing compare to the hardcore stuffs you mentioned in your video ^^. If I had to compared what I'm not missing from my early experience is the blue tape and the manual bed leveling :)
Yes! Finally someone sheds light in the Solidoodle! Way before its time. The fact we went backwards to bed slinger was a dumb idea. I mean, look back at repetier host. 10 years ago and we had Webcam, active gcode following in 3D. You could see what it was supposed to be doing as it was doing it! We still don't see that today. Octoprint does it in a 2d layer by layer, but not the same.
I still have my solidoodle. I don't use it, but I have it. I now use my Bambu X1C every day. While Prusa's and ender's were minor steps forward, the Bambu has been a quantum leap. It changed my printing more than the previous 10 years of slow development combined
I still have a massive roll of Kapton tape
I still have my solidoodle (2) and still use it.
- updated the hot end to all metal years ago,
- updated the bed to glass years ago.
- jigsaw extruder finally gave up in a way that I wouldn't be bothered to recover at the end of 2023.
My first was a Prusa Mendel i2 - the a-frame style made from threaded rod and 20 bajillion nuts with a Sanguinololu board that came as just a pcb and I had to solder everything on the entire board. I remember when the bar to success was very low - it pooped plastic. We really weren't concerned about a "perfect first layer" or "z wobble" or "ghosting" or "ringing" - if you got a vaguely recognizable cube-like shape that somehow managed to stick to the bed the entire print(since we were mostly using ABS at the time), you had accomplished something!
i've been waiting for years to finally get into 3d printing, I just didn't have the time to invest to push through the early adopter hurdles. Finally in 2022, I got into it with an Ender 3 S1 Pro, really enjoying it
Ugh this is giving me flashbacks. Nichrome wire hotends, acrylic extruders, and skeinforge were so rough back then.
5 years of 3D printing, how time runs when in good company.
The holow bolt with self made heating element is the top in my opinion.
Great video/project as always 👍.
Thanks for sharing your experience with All of us 👍😀
So, it was basically like a vape coil or rta for 3d printing lol. Really cool to see how far it had came and to think of how far it could still go. Thank you for all you do for the community.
Got a new subscriber! Really well done video, you went to a lot of effort with demos and physical demonstrations and it certainly comes through in the quality :)
Oh I still remember the first Creality printer I got, I spent more time leveling the bed than actually printing and the level distance changed every time the bed heats up, the extruded melted the bed sheet and all sort of issues. That put me off 3d printing for 7 years before picking up a Prusa.
I started off on a with a Makerbot Replicator v1 and that thing was a pain sometimes, the worst bit about these old machines was the warm up times and lack of control over the gcode from a gui. In all fairness it printed PLA as good as my current Ender 3 v2 just much slower and was a fair bit louder.
A makerbot benchy took an overnight print to get good quality, something that my ender can do in about an hour 😂
Love the video, it brought back memories of watching the percentage creep across the cli window for what used to seem like eternity! ❤
Blue tape and plywood with a jamming Ubis hotend... Not ashamed to say im nostalgic for those days. The days of hour long slicer jobs, ABS on unheated beds and no enclosures, acrylic frames that cracked upon unboxing... Merely finishing a print was a story worth telling 😅
That would've been enough for me to throw in the towel. Glad you stuck with it. You're a valuable resource!
I still have my original stock solidoodle 2 with the original stock everything even including that kapton tape on the bed still intact. It has printed a lot too. Your guides back in the day were super helpful.
That's amazing. You have to keep it as a museum piece.
My first printer was a PrintrBot Simple metal back in 2013, it was awesome because it actually had a PCB Bed heater! ... that could get to 60°C if the room was already at 30°C, so it never printed ABS very well, the bed was a block of aluminum with Kapton on itm the heater was exactly as you described the solidoodle's (though I never had to rebuild mine fortunately). While it had micro-stepping motors it never seemed to utilize them and it screamed like a banshee.
After college I got a Prusa i3 Mk3 and haven't looked back, it just works so much better with all the modern conveniences like a spring steel sheet, a hotend that doesn't suck to use or change, and software that actually functions.
I think the hardest part of learning to 3d print back in the day would've been not having your channel to walk us through everything step by step. At least that's the biggest reference I used!
The reprap forums have been around since 2004, just about everything in the 3d printing world FDM wise initially came from there including marlin. Though back then most people were using arduinos and erector sets or whatever they could find at homedepot for their builds.
@@nikushim6665 true the forums were definitely there, but watching a video showing exact equipment with step by step instructions is much less daunting to a new user than a wall of text with some pictures in a forum.
