Can you make money repairing barely broken 3D printers?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 พ.ค. 2024
- There must be plenty of ‘broken’ 3d printers sitting around collecting dust. In this video, we examine if an experienced user, with plenty of knowledge and spare parts, could buy these printers, fix them and profit from their sale. My experience shows that while there may be some easy conversions, sometimes you’ll take a loss on a difficult machine, and that puts a question mark over the whole idea.
0:00 Introduction
0:46 Premise
1:42 An example 3D printer: Ortur 4
2:52 Plan of action
3:13 Updating firmware
Marlin Ortur4 config: github.com/MarlinFirmware/Con...
My branch of Marlin 2 for this printer (SKR mini E3 V2 mainboard): github.com/teachingtechYT/Mar...
4:14 Investigating the hot end thermistor
5:12 Changing the broken mainboard
Link to adaptor CAD: cad.onshape.com/documents/d7f...
6:29 LCD saga
Reddit Anet LCD thread: / anet_a6_full_graphics_...
Scammed video: • I got scammed buying 3...
Portzal TFT35 (non E3) housing: www.thingiverse.com/thing:412...
BTT TFT35 E3 model on Grabcad: grabcad.com/library/bigtreete...
7:54 Final checks and tuning
9:02 Printing and tweaking
My free calibration website: teachingtechyt.github.io/cali...
10:31 Preparing for handover
10:55 Conclusion
Buy quality and affordable filament from X3D. Buy 3, get 1 free and a free sample pack with every order: www.x3d.com.au
Get Quality Resins from 3D Printers Online. 5% off storewide for Teaching Tech subscribers [Code: tech5]
3dprintersonline.com.au/
Take a look around and if you like what you see, please subscribe.
Support me on Patreon: / teachingtech
If this is about flipping, I miss the part where you try to sell it again and show us how hard it is to sell a working printer for a fitting price :) That would definitely conclude and answer the initial question.
Yeah, people might not be willing to pay more than 50% for a used printer ? also factor in ebay/payment fees ,shipping and being open to a buyer dispute if it doesnt work for them...
@@hthring Not wanting to pay more than 50% of the new price for a used printer is a stupid approach though.
@@connorlancaster7541 But there are so many other more modern narcissistic shared fantasies which are more appealing than [insert your religion here]
@@themekfrommars Huh?
The issue being that these machines are dirt cheap broken, but also dirt cheap while working. The amount of work that went into reviving this rather mediocre machine is not really something you'll get back after the repair work, advertising the machine, shipping it, etc. If the machines cost $500 broken and could be flogged for $1500 tested and working it might start making sense, but buying some crap for $100 and putting time and effort into fixing it and then selling for $250 or something would be a ton of work for little reward.
Rather than worry about flipping a printer, this seems like a way to get another one for your shop...as long as you accept that it could be a lot of work. But maybe not!
That’s exactly how I now have two printers and a third on the way.
Ask Holy Spirit to teach you and to guide
you. I would recommend the TH-cam Cleveland street preachers and follow Jesus no man no religion. Be holy and obey Jesus. Hebrews 5:9 "salvation is for those who obey.
Jesus says if you love me keep my commandments (John 14:15). Jesus even says if you keep my commandments then you shall abide in my love (John 15:10).r
@@connorlancaster7541
And I say, if you begave nicely to other people chances are that they will behave nice to you.
See. It can be done without involving religious stupidity.
There are 3000 religions/versions of God. You simply believe one more than I do. That doesn’t make you right. Statistically you are wrong.
Also - spare parts!
I got my first printer this way for super cheap. Bought a Qidi Xone2 for $120 with free shipping. Broken thermistor wire, bent Y limit switch and a clogged extruder. I had it running in a few hours and it's been a great machine for the two years I've had it.
I did it for about a year with returned ender 3 pros. usually flipped for 70-90usd profit per. was doing 3-5 a week. was fun
How much time did you typically have to work on one to get it working? That does sound like a lot of fun 👍
@@briguy9915 I'd usually grab 3-5 thursday or friday after work. Then by midnight friday have them all fixed and a 12-14hr test print kicked off to make sure they were good. Then they'd go up for sale Saturday evening and be all sold by end of tuesday. Rinse and repeat if i felt like it. Only did enders so i could buy common stuff in bulk like bed mats and hotend parts.
What surprised me was the amount of upgrades they got returned with. I acquired so many yellow bed springs and capricorn tube as i always sold them bone stock lol
Enders are possibly the only ones that you can actually flip, I bought 13 anycubics for $60, most were untouched. Nobody has bought them, even when I listed it for $100.
Ask Holy Spirit to teach you and to guide
you. I would recommend the TH-cam Cleveland street preachers and follow Jesus no man no religion. Be holy and obey Jesus. Hebrews 5:9 "salvation is for those who obey.
Jesus says if you love me keep my commandments (John 14:15). Jesus even says if you keep my commandments then you shall abide in my love (John 15:10).g
@@userblame632 Also considering how great the Ender community is, flipping them should be super easy.
I bought a "refurbished" printer from JGmaker directly (saved me $200ish on the A5s). It took a year to get all the bugs out of it. They were very supportive, sending me: a new fan, Z-coupler, LCD, and a new heated bed.
I now have a fairly solid 3D printer, but there was a lot of trouble shooting, and time involved to get it there. (Each part problem was discovered at different times so customer service and shipping time was significant).
The next printer I buy will be be a brand new one with a good warranty.
i bought my first printer is voron0.1, i think is very small and easy to printing
I thought this was going to get me motivated to pickup a few “broken” printers…then I quickly realized this is exactly what I don’t want to end up having to do 🤣!
