Ack! My trusty Monoprice Maker Select Plus is broken. Any sugestions on a suitable replacement/upgrade?

Question

About 6 hours into a 8 1/2 hour job, I finally took notice that my job was still a few layers above the raft. Even though the head was moving, no filament was being extruded. I am not sure of the order of events, but the filament was jammed. Did the hot end cool too much to melt the filament? Did the filament actually jam entering the heater? After a quick disassembly, I found a distorted filament (partially ground away) in the extruder drive housing. After I reheated and cleared the tip, I extracted the remaining chuck of filament (very difficult as I could neither pull or push it with a hot tip). I then fed new filament into the extruder and attempted to drive it into the heater. Oh no, there was no filament movement (funny but after detecting the failure, I attempted to drive the extruder and thought that I had heard it driving???). Moving the extruder motor into place on another driver it seemed to work. I am now into a full disassembly to see if I can repair this unit. Only time will tell. I am also thinking about the possibility of buying a new printer to take the place as primary while I refurbish the existing one as a backup (or secondary) printer.

I am leading heavily into getting a new printer. But now I face a dilemma, what kind of printer do I get? I have not been looking around to see what else might be available and I still am a relative newbie to the world of 3D printers as this was my first printer, so I find myself not too well equipped to pick a replacement. Any suggestions as to designs, models or vendors would be a great help. What features should I be considering at this point (auto leveling, upgraded hot ends, etc.)?

Thanks in advance,

Gene

milosrasic98 · Accepted Answer

Hi Gene! If you're looking for another printer, could you maybe tell us a bit what you're looking for in the printer, by that I mean, just some general stuff like, size of prints, are you planning on printing just PLA, or printing flexibles, ABS, Nylon, your budget for a main/secondary machine? I took a look at the model of your 3D printer and it looks like a really good machine with rods and linear bearings for all axis which I love. A machine that comes to mind is a Prusa i3 or a Prusa Mini. I haven't worked with them directly, but I've heard really great things about both machines and know people who have an i3, though they are a bit more pricey. There is also the Prusa slicer which comes with really fine tuned presets for these machines. I have a Creality Ender3 Pro, which I have used for the last 9 or 10 months and considering it's under 250$ it performs amazing. I didn't have any major problems with it, a few clogs with some specific filament, but besides that, it worked flawlessly. I haven't tried any materials but PLA on it. It has an okay build volume of 220x220x250mm and instead of rods and linear bearings, it uses v-slot extrusions and rollers. It would be a downgrade on that aspect from your machine, but if you're looking just for something to work while you fix your printer, this can be a good option considering the price. There is also an Ender3 V2 out which has an automatic bed leveling sensor, I haven't used it, but I've read pretty good stuff about it. The best thing I can say about the Ender3 Pro is that it's a great machine for tinkering around with it and upgrading with a lot of mods available, for example, it's a bowden extruder machine, so it won't really work with flexibles as it is, but there are a lot of mods to convert it to a direct drive so it can print flexible materials and so on. Hope you get your machine fixed fast! Milos

fmilburn · Answer

I have an Anycubic I3 Mega and prints are done using PLA so nothing exotic. I don’t level it frequently and haven’t added any upgrades. It has been reliable so I would say it has been good for a basic machine. I am interested in what others might say about new developments.

hlipka · Answer

I can second the Prusa. Half a year ago I exchanged my K8200 for a Prusa MK3S, and I have not looked back (and in the 6 months I have printed more stuff than in the 5 years I owned the K8200). It really is a work horse, and you can expect to unpack it and start printing (having done quite a lot of PLA and PETG and a bit of ABS so far).

milosrasic98 · Answer

When it comes to changing filaments, I can tell you write away that the stock Ender3 Pro isn't the best thing. It's incredibly fiddly where you need to straighten the end of the filament to have a chance of getting it through the extruder to the bowden tube. I can't really say about the Ender3 V2 or the Prusa, but the Prusa uses a direct drive all metal hot end, so there shouldn't be any issues on that part (that's another sort of limiting factor for the stock Ender3 Pro, it doesn't have an all metal hot end, so it can print PLA and maybe PETG, but it wouldn't work with anything that requires higher temperatures). I'm surprised to hear that you have that much problem with first layers adhesion, a thing I usually do is to get the bed closer to the nozzle and then compensate for that in the model by putting chamfers all around the bottom surface to compensate for the elephant foot effect. Since the prints are mostly flat (take up a wider area but not that high in z axis), I think something with a bed leveling sensor would be an absolute must. The Ender3 V2 and both the Prusa Mini and Prusi i3 MK3S have a bed leveling sensor which should help dramatically. As hlipka already stated, the Prusa really is a work horse, a thing I love about them is that they use their printers to well, make more of their printers. Here is a picture of their print farm making parts for printers. I really find that fascinating and cool! To summarize a bit, all of the things I've heard about the Prusa is that it's a really good machine which is a work horse that doesn't require that much work around it. On the other hand, I love the Ender3 series of printers, since they are really affordable with really good quality prints and if you love tinkering around with them, you can do whatever you want with them, with so many different mods done by others already. There's an abundance of upgrades that can be done, from linear layers, all metal hot ends, direct drive systems, different beds and so on. But again, it doesn't require any of those mods to get really high quality prints, I'm running it pretty stock except some 3D printed upgrades and I'm really pleased with it. Have you had any progress on fixing your machine? Milos

genebren · Answer

Well I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a Original Prusa I3 MK3S+. It will take a while to get here, but I have plenty to do between garden and other projects, so that is OK. I thank everyone who offered their insights!

I will continue to restore my existing printer because it will be pretty cool to have multiple printers!

Thanks again!

hlipka · Answer

One tip (maybe the most important one apart from using the online guides for building the kit) is to use the 'Live Adjust' method for the first layer: https://projects.ttlexceeded.com/3dprinting_mk3_live_z_calibration.html (or look at the original thread at the Prusa forums: https://forum.prusaprinters.org/forum/original-prusa-i3-mk3s-mk3-assembly-and-first-prints-troubleshooting/life-adjust-z… ). Its way better than using the built-in Live-Z procedure.

Ack! My trusty Monoprice Maker Select Plus is broken. Any sugestions on a suitable replacement/upgrade?

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