Hi, I'm Luke. Today on Out of
Darts, we are going to review our workhorse 3D printer: The
Prusa i3 Mk3S+. Let's get going! For those of you just checking out this channel, I
run a nerf mod hobby shop called Out of Darts. We do 3D-printed designs, parts, tools, supplies,
accessories to modify your blaster arsenal. You may have also seen us over on 3D printing
nerd, or on Prusa live back in July of 2020, or possibly on The Verge article.
All of those are down linked in the description below if you want to
check out those videos and articles. I think 3D printing is really amazing, and I love
sharing this information, and that's why we made this review. Because we have so many of these
printers, and we print so much with them, I think we've got valuable insights that might be helpful
for other farm operators and for other hobbyists. I’ve been running this YouTube channel,
and this nerf mod business for about five and a half years now, and we
didn't start with Prusa printers, but once we got our first Mark-3, we
didn't look back. As far as I’m aware, we run the largest Prusa print farm outside of
Prusa themselves over in the Czech Republic. Running a 3D printing farm has been a
really challenging task over the past years. The initial task was just keeping up with running
them myself because I was answering emails, running the business, sourcing new products,
buying, doing all the purchasing, inventory, and designing, and printing, and doing everything.
As we've grown the team, it's really become about the uptime and keeping the printers not only
busy by designing products at the right pace to actually be able to sell things but
also to keep them up and operational and keep ahead of repairs. It's a fine line between
having too much labor and too little labor. And at times, we've been completely slammed. There
was one time when we were at about 36 printers; we actually backed up our print queue to about four
months. We had one product that just went crazy, and we were four months backlogged and could not
get more printers and space and electricity fast enough. And the challenges are kind of part of
the game, and it's been a really enjoyable time. I think 3D printing is just an amazing technology,
and there's a lot of opportunity because seven years ago, I knew nothing about 3D printing other
than FDM was basically a hot glue gun equivalent. That's all I knew seven years ago, and now we're
running this. and I knew nothing about design at that point either, so I think 3D printing is a
great way for someone to start in product design, or creating a product, and building a
brand, and I love that it's so accessible. I want to mention this is absolutely not a
sponsored review. However, the link for Prusa printers down below to buy one (if you do want to
buy one) is an affiliate link, so please keep that in mind. I have never used an affiliate link on
my entire channel. This is the very first time, so we'll see how that goes. But I’m
not making this review to make money. Prusa is a very valued partner, and
we have a lot of their printers, so we're pretty heavily invested and very
happy overall with how things are going. I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty
details of the bed size, the print temps, the capabilities because -- we'll put
some of that up on the screen here, but you can find that on their website.
It's pretty common knowledge. I want to focus on the insight that we can offer
that's different from the other reviewers. In the context of this review, it's also important
to know that my experience is limited to about a dozen printer models. If you want to compare this
to many other 3D printers, it's really better to watch a review from someone like Thomas
Sanladerer, or Maker's Muse, or 3D printing nerd – Joel. But my perspective is really about
running these on a farm in their reliability. I believe that 3D printers are a lot like cars;
there's regular maintenance and ongoing repairs that are always going to be part of operating
a printer. And when you run them commercially like we do -- which is 24/7, 365 days a year --
you're going to run into everything. Nozzles need changing, hot ends need replacing, belts wear out,
power supplies go out, and accidents happen (like blobs and extrusion issues, or detached prints
off beds). You name it, we've probably seen it because when we're running close to 100 printers
24/7, you pretty much run into everything. We've even seen things fail over time that normal users
would never see. things that the forums will say, “oh, that never burns out. that's a lifetime
product,” such as a stepper motor. We've seen one of those go out. That said, that's not a criticism
because running printers for five years straight and one little part on one in ten printers goes
out is a pretty negligible amount of repair cost. We have two print techs that do most of the
printer maintenance and operation. When I started the business, obviously, I did all of that. I ran
all of the printers up until we had about 26 or 28 printers, and at that point, I hired on my first
tech, who really over a year and a half took over that role, and now has been with us a couple years