Just love watching you keeping the 3D printing community with updated contents that we thrive on.
Hope you do many more of buying broken printers and fixing them that are of different brands, as one can learn more about the other printers,
Meaning basically how they failed and quality the insides are and so on.
Anyway keep it coming as love learning from this #1 channel.
The end of the video is so cute. Thank you Michael.
Bass guitar strings are great for clearing blocked tubes and hot ends.
i have 5 printers now the last four bought as spares or repairs which were easily fixed and now run great.
what a satisfying project tho. good work
Seems like the same that happened to me when I flipped handheld consoles for some cash.
I bought them off of eBay auctions from Japan, (eventually one or another beaten up Game Boy was well priced locally), bought new cases, button membranes and usually a screen mod, and sold for twice the total cost.
Result: always profit (duh, always selling 2x cost) but sales were SLOW for some devices. Modded Game Boys were a heck of a niche around here, and people that bought them loved them, but they were very few of course. Come this pandemic and the dollar exchange killed that business. Some were best sellers like the 3DS, PSPs waited on the shelf for ages.
TL/DR: check the market for used 3D printers (or anything you're flipping) to see if you're up to the investment (sometimes a bet). You might sit on stock for long periods of time.
plus you dont get many repeat buyers
Thanks for this vid. Sorry to hear about the scammer, I have had similar from another seller. I have been picking up unwanted printers from people who have lost faith or upgraded for a couple of months now, so far I have accumulated 5, one being an ancient delta "magician", an E2 and bed slingers of varying size. All of them have needed a bit of work but I haven't yet managed to get to the selling part of the plan as I seem to have grown fond of them (calling cards of an addict I am sure). I also seem to have become the 3D print guru at my college where I work, most fixes seem to be new nozzles, firmware and students tinkering with eccentric rail adjusters with little or no mechanical empathy. You channel is a 3D barcode next to the door of my 3D printing lab for recommended watching and study :D
I've been buying faulty 3D printers from a well known Chinese company, and they are hard to sell again, only if you make a very low profit, something around 30€\each.
Usually, the common problems with buying faulty printers from the main seller, are related to buyers and not to the printers themselves. So basically loose parts, bad bed leveling (damaged stickers), and so on. Also i got one that were smashed, but not hard to fix.
All my 7 printers that i've bought were working fine, besides the issues that were easy to fix if you are already into 3D printing.
But buying a printer for 60€ and selling it by 90€ doesn't worth the time.
That's generally the problem with 3D printing, cause it's community is either people who are very fresh to the hobby, or experienced people. People who are just starting would rather get a new Ender 3 rather than a cheaper, less known printer. On the other hand, experienced people probably know the flaws of these cheap printers so they would rather get a more expensive one.
If it's just a clogged nozzle or PFTE tube gone bad, then yes. But seeing what you went through…… I think there is no way that printer is worth more than the work needed to fix it. When you need to change both the mainboard and the screen, you might as well just build a new printer.
I hope your friend appreciates your hard work :)
Unless it's a change you wanted to do anyway. Let's say you get a Ender 3 that's mechanically sound but has a busted (original) main board. If you already intended to replace the main board to get silent drivers, it's not a big deal. You can also use a cheap LCD in its place if you don't care about the pretty pictures. It also depends on how much you got it for in the first place.
Meh, if you make it your sidehustle to buy and repair printers, you will find printers with broken electronics and printers with broken mechanics. So if you limit yourself to buying only popular models, instead of buying something obscure like this, chances are you will not have to take any of these very time-intensive tasks like designing/printing brackets, compiling your own firmware to account for a different mainboard, LCD, sensor etc because you can swap like for like.
If you go for models which have upgrades people commonly like to make, do the upgrading, sell the printers as upgraded instead of refurbished.
first off, he did say if he wasn't giving it to someone, he would have scrapped it.
but the reality is that BOTH a mainboard AND LCD being out would be RARE in the LONG RUN. Since he's talking about doing it for pay, he'd be fixing MANY printers, so the AVERAGES WOULD PLAY OUT: in a DOZEN, maybe one does need both, 4 need one or the other, and 7 just need cleaning and adjusting or super low cost fixes.
@@AlexusMaximusDE but the big problem is that replacing electronics (meaning Mainboard or screen) is not cheap. These components are kinda expensive.
And broken 3D printers are still quite expensive and working ones don't sell for all that much.
i been flipping printers for awhile i make a little money.but i enjoy doing it.im working on one now as im watching your channel
Thanks for making the video. I had not considered buying used printers, but now I might.
Pretty cool rebuild
I think the biggest lesson that people should get from this video is tune your printer before you do your first print. You took a lot of time before you even hit print.
Well done
I don’t know how much his mainboards cost, though the cheapest possible controllers if you don’t care about screens are (iirc) under $40.
But while he didn’t say how much time he spent, unless his time is worth very little to him, just the time sink with all he did appeared to be several hours of work, optimistically. If he came out ahead in a financial way, it’s from having useful content for youTube!
@@strictnonconformist7369 I've seen people get printers for free or really cheap from people who didn't know what they were doing. Plus if you're someone like me, who has got like four controller boards just lying around it's just free money.
@@rheller_82 how much time is spent making sure you aren’t buying/getting too much of a problem? I’d keep it as a hobby that pays for itself, I have other things I am into 3D printing for, and my time is valuable.
I purchased a used Flashforge Creator Pro off eBay for $450 because I need to make small two colour badges. The machine turned up in original packaging with all the accessories unopened. The usage meter showed 12 hours. The extruder heads had been assembled with the left head on the right etc.Swapped the heads over so right was on the right... and had an absolutely new machine. The only mