New Prusa i3 MK3

At time of writing, Prusa has a 3 to 4 month delay from the time you order to the time they ship. At other times, the wait is only 3 to 4 weeks before they are shipped from Europe to Canada.

In addition to the delay, the cost of shipping is very high for a prebuilt one due to the size of the box required.

I have, and build, 3D printers and then sell some of them fully built. I usually have one or two for sale. The number I have for sale depends on how much time I have to build them, who I was able to get shipping from (I only have a couple manufacturers I'm willing to use, ones that have proven reliablility,) and how many have sold. If you want high volume, for a printing factory, talk to me in advance so we can schedule them.

Because of shipping costs, I only do this service in the following geographical areas:

• Canada, Alberta: Calgary (20 minutes North of), Airdrie, Crossfield area
• Costa Rica: Central Valley and Samara areas.

Calgary and Costa Rica are the two places I spend the most time and have facilities to do the builds. March 2020: due to COVID-19 caused travel restrictions I am curerntly NOT building printers in Costa Rica, just the Calgary Canada area.

I build them, then test them for between 75 and 150 hours (3 to 6 days) with PLA and PETG then sell.

I also have some 3D printers in several locations in and around Calgary that are ones we keep for the long term.

I currently have a few Prusa i3 MK3's for sale, and will in September 2020 will have some Creality CR-6's for sale.

The price in CDN varies based on the USD as I purchase several at a time (to saving shipping costs to Canada) then build, test, and sell. If you want the kits to build yourself and would like to combine your purchase with mine to reduce shipping costs, that is a possibility.

The Prusa i3 MK3's are available in my Canada location for $1433 ($2 cheaper than the current, Aug 8, 2020, price if you order it directly from Prusa and wait 4 months for it to be shipped) with a PEI flexible plate for PLA. $55 extra (same price as from Prusa) if you want to add a powder coated PEI flexible sheet.

Will you save money over buying direct from Prusa or Creality? Probably not, and if you want to buy their kits and build them yourselves you can save a couple hundred dollars. I have the built and tested them and, if there were defects, gotten them fixed or replaced (several times specific parts that the manufacturer provides need to be reprinted due to minor defects, not a problem if you own multiple 3D printers, a huge problem if it is your first! The filament sensor almost always needs fixing as of Aug 2020.) You can see your printer running before you buy Tell me when you are coming and I'll have a print running timed to finish a bit after you arrive.

I also do custom printing if all you want is some parts built. But if you don't yet have a 3D printer, why not join the wave that is sweeping the world. If you decide to build your own, having a source for custom parts can be helpful if you are building your first printer and one of the 3D printed parts it is made with is defective or you broke it by tightening a screw too tight! Building your first is the hardest. Allow about 3x's what the manufacturer says to build your first 3D printer. Take your time, double check each instruction before moving forward. That way you won't break any parts and you won't need to buy a replacement part from me or the manufacturer! Note that doing the wiring wrong - even slightly - can totally destroy your printer. Again - take it slow and careful at least the first time.

Here are some of the things I use 3D printers for:

• Producing custom marketing swag such as ear savers

• Producing parts to repair equipment, for example:

  • fixed an $800 wood auger in 2 hours of my time in Tinkercad and 1 hour of printer time, with $1 of filament. This one repair paid for the cost of the 3D printer

  • fixed a Samsung dishwasher in 45 minutes of my time and 2 hours of printer time, with 1.50 of filament. The alternative was to wait 6-8 weeks for a $60 part from Samsung - and I would have spent more time driving and installing from Samsung than the time I spent - so I saved time and money and my wife was happier by 6-8 weeks.

  • several other building repairs with hard or impossible to find little peices, about one a week it seems.

• Created custom plant trays

• Created custom plant pots (lots of artistic ones)

• replaced lego peices that are no longer available

• lego switch plates for kids rooms (they can build on the switch plate)

• created custom funnels to meet specific needs

• created a custom sprinkler for the kids

• door/safety locks to keep young children out of rooms they don't belong

To get your creative juices going, visit a site like https://www.prusaprinters.org/ or https://www.Thingiverse.com to see tens of thousands of free plans that you can start with once you get your new 3D printer built and tuned-in.

I can do modeling of simple mechanical parts and have done dozens, cost typically around $150 for labor if you don't want to do it yourself, but I do not do artistic modeling (think toy dinosaurs for example.)

Most who are buying from me are getting their first 3D printer. So a few hints (There are 100's more on the internet):

• Start with PLA. A lot of sites say that PETG is 'about as easy as PLA'. But these are people who are coming from ABS and so they are saying, 'compared to ABS, PETG is about as difficult as PLA.' But this is the situation of people who started several years ago when PETG was a 'new thing' and ABS was the most common product used. If you are starting with PLA (and you should) you will find PETG a lot more difficult. PLA lets you learn in a more gentle way, then when you have some experience, you should try PETG. PETG has benefits over PLA that I won't go into here, PETG will be more difficult, but if you got experienced in PLA first, you won't have as many problems all at the same time when learning to use PETG. Once you are successful regularly with PETG, then you can look at the many other options.
• Start with good quality but cheap PLA until you are getting successes almost all the time. I don't mean to buy cheap, poor quality PLA, I mean don't go with the fancy colors and embedded PLAs until you are reliable with the basic good quality PLAs. In Canada, I'd start with the lower cost PLA from https://filaments.ca and https://botfeeder.com They have a wide variety of colors in their basic PLA line that I have had great success with.
• If you live in a dry climate like Calgary ALberta, great, you won't have to be paranoid about moisture in your PLA and PETG filaments (but you might with nylon). If you live in a humid climate like Costa Rica - well, that's a different matter - your filaments can absorb, but some studies I've seen, 60% of what they CAN absorb within 3 hours of be exposed to the air. So your 4 hour print is going to have water that boils and 'explodes' inside your filament as you heat it up well past the boiling temerature. So if you live in places like that, keep your filaments in a dryer or at least a mostly air tight container with silica gel in it to keep it dry - EVEN WHILE YOU ARE PRINTING. (It won't be completely air tight, you'll have a small hole for the filament to come out.) There are lots of options for thi, I use PrintDry.
• Don't start with a 12 or 36 hour print - until you have shown you can print reliably repeatedly.
• Make sure you get your 1st layers PERFECT every time.
• Keep the bed clean - particularly grease free. Grease from your fingers on the print bed is horrible - and I have very dry fingers when I'm in the Calgary area. IPA (Isopropyl Alcohol) does NOT remove finger grease (though it combined with a paper towel might - it is the paper towel that is removing the grease.) I keep a spray bottle with water and a couple drops of dishsoap, I use the blue 'dawn', and if I ever accidentelly touch the bed, I clean it with that solution THEN use IPA to get rid of the soap.
• Keep the bed clean, no grease. My fingers feel really dry in Alberta to me. More than once, I "just" brushed a part off with my hand and just barely touched the pei bed and decided to not clean it because I "just" touched it. Then, half the time, the next print 'came loose' half way through printing. This never happened when I cleaned the bed with soapy water after touching it, so I am convinced that just the tiniest amount of grease from the driest hands is enough to make the PEI slick enough that a print will come free and be ruined if I don't clean it. Now, while I am emphasising the need to clean all grease off, I will admit one cheat. If I am certain I haven't touched the bed where ANY filament is going to be put down, but I have touched it outside of that area, sometimes I won't clean it. The risk of course is that 4 prints later I will print in the area I touched and will have forgotten by then that I touched it 'there'.
• Keep the bed free from grease. OK I hope you got the point. This one is critical. IPA is good for removing water and dust, but you must keep your bed grease free for it to work well. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that if I were to 'touch' the print at any point (such as when cleaning up a blob to try to 'rescue' a print - happens rarely but it does happen) I suspect I MUST wear gloves because I would deposit grease on the surface that will be bonded to next
• Printing in the middle is easier than the edges of the bed. Why? uneven heating in the bed. It is hardest for them to keep the edges of the bed as warm as the majority of the bed. I have the most problems with prints that go to the edges.
• As a result of the above - I take SPECIAL care to clean the outer 5cm (2") of the bed whenever a print is going to be printing close to the edge. That seems to be where I touch it and not notice, or at least I assume that is the reason.
• I wear cotton knit gloves that I got from Princess Auto for handling the bed and prints, ever since I started to do that, my frequency of failure went down.
• when putting a magnetic bed (such as the very convenient flexible ones for the Prusa i3 MK3) make sure you don't have any peices of filament between the bed and the magnetic part - that will warp the bed and cause print problems. The printer only checks 9 points to 'self level', that works if you do your job, but doesn't work if you get filament or something else stuck causing the bed to warp.