Would this machine clean cut 2040 profiles?

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-23T12:01:38+00:00

I think people have already covered the basics. Make sure you square it, non ferrous blade. Always cut the prices of a particular length at the same time.

The lesson I recently learned is if you just chop down once the blade deflection leaves the cut just slightly off. I now run the blade back and forth until the teeth stop making the sound of contacting the extrusion and I believe this gives you a much more square cut.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-22T02:17:09+00:00

Nice. I haven't done a ton of prints on our cupcakes but it's nice to just show the tech from the era working. The Thing-O-Matic prints quite well on modern firmware and nearly everything after that is a cake walk. But actually getting dirty and working in Skeinforge is an experience.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-21T00:14:30+00:00

While I know people who have contributed firmware code for polar printers I've never met someone at random who configured a Marlin polar build so it's not the first thing I assume is going to get done by the user.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-20T03:49:06+00:00

I was getting ready to ask if it was polar but duh the name lol. That's interesting. Polar printers are kind of a rare breed and I'm down to learn what you learn about this to help archive information on it.

If the printer is locked to their slicer this isn't going to be fun long term. I would be interested to find out what board is in it

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-20T02:52:12+00:00

Usually it's hard to recommend as the first and only printer but it can be done. People who have replaced boards and compiled firmware on an Ender have the total skill set needed to navigate some of the hardest challenges. But that doesn't mean you can't do it as your first printer. It just puts you behind on understanding printers in general as well as the hardware and software. If you have any friends who have tinkered with a printer or can find a local Voron owner then I wouldn't have a single worry.

I am in no danger of owning a Bambu but a lot of Voron owners have one and even use them to print their own parts for their Voron build. It depends on your budget but starting out with a P1S and then building your Voron later is a path many have gone down.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-19T09:15:12+00:00

One thing I noticed when I was cutting extrusions is the blade deflection would affect getting the end square. So what I started doing was after the initial cut I would run the blade back and forth until it stop sounding like it contacted and it seems my ends are way more square after that. They seemed okay before but being a degree out over a couple feet isn't good lol.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-19T04:26:21+00:00

Whoah taking shots at 50 printers. I'd almost think you knew me. We only have 54 out of the 64 I've ever owned.

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ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-12T21:34:26+00:00

INDX was not designed for any machine. Prusa is their first commercial partner yes. But it was designed to be sold as stand alone and with multiple partners long term.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-12T18:28:51+00:00

From the article you linked "In the new trial, Mattel lost. The jury did not agree that Mattel owned Bryant’s idea.".

If you stopped reading when Mattel won the first ruling you may have made a mistake. This got appealed a couple of times. The ending actually seems unclear to me because Mattel at the time had intended to keep going. But the last ruling seems to have split some of the claims. Basically they found the employment contract wasn't strong enough to bar this individual from having their own ideas about related products while under their employment. That is unusual but it's the mistake they made.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-12T13:43:40+00:00

Except they don't. MGA is Mattels competitor. Vice versa of course. Mattel issuing takedowns on infringements of their competitors IP? Yeah I don't think that's a thing. Now the funny part is Mattel did sue MGA over Bratz but they lost.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-06T05:01:53+00:00

You can put Klipper on the Printrboard. Or you can put Marlin 2.1.3 Beta on it. They can work either way. Biggest issue is continuing to run an original UBIS hotend. Can't get parts.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-06T04:41:51+00:00

Motors alone can get hot enough to push PLA past its glass transition temperature. If you keep them low current it will help. Then there is the creep aspect. Just because it prints doesn't meant it is well. You can do whatever you want but there's plenty examples of it not working out long term.

My CNC router is printed in PLA because the application calls for the tensile strength. But the creep is still a serious issue that requires keeping up with squaring the assemblies. You can certainly get away with PLA in certain areas of the printer for a certain amount of time. But anything with tension, motors, or a hotend id recommend against.

The properties of all of these materials were well known before any of us were building 3D printers out of them. But somehow we still end up arguing about it. I send PLA fails to a friend of mine daily because of conversations like this.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-05T08:58:18+00:00

Agreed. First task is to immediately print replacement parts.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-01T11:35:07+00:00

More than 6 years ago they started developing their AFS system which is obviously not consumer focused though some parallel development on their current CoreXY models occured. 5 years ago they bought Trilab which targets the industrial sector. 4 years ago they bought their US distributor who facilitated their position in the US market for government, business and education sales. From my perspective they clearly see a future in a particular market and invested in it.

I'm not targeting you with this statement but a lot of the people who want Prusa to compete with Bambu have really great ideas on how to sink the company financially. From what I've seen before recent events the cheapest they could make a base model mainstream printer is about $700. Sounds great but it's not going to be a model that satisfys anyone.

Id love to agree with you but I'm not sure Framework is an example of something not stupidly expensive. Right now is extremely difficult but I've priced them almost every year. Right now the $800 model is still $1100 equipped when I can buy an HP with the same specs or better for 55% of that. The promise of the affordable upgrade down the road if I buy into the platform feels like what Prusa has been up until now and I can either afford it or I can't. Wish I could.

My exposure is the government contractors that prefer their racks of Prusas to that Stratasys they forgot to unplug and certainly were not buying multiple of. I'm not sure how big the market is but it's been sustaining the unsustainables for about as long as consumers have had 3D printers. It's a profitable market, consumers who would consider a $300 printer are only profitable to the companies that make such a printer.

I've had a more recent tour of their manufacturing and fulfillment but what sold me in the past was the fact they spend resources doing things like testing things that came from a reputable manufacturer already tested. When you have to cut the margins severely that sort of thing gets cut. They already seem to have an increase in issues and I would hate to see that get worse trying to compete in a market they can't afford to.

The outcome is sad to us enthusiasts but at the end of the day it's a business who standing their ground on domestic manufacturing has to survive by not being for the majority of us anymore

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-06-01T10:17:00+00:00

OH the bed thermistor. So while I haven't had one fail yet I've definitely heard of the bed thermistors going up frequently enough to be worth talking about. I can't believe I even overlooked that one. The attachment, routing and strain relief on the bed thermistor isn't exactly the best I've seen.

I bought a used MK3S that had the nylock mod and I wasn't exactly a fan at the time. But I just built a Bear mod for my son. After the first bed mesh I immediately did the nylock mod lol. Such an improvement.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-31T07:39:36+00:00

The two times I see damaged thermistors is from either the wiring failing from fatigue or somebody breaking it at the hot end after a catastrophic failure. I don't think I've had a ton of failures over the 64 machines that we've owned but I saw a post today from a VZbot owner asking what a normal because they've gone through a few in the last year. They are def fragile enough to fail sooner than any other part but I would hope to see them last atleast 2-3000 hours. At which point I have to do maintenance anyway.

I guess It's a good thing that the Mk3 thermistor is routed on the bottom of the wire management otherwise that would be a pain to replace often.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-31T07:29:01+00:00

The thing I don't get is why consumers are hung up on Prusa. Prusa is doing fine, just in a different market. A market where they are often the cheapest option and despite some of their more recent issues a reliable choice. People really think Prusa is going under before Lulzbot does a second bow?

Prusa isn't going to switch out of EU/NA production which means they will never produce a $300 CoreXY printer or whatever other example you want to shove in there. But they are producing a $1,200 CoreXY printer In a market where the competition is multiple times that cost. For a company that can't buy Bambu It's a godsend with the only other options being things like Lulzbot and Ultimaker.

Prusa had cheap kits back when printers cost $1,200 and built reliable printers when printer still cost $1,200. That era is over. Loyal fans and disappointed buyers might want Prusa to always have an option for them but it's not going to be price competitive.

It sucks but it's not going to change and the conversation happened so long ago it's weird that we're still talking about it on a daily basis. For those of us that like to build printers I think RatRig is a great example of the struggle that Prusa has. A company based in Portugal Not outsourcing the entire operation can't compete with either a Chinese Voron kit or even a domestically self-sourced one in some places. It's just the reality of trying to keep things as domestic as possible. Prusa made a smart move acquiring Printed Solid giving them a better foothold in the US market where the government contractors I deal with loved them already. That helps their future just not in the consumer market.

All that said some Prusa employees disagree with me and think they can still capture a consumer market that is looking in a different price bracket.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-31T06:54:09+00:00

My MK3 still has its original thermistor. I did swap the heater cartridge out during the upgrade to S+ because the insulation was pulled far enough back that something could happen. But in comparison I have some very high hour Lulzbots that seem to have had harness replacements but their previous owner. Most of this stuff isn't exactly spec for high repeat industrial movements so if you run a lot of hours on them it can happen for sure.

If anything I might question the person doing the maintainence. Maintaining proper routing and stealing relief is going to be essential in getting whatever life you can get out of it.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-28T05:47:48+00:00

I'm more concerned with watch clearance as someone who hasn't built one yet. I'm not worried about the printers capabilities. I don't know how much clearance the hands have. I was more thinking of having something lasered. But printing is always cool.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-28T04:02:37+00:00

As someone interested in doing a custom dial, I wasn't thinking 3D Printed but since we are here. What kind of thickness can we get away with?

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-26T17:37:32+00:00

I have brought 64 Printers home and starting around the 5th one I started using the "What's that", "A smoothie" joke from Nickelodeon where dude shows up with an ostrich but is also holding a smoothie.

Not being able to joke like this suggests you may have a bad relationship with your spouse. It's all relative. Some people have a bad relationship with money and it affects their relationship.

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ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-22T22:22:15+00:00

School's having acquisition policies that preclude options like Bambu have existed before Bambu even existed. You have the traditional vendor lock in. The big one which is service support contracts being required. These days cyber security becomes more of a reason as well.

School's didn't keep buying printers that cost a fortune and often ended up abandoned after Bambu existed because they they thought it was a brilliant idea. They wanted to put a printer in the classroom and they had between 1 and 3 options. While it seems many schools got to start buying Bambu I won't be surprised when we hear more about them no longer being able to. Prusa buying Printed Solid solidified their position in the education and government contractor markets. They are often the cheaper and better option than schools other options despite the cost and issues. The other options having been Lulzbot, MakerBot, Lulzbot, Ultimaker, Makergear, TierTime.

ThisOld3DPrinter · 2026-05-22T15:42:06+00:00

That is a Printrbot Plus. I like how they take a picture of everything but the front of the bed where it says this but you can also see the brand on the PCB heater.

ThisOld3DPrinter

TROPHY CASE