I'm by no means discounting the value in those forums, but there's a reason 3d printing had exploded the way it has on RUclips
In those days, I was about to graduate college and I heard about 3D printing and wanted to get into it but I was not in a financial position to do so. Every so often, I'd think back to it but life gets in the way. Now here I am making repairs and upgrades to a broken printer I got on OfferUp and it's running better and better. This makes me realize how primitive but impressive it used to be compared to the more polished machines of today.
The solid doodle 2 was also my first printer. That's when you had to manually tune the PID loops for the hotend and bed. The good ole days!!
I've still got my first printer, an UP, from about 2010 or so. I haven't used it for about a year but it still made very good prints.
This year marks my 8th year in 3D printing (including a 2 year haietus) Today's printer's UI and UX have been GREATLY changed over the years.
This video is awesome... I would never started 3D printing dealing with these problems....thx for the flash back.
I am so glad I didn't get into 3D printing until last year, if I would have had to go through what you did, I would have given it all up
Cool video, i only started printing about a year ago for work and with many hours of learning its been fairly easy to jump in. I mean easy in the way of hardware assembly and reliabilty. We have a ultimaker printer at work and i have a modified ender s1 plus at home, and for the most part they just kinda work. I was thinking about the early days of printing when i was changing an extruder, its just a few screws and a ribbon cable. Im lucky that i happened to need printing now and not 10 years ago and greatful to all the people who dealt with all this crap and figured everything out and shared it so that i can just spend about 600$ and make whatever i need. Great video, i ve been curious about the history of printing , this satisfied my curiosity,now im gonna print a little drone frame cus im on vacation. Have a good weekend!!
Built my first in 2013 off of the original RepRap threaded rod monstrosity... I remember trying to get everything working in repeiter.. and Slicer.. and various custom one-offs.
The introduction of Cura engine was probably the biggest time save for the 3D printing hobby, imo. It was thr first slicer that let you slice a model twice a day without needing to run errands between the jobs 😂
Fascinating history! Thanks, Michael! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Thanks for the great nostalgic video! It brought back some happy and some painful memories!
The moment you pulled out the threaded rod, i expected to wrap the wire directly around the thread then seal it in with something like the cement you use. I gather that the wire rod combo might become conductive without the cement layer in between. Interesting scary periods of discovery...
I started 3d printing in 2018. That video that the 3d printing DM did on the ender 3 got me in. today looking back its been a wild ride
April 2011 was my start date. I built a 1x2 Repstrap, mostly with parts from the hardware store, and Gen6 electronics from Camiel. I bought my first roll of filament direct from Adrian Bowyer. Used it to print a Prusa i2, and still use the X axis and a J-head for printing 3mm filament! I remember using RepSnapper more than Skeinforge for slicing. And the RepRap forums, a lot!
Thanks for sharing, some amazing tid-bits there! The idea back then of a buying all of your 'vitamins' from a hardware store and printing the rest seems so foreign.
I started 3D printing on 2019, on a Graber i3, used Marlin 1.x with RAMPS 1.4, glass bed mounted on top of circuit board heater, and J-Head clone as extruder with direct drive. I remember how exciting it was on every good first layer and finished print, but also remember the countless hours of troubleshooting without hope as well! Now I have poor's man Mingda D2, but looking for a X1 Carbon... The hype got me!
I remember the grooved extruders, it was a great upgrade over the gears that were used at the time, and a while after the bmg extruder released.
great video! I think a better example of nichrome wire would be the heating element in your toaster or hairdryer, it's the exact same stuff
I've got my first 3d printer around 2010. It was the original UP! from pp3dp. At that time it looked like the best option from budget printers, and I must say that it aged very well. I used it for a long time, and the main reason why I completely stopped using it was that the old software became unusable, and the manufacturer started to push hard for cloud BS in new releases.
That doesn't mean that the printer sits unused: I upgraded the controller to Dutet2, and the printer still extrudes plastic with most of the mechanical parts in their original form.
I started 3d printing really late, my first one was made using cdrom drives, with 4x4x4 cm building volume. At the time a friend recomended using Cura instead of Slic3r or Prusa Slicer.
Today I still use a Graber i3 printer (basically a Prusa i3 version with MDF frame), using Arduino+RAMPS 1.5 and a Pi3b running Klipper. And surely I spent more time tinkering with the machine then actually printing something, as I intended from the start.
SD2 Pro was my 1st as well, I remember all your mods, used some myself. Yes things are so much better now.
Solidoodle 2!!!! w/ the upgraded heated bed... so that means I started 10 years ago. That taught me a lot since ABS was the only filament I could get my hands on.
I only used ABS too. Took me years to try PLA.
I started almost exactly 10 years ago with a printrbot maker kit in 2014. Repetier host vs modern slicers reminds me of windows device manager then versus now. The ever expanding tree was fine, but hard to find specific stuff.
We purchased a Printrbot to accompany the Makerbot but I never found it to be that reliable.
Black to 2013 the Folger I3 was my second 3d printer after a Prusa Mendel. Folger's extruder/hotend was rubbish. I replaced it with a Jhead then by a E3D V5. Slicing was done through Repetier Host with Cura or Slic3r engine as both were available. Folger's carried a MK2 heated (disposable at this time) and we were printing on 5mm mirror with ABS juice or PVA glue. This solution was preferred over painter's tape and Kapton tape which was, as Michael said, nearly a single print solution. PLA was barely available, but ABS was reasonably cheap 12€/kg. Obviously bed leveling was manual. Then comes the Tevo Tarantula which was a very successful printer way before Creality established. Who still remember about it ?
My first printer was an Afinia h480 back in 2014. Sliced up my hands all the time scraping rafts from the perfboard hahaha
It doesn't connect to windows 10 machines so I haven't used it in at least five years, but I'd like to try and make it work again some day.
I did not have part cooling on my Mendel 90 as at the time I only printed ABS, once I could get a hold of some affordable PLA though I also got a MK8 hot end, which came with a part cooling fan, it was a real MK8 hot end not the Creality hot end that a lot of people seem to think is a MK8 but only has the nozzle of a MK8, also back in those days I only printed functional parts that I could not make easily on my lathe or mill, it was treated as a tool and only got used when I needed to, ABS filament was not as cheap as it is these days
8:30 About a year and a half before the local Fry's Electronics crashed and burned, they sold sheets of adhesive Kapton for this purpose. I had access to a Prusa by then, so I bought it to use for flat flexible circuits.
I built a RepRap back then and could never print anything useful with it. I gave up 3D printing for almost 20 years until I bought a Prusa last year. I really don't miss tinkering.
I love that Skeinforge is described as having a "Simple, intuitive graphical interface." That surely had to be written by someone involved in the project. No normal user would call Skeinforge's interface as intuitive.
Indeed id say whoever designed a such interface muct have been drunk when he did it. But I also never have seen or heard about these early programs. I got my first machine 2021, an Ender3 V2 and the slicer (Cura) reminded me instantly about how you run a laser or waterjet machine. It works just like the toolpath generator in those machines including an animated preview of the toohead movements before you start the cutting cycle as well as setting all the parameters for the cut like material, speed ect. Its exactly the same process with a modern 3D printer slicer so I recognized the process imediatley after I had played around with an OMAX machine a while ago at an exhibition and had no problem operating that machine. Even I had never used a waterjet machine before I could easily load the CAD, generate the toolpath and start the cutting cycle all by myself. Seeing that a modern slicer program is just similar to this (although actually a bit more advanced, multiple layers and quite a bit more options to set compared to the cutting machine) I got into it very easily. I would not have had a such easy time with Skeinforge though. But everything have to start somewhere and this was a really interesting flashback how it was done back then including you having to build the toolhead from scrap metal and loose parts and wire more or less. At least it worked and kicked of a great revolution for in home manufacturing.
My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake. I still have it around though it has been out of commission for a long time, and that Solidoodle is ages more advanced than the Cupcake was. I think I got one successful print out of it before it got replaced with one of Printrbot's first all wooden DIY kits.
Oh man, I started with the Printrbot Metal in 2013. No leveling, no heated bed, needed the blue tape.
Wow. I remember Skeinforge was quite useless because it wouldn't extrude, it would just move the toolhead. Countless people had this issue, and there was no solution to the problem in spite of playing with configurations.
Later on I finally used Repetier and the ancient version of Slic3r and it worked as close to perfectly as you could get in 2011.
I did own a Cupcake CNC from MakerBot (SN 00862). Its Hotend did not use cement. The hollow Screw was insulated with Kapton, then the NiChrome was wrapped around. Then this was heat-insulated with ceramic tape, kept in place with Kapton.
In comparison with today, the printer was horrible. It had a XY-moving 10x10cm build area. The build surface was unheated Plexiglass. Adhesion was a big problem. Instead of a Brim, you used a raft. Better 2 Layers high, because the first layer was super-inconsistent. No wonder, because you could not level the bed. You needed the adhesion, because the default Filament was 3mm ABS. And as the printer neither had a Fan nor an Enclosure, warping was the next big problem.
If your part printed successfully, there was lots of stringing, because it was hard to control the flow rate. The filament drive used a DC gear motor instead of a stepper.
It was adeventourous!
Times are much better today.
Ha, I've been finding old printed parts, machine parts and the first few videos of my old printers in the past couple of weeks as I'm doing a rigorous cleanup. I also found ancient versions of Slic3r and some other, more shady slicers from before 2013. It's amazing we've been in this hobby for so long. I started with a 'Prusa Air 2 XL'. Someone totally ripped me off, selling mediocre sets that didn't really work. I spent around 600 euros on a kit and then I probably spend some 800 more to buy all the tools and upgrades it needed. Eventually I built myself a MendelMax 1.5 which totally changed how I printed back then, but those J-head hotends were nothing compared to even the v6 that most people use right now.. Thinking of it, 3D printing kinda sucked ten years ago, but for me at the time it was the coolest thing I could think of. I was living a fantasy! Haha. Anyway, this makes me think how we will talk about 3D printing in ten years. We will probably say 'man, 3D printing sucked in 2023'.
Goodness, I remember those days with my solidoodle 3 and just how quickly I swapped out to an e3d v5 as soon as it was available.
I started building a Hypercube back in 2017 after a work friend of mine lent me one of his printers for a while. Ive since built my own much bigger hybrid version of the Hypercube (look up Tech2C if you want to look into that). I've since modified that machine several times since to have a Linear rail for the X axis, and will probably do the same for the Y axis at some stage as well.
Ive been using Fusion 360 to build things (doing just that as I was watching this video) for most of those years as well. I use Simplify 3D to drive the printer, and have recently been playing about with Cura, but it's proving to be a very different slicer to set up and use, there's a lot I really prefer Simplify 3D for.
I love my Hypercube, I honestly wouldn't change it for another printer on the market, maybe a Voron, but I could modify the Hypercube into a Voron anyway, so...
i remember breaking some of the horrible acrylic pieces of the TEVO tarantula back in 2016. the frame was as solid as a wet noodle and the control hardware was as stable as uranium. fun times.
I was in that same situation 😂 flaming hot piece of garbage
I started 3d printing in 2018 with an Anet A8. When I bought the kit I'd done extensive research so i bought upgrade and safety parts alongside the kit. I still have the parts from it, but they are in a custom built i3 style printer of my own design. I remember using repetier back then. I still use it but only for loading gcode sliced in Prusa slicer. I like the 3d printing view of repetier.
Just over 2 years now for me, and boy does that old school stuff look tedious. Glad I waited -- everything is vastly improved, including pricing.
I started in 2013, but i splashed out a bit on a leapfrog creatr with a Simplify3d licence. Honestly, it still holds up pretty well even by todays standards although it had no part cooling fan so you could only print large PLA prints and no enclosure so you could only print small ABS prints and that was your obly 2 options for filament back then. Still had loads of fun with it
Ah yes. I was lucky to get into this early. My high school had a MakerBot 3d printer.
This video is a perfect example of the value of the Internet Archive
I've been using it a lot lately for various things. Apparently it's in danger over copyright concerns. That would be a horrible outcome.
We sure have come a long way since the days of hollowed-out nichrome-wrapped hotends, hobbed bolt filament drives, and Skeinforge. I got started with my first printer build in 2012 and can still remember many long sessions watching entire prints, enthralled by the way Slic3r generated lines and made my jalopy of a machine produce real plastic objects. Modern printers are still very much the same in a lot of ways, only much more refined and lower cost. If we can make as much progress in the next 10 years as we did in the previous decade that would be amazing.
Scott! Many people won't know that you are one of the ones driving everything forward at a great rate. Thanks for all of your work :D
I intentionally didn't get into 3D printing until the Ender 3 for basically this reason. Everything I saw earlier either required a huge time & learning investment to setup & get working, or was proprietary & klunky meaning it'd be a dead end when you hit the klunkiness.
In 2013 i got my first 3d printer, the qu-bd revolution xl. On paper it was the best printer out there... not on paper it was pita to use. If you could get the bed level(3 tiny m2 screws under the bed) it could print very fast for its time and even today, as long as the extruder didn't bind or the z-stop didn't fall out and nozzle jam the bed. I printed a few things with it but it was a huge headache, i have 2 machines collecting dust in the garage, first one was damaged in shipping so they sent another one.
Current printer is a tevo tornado and thinking of the creality k1 as my next upgrade.
That slicer took me back to the days of visual basic.
We definitely have it easier then those getting into it 10 years ago. People getting into the hobby now have it so much better as far as tech / support.
I was interested in 3d printing around the wooden ultimaker days but they were too expensive and making your own hob gear extruders for the mendels kept me away from those. It wasn't until the Ender 3 was out about a year or so I finally picked one up and got into the hobby.