A few months ago, Hackaday’s own Al Williams convinced me to buy a couple of untested, returned-to-manufacturer 3D printers. Or rather, he convinced me to buy one, and the incredible success of the first printer spurred me on to the second. TL;DR: Lightning didn’t strike twice, but I’d still rate it as worth my time. This probably isn’t a good choice for your first printer, but if you’ve done the regular maintenance on your first printer already, I’d recommend it for your second or twelfth.
As background, Al has been volunteering with local schools to teach a 3D printing summer class, and this means outfitting them with a 3DP lab on the dirt cheap. His secret is to buy last year’s model which has all of the features he needs – most importantly for the kids, automatic bed height probing – but to buy it from the scratch-and-dent shelf at Creality. Why? Because they are mid-grade printers, relatively new, but on deep discount.
How deep? I found an essentially endless supply of printers that retail for $300 on discount for $90 each. The catch? It might work, it might not. I bought my son one, because I thought that it would at least make a good project for us to work on together. Those plans were spoiled – it worked absolutely flawlessly from the moment we bolted it together, and he runs 24-hour jobs on the thing without fear. From the look of the build plate, it had been used exactly once and returned for whatever reason. Maybe the owner just didn’t want a 3D printer?
The siren song of straightforward success was too much for me to resist, and I picked another up to replace my aging A8 which was basically a kit for a 3D printer, and not a particularly good one at that, but could be made to work. My scratch-and-dent Creality came with a defective bed-touch sensor, which manifest itself as a random absolute refusal to print.
I took it apart, but the flaw is in the design of the V1 touch sensors – the solenoid requires more current to push down than the 3DP motherboard can reliably deliver. It works 100% of the time on my bench power supply, but in situ it fails about 30% of the time, even after hitting it with graphite and making sure everything is mechanically sound. Creality knows this and offers a free trade-in, just not for me. The new version of the Creality probe costs $50 new, but you can get cheap knock-off BL Touch models for $14. Guess what I did?
And guess what bit me? The cheapo touch probe descends a bit slower than the Creality version should, and the firmware is coded to time-out in an extra-short timeframe. Thankfully, Creality’s modifications to Marlin are all open source, and I managed to tweak and flash a new firmware that made it work 100% of the time, but this was at a cost of probably eight hours of bug-hunting, part-ordering, and firmware-compiling. That said, I got some nice extra features along the way, which is the advantage of a printer running open-source firmware.
So my $300 printer cost me $105, plus eight hours of labor. I only charge one coffee per hour for fun hardware debugging tasks, but you may have a different valuation. Taken together with my son’s printer, we have $600 worth of printer for under $200 plus labor, though, which starts to sound a little better.
Is gambling on an untested return 3D printer worth it? For us, I would say it was, and I’d do it again in a few years. For now, though, we’ve got three printers running and that’s all we need. Have you gone down this perilous path?
Please tell me, where is this magical place? My FrankEnder needs a friend… or a sacrificial parts donor.
I’m gonna have to go rake back through the podcasts but i want to know as well.
Ebay, honestly. Not so sexy. :)
The catch: shipping is also ninety bucks :P
“Is gambling on an untested return 3D printer worth it?”.
As with any type of gamble, if you can afford to lose that amount of money then yes, it is worth it. If you absolutely needs a printer and has had a hard time scrounging that amount of money, then no. You will probably need more money to fix whatever the problem is with the machine, and will end up worse and aggravated for the experience.
Isn’t this the place with all the roboticists and electronics repair gurus… You’d think they’d be able to fix what was wrong with an open-box return pretty easily
Did this on a CR10S and was a smoking deal. Did this on an anycubic and got smoked.
I leave all that troubles for JLC3DP :)
Come back with a similar report after the first few thousand hours, and then we can talk quality vs maintenance…
Their report wouldnt be much different from any other creality owner. Buying returns of 3d printers are hit or miss whether you buy them from a website based reseller, or off ebay.
Many first time buyers get overwhelmed trying to get them setup, and give up. Quite a few people are gifted a 3d printer by a family member then find modelling to be more than they bargained for. And then theres the inevitable, manufacture defect/shipping damage units.
If you get one that wasnt really used but bounced back, or you identify the issues and repair them, youve basically gotten a good deal on the same printer you would have gotten ordering from creality or whatever manufacturer directly.
And if you can sort out the defective part (the touch probe on mine) and repair it cheap enough, then you win.
The only real problem I can think of would be the motherboard. Then you’ve got a more complicated bit of work ahead of you.
Looking a gift horse in the mouth a bit? Make the kids deal with the maintenance, it builds character.
Elliot, If you name the printer, someone might offer you a fix? depending on the mainboard and the probe, it could just be a weak internal pullup that can be fixed with a strategic 10k resistor for instance.
It’s fixed for $15 and a cheapo BL Touch clone, but the printer was/is an Ender 3v3 SE.
Their “CR Touch” sensor works the other way, though, because it’s based on a push solenoid. It needs to be energized to push down. It worked on my bench when given enough power, and failed on the printer, but only sometimes, which was super annoying.
It’s a very nice design, in principle. When power is off, it pulls up and away from the bed automatically, and it uses an optical sensor that the pin in the solenoid interrupts. But mine was defective, or the board just didn’t have enough oomph to drive it. I guess I’m not sure which.
I’m generally not afraid of something refurbished for the right price. For the record, I used to work for a video game retailer and had the chance to see their returns warehouse. Fun fact: 50% or more of the hardware they had returned had nothing wrong with it.
These machines have been beaten to death in a 3d print farm. The farm upgrades their printers and this is where the worn out printers go.
I just bought a used Creality K1C. The diagnostics menu reports a runtime of about 30h. It was definitely almost new. However the bed was heavily skewed. I guess that was the reason the previous owner returned it. However it was an easy fix.
I have been given two 3d printers. An ender 3 and an ender 2 (so I’m told). The 3 hasn’t been used and the 2 has been used once. A lot of 3d printers just gather dust after purchase it seems.
Blanket reply to some of the comments. Creality actually sells “returns” untested and they are non-returnable. You get what you get which — in theory — could be a few twisted parts of extrusion. I’ve bought several and also “coerced” several people (including Elliot) into getting some. I would say 90% of them were nearly perfect. One did look like it had come from a farm (had Klipper on it and a trashed build plate, but otherwise perfect). Several have looked like they had never been printed on even once (e.g., stuff still in wrappers, plastic cling still on them, perfectly clean hot ends/nozzles). I did get one (the last one) that was the worst of them. It was taken apart improperly which made it look worse than it was. But it all went back together with a few bolts from stock. The only serious thing wrong with it was the CR Touch body was cracked. I repaired it with some glue and M3 washers but even if I had to print a new case for it (they exist) or — like Elliot — buy a BL Touch etc. it would have been fine. In fact, here’s a photo of it sitting on a replacement case that I didn’t use. Ugly but works: https://photos.app.goo.gl/xVVjc2UDGmediJg98
Another one had a bad Y stop. What’s more is after I figured that out, I noticed someone had made a mark on the extrusion by the Y stop. So someone had done enough troubleshooting to know it was the limit switch but didn’t fix it. Those limit switches are like $5 for a bag of 10, so …. But really that’s the only two that have had any real problems. Sometimes they need adjustment (tightening the wheels, for example), or a new build plate, but that happens anyway.
Sure, one day, I’m going to roll snake eyes and be sorry, but like Elliot says, if you add the cost of one bad one to the pool and divide by N you still get a good deal.
Google Creality open box printer to find them.
And you’ve had a lot worse luck than I have!
“Google Creality open box printer to find them”
The first result creality3d.store is NOT Creality. Its an authorized reseller called Comgrow.
The Second result Creality3dofficial.com is also NOT Creality. Its another authorized reseller.
Theres nothing wrong buying a refurb/return from either of those resellers, But they ARENT Creality.
https://store.creality.com is the REAL OFFICIAL Creality webstore. They DO NOT sell refurbs nor returns on their site. Creality sells its certified refurbs through the ebay account Creality_Refurbished. To my knowledge they do not sell “open box returns” at all.
The siren song that you are now rebroadcasting. Funny how the song is just as alluring even if it’s only being written about. The lure of open-box 3D printer siren song lyrics, maybe?
i just met a guy saying he does this, getting used printers on ebay. a lot of the federated used vendors are liquidating piles of returned merchandise.
makes perfect sense to me because one of the things that convinced me to buy a cheap printer is i looked at videos of people complaining about it. i watched 3 videos in a row of people saying not to buy the specific printer i had selected, and all 3 of them showed grinding instead of motion in the z-axis. pure ignorant optimism on my part but immediately like 3 possible causes with easy fixes jumped into my mind, but obviously not into the minds of the people complaining about it. they were saying “it sucks because it doesn’t work” not “i checked x, y, and z, but i haven’t figured it out yet.” so i figure a lot of printers are returned because of really trivial problems. most end users just don’t want the reprap experience that many of us already have under our belts.
No thanks. I certainly spend 100s of hours tinkering and troubleshooting personal projects, but in my opinion troubleshooting faulty equipment is not a fun time. I’d gladly trade 210 dollars for 8 hours less of that; especially considering you can easily get a workhorse that you will scarsely need to think about. I’d rather use that energy to think about what’s going wrong with my custom stuff.
I’m glad the capitalism has found a way to keep these returns out of the dumpster.
Meanwhile I still have an ancient Anet A8 faithfully grinding out prints and begging me to finally put her out of her misery before she burns my house down
I have bought several returned/open box/for parts only printers, and had really good luck. Then again, no matter how trashed it may be, I crave the challenge to get it running again.
Honestly, the FPO printers have almost always been fine outside of basic adjustment/maintenance. The others have been hit and miss, but I never paid more than a new one to get it running and often I replaced the problem parts with upgrades and still saved overall. Then I give them to friends for their kids or family, and I keep the ones I like for myself. I may spend around $100 on something I give away, but the mental stimulation and joy of seeing someone happy to get one is well worth the price.
The weird ones are when I buy one strictly for parts, then it works so I have to clean it up and pass it along. I can never kill a working piece of technology, no matter how old; call it a sickness! My wife hates it.
i had this same problem with my parts laptop! i bought it to replace the screen in my daily driver, but i was able to easily repair the ‘broken as is for parts only’ and now i have two laptops :/
I started with the Bambu 1X and honestly, I would have given up on 3D print if I had to tweak, tune the printer and, X1 is not even maintainance-free.
Not that I don’t like or don’t toubleshoot things connex to my main project but I have already my hands full of stuff to do and loose hours 3d printing would demotivate me.
I will however flash x1plus on it cause I did choose this printer cause I knew it got cracked.