taking care of managing the printers in the farm. We use software called Notion. We actually
log every single error that happens with each print, and we log it by what type of filament it
happened with, what file it was, what G-code, and what printer number. This allows us to kind of
track and see if there are any underlying issues that are happening with specific printers here
in-house. We primarily print in PLA and PET-G, though we'll occasionally do a polycarbonate
blend. PLA and PET-G are generally a lot easier on your printers due to the lower temps; you're
not going to see as many components wear out, melt, and get damaged. And PLA is also
pretty non-abrasive, so the nozzles last a very long time. We probably get
six months to a year or more on nozzles (generally), but it really varies
for sometimes no apparent reason. With those filaments, we print from four
primary brands, including Atomic, Hatchbox, Prusament, and Proto-Pasta. Now we recently
did a video about Proto-Pasta. We are in the process of switching all of our filament over to
Proto-Pasta, mostly for supply chain reliability and environmental costs because they're local to
us. So, we're actually able to return the spools, the boxes, we don't have to have any freight, or
shipping, or additional packaging materials, so we really get to lower our waste footprint because
the plastic spools really can't get recycled. We've stuck with this limited sort of four or five
brands throughout the time we've printed because when you're printing at scale, you really need
something that's going to reliably print the same every single time with the same settings
across all the different printers. And you can't be tweaking, you know, if
you're going to print hundreds of a file, you can't be constantly dealing with tweaking
and changing for different filament brands and trying to track that. So, we've kept things
pretty simple. We set our sort of base profile, which is really based on Prusa slicer.
We slice everything in PrsuaSlicer; we try to keep up to date there. We have minor
tweaks here and there; as far as bed temps and operational temps, we generally run our beds at
about 67°, and we run the nozzles at about 220°, and we found that to be most reliable
for the majority of our PLA printing. So, the printer itself comes in two forms: you can
buy it as a kit -- the kit comes for about $750, and you can expect to spend anywhere from six to
ten hours putting that together. I make each of my print techs and employees, as they start working
with the printers, build one, and that way, they have a good understanding of how the printer
has gone together. That said, I only built one of these personally. The rest of them we bought
pre-assembled because the time and labor equation really made sense to just do it that way. The fully built kits are $999. so, it is more
expensive, but when you figure it's going to take someone eight or ten hours to assemble, it was
just easier to for us to get up and running as quickly as possible. Since we are a small startup
business, it was important to keep people on the other tasks in the business rather than bog us
down in, you know, 20 or 30 printers show up, and we have a month worth of work for a person
to get them all assembled and up and running. I highly recommend the kit as your first printer.
If you're going to buy a printer, you need to know how to fix it. There's just no way around that. No
printer is perfect; all printers will eventually have parts that need replacing, or you might
get a hot end jam or something. And the more you know about the actual printer itself,
the better your experience is going to be. One of the biggest reasons we chose Prusa is
Prusa's development of the slicer. PrusaSlicer is hands down the best slicer we've used. The
others just really don't compare. And there's nothing wrong with the other slicers; it's just
Prusa is controlling the filament, the slicer, and the printer. And when you do all three in
tandem, you are controlling everything end to end, and they can ensure that you're going to get
really solid results. And they've also committed really heavily to the development and improvement;
it seems like every month there's a new feature coming out, and they're really listening to
their customers, and I think that's fantastic. We used to use Simplify3D, but Simplify3D
didn't see the updates as frequently, partially due to their business model of not being
really subscription-based (or anything like that). The revenue stream makes it hard to keep
developing a piece of software like that. Ultimately Simplify3D kind of fell behind because
it has to support hundreds of different printers, whereas PrusaSlicer is really just
about supporting their printers: the three models they essentially
have, plus the multi-material unit. In running our farm, we're currently still running
everything off of SD cards. We're waiting for Prusa control or Prusa software that's coming
out, and we are going to be beta-testing that as well (hopefully) and kind of figuring
out a better way to manage the fleet. So, we're definitely looking at a way to
improve that, but currently, we're still just running and copying SD cards. We have about
500 G-code files that we are frequently printing due to a variety of different spacings and sizes
and different parts. It's everything from little, tiny internal parts to large add-ons to blasters
to complete blasters like this one here. Another huge advantage of the Prusa system and
kind of getting into their ecosystem is that there is a lot of community support. Both
the Prusa forums and just all over online, there's a large community of people that have
these printers or have clones of these printers, and it makes it a lot easier than finding
support for a more obscure printer. When I purchased my first 3D printer, it
was the FlashForge Creator Pro. At the time, it was top reviewed, and it
was the number one on amazon, but what we found after is that there
really wasn't much of a community. So, when you had a problem, you had to only go to the
company -- you couldn't just google it and find a knowledge base where you'd find a great answer to
your problem. and that's problematic, ultimately. With the Prusa system, there are more than a
hundred thousand of these printers out there. They have an avid fan base; it really makes it a
lot simpler to find solutions to common problems. Now that said, there are times when you're
going to have to talk to support, especially at the scale we do because we run into those weird
issues that don't show up on the forums, aren't in the manual, that sort of thing. And that's one
spot where I do feel like Prusa has led us down over the last few years. The support chat
can be a fairly long wait, and it can be at times -- for our knowledge base, it's a
little frustrating. because we've gotten on there and we've asked questions, and we're getting
kind of level zero or level one support, where they're they start with -- this
isn't a literal quote, but it's like, “have you tried turning it off and on again?”
“Have you checked the thermistor?” “Have you done…” and going through all the
things that we've already done. Prusa has definitely gotten better
about that over the past few months, but support is definitely one thing that you want
to keep in mind when you're buying a printer. That said, it is still leagues above some of
the support I’ve gotten from some of the Chinese printers that I’ve purchased, where it's basically
non-existent. Or they're helpful, and they want to send you a new printer, but they don't
give you a way to fix the one you've got. So that's been my biggest downside to Prusa
has been the support, but as I said they I know they are working on trying to improve that, and
they've definitely helped us out more recently. Again, the knowledge base is
fantastic. The documentation, and assembly, and guidelines, and
database on their website is fantastic. Prusaprinters.org is also a great place to find
really well-designed, verified G-code and STLs that won't break your printer, and it's a
good alternative to things like Thingiverse, and it's [already] tuned and designed
right for your printer from the start. The Mark-3S+ is by far the best
version of this they've made. they've solved a lot of issues that I had, and
complaints and gripes I had in the past, such as the older filament sensor didn't work very well,
it had a ball bearing, and it tended to fail and not function properly. We had more
issues with the old hot-ends and cooling; we also had min temp errors and other issues that
kept commonly popping up. But the current version is the most stable it's ever been, which is why
I think this is still a very big contender in the 3D printing space, even given its premium price
point and the fact that it's been out so long. One of those things you'll notice, as far as the
printer itself, the screen is going to feel pretty clunky and dated compared to some alternatives
that are out there. A lot of printers in this price point have custom LEDs or LCDs that have a
touch screen and render previews and all of that. Even the Prusa Mini has a better screen than the
Mark-3. that said, it really doesn't slow us up or change our workflow that much in a commercial
setting for printing and running a print farm. scrolling through the menus really doesn't take
that much time out of our day, and we ultimately think that we will be controlling these remotely
once the software has been settled out and enabled One of the best parts about the i3 ecosystem is
that you can print all of the 3D-printed parts. And all of you probably noticed know this already,
but all these are parts are printed out of PET-G. All the files are available online; Prusa even
has the pre-sliced G-code for these printers. So, you can download the G-code, you don't even need
to slice it, and you can just hit print. It's really nice to be able to replace parts that
get damaged or wear out, though, in reality, those are pretty limited. It's occasional extruder
housing we've seen needing replacing, and we've replaced things like upgrading the fan shroud
to the newer design. We’ve replaced the actual fan shroud probably the most frequently because
if you get a blob or something that grabs that, it can cause the shroud to be damaged. But the
nice thing is you're printing a part that costs you 20 cents or something, and it's really
quick and easy to get back up and running. On the note of running, these printers
have run for an absurd amount of time. Now there's some question as to how accurate the
time meters are on these, but this one claims 840 days. It's on the most current firmware. This
printer is about four-plus years old, I believe. It's from when the i3 Mk3 first came out,
so that's probably about accurate. I assume that's on-time rather than SD card time. There
was a bit of a debate online as to what it was. But suffice it to say, these printers, the
majority of them, have been running for three-plus years -- some of them four years,
and they've been running 24/7. And especially in the beginning, when we were running out of my
garage, and it was a really small scrappy startup. I was getting up and running these at 2 AM so that
they were running 24/7, just constantly running. And as much as when you do have to replace
something, it's like, “Oh darn, I have to replace something,” but it's pretty minor. Of
our 67 Mark-3's, I think we've replaced two power supplies, we've replaced normal things
like nozzles, I think we replaced one belt. It's really pretty minor overall. the most
common things that we're replacing are the heat break, and the heat throat, and the nozzles,
and mostly that will happen if we get a bad blob up overnight. So really, from a reliability
standpoint, they're very excellent. The other feature that we love and is absolutely
essential for what we do are these flexible spring steel PEI sheets. Not only does PET-G and PLA
stick to this really perfectly for good adhesion, but it makes it really fast for operators
to pop the parts off of the print bed. And in the case of some prints, they can be
a little more stubborn than others, and on other printers, you might actually
break things getting them off of the bed. This also gives you the option to do different
textures, though we primarily print in the smooth sheet because PLA adheres best to smooth.
If you're going to do the textured sheet, I’d really probably go with PET-G
because it sticks a little better. So, to kind of wrap all of this up, I
think these printers are really reliable; they have rock-solid parts, a really phenomenal
knowledge base, and a massive market share. And it's for a good reason. I think they're
very good printers. Now the Prusa Mini, I have to say I would not give that same
review. And I will be doing a review on that coming up on the channel, so hit the subscribe
button if you want to see that. We actually recently went through an overhaul; we got rid of
41 mini Prusa mini printers, and we're replacing them with Mark-3’s. We just didn't find them
to operate as well in our commercial print farm environment. We had hoped that was going to be the
case, but it just really wasn't. So, we're going back to just Mark-3’s, keeping a single printer
brand and unit across the entire print farm. The print bed is really medium size. It's not
large, and it's not small, so keep that in mind if you're looking for a printer. That's
(obviously) always an important factor, but we design basically with these printers
in mind as sort of an in-house limitation. We will look at getting maybe
an XL or some other large CR-10 printer or something for larger stuff if
I’ve got a specific design that needs it. But right now, this sort of medium-sized
print bed really does fit our needs well. Another potential con is the price. at
$1,000, it’s far from the cheapest printer, but my experience has been with CR-10s,
and with FlashForge, and with Qidi most of those printers have taken
me more time and effort to set up, manage, repair, and we just really seen the value
in spending more money to get the genuine thing And on that note, we even have now stopped
buying any knock-off or third-party parts. We just buy the authentic E3D parts or the parts
straight from Prusa. Because every time we put in a non-authentic or a third-party part --
because this is an open-source system, we just run into more and more issues.
And ultimately, when you've got a business that's running on it, and
you've got repair labor and maintenance, and lost revenue from not being able to print
when a printer is down, it makes sense for us to have reliable printers that print all the time,
and work day in day out, and take care of us. At the end of the day, I give this printer
in its current form a 5 out of 5 stars, and I am 100% confident of that review. I have
spent over $120,000 as a business with Prusa, and we are still buying more of these printers.
We are voting with our dollars more than anything. I hope this review has been insightful and
helpful. If you're interested in more content on 3D printing and running a farm, I’ll have some
links down in the description to Joel’s tour from 3D printing nerd and anything else we come up
with in the future. Again, if you are purchasing a printer, I do have an affiliate link in the
description. The first time I’m trying that, so we'll see how that goes. Again, thank you so much
for watching. Until next time, I’m out of darts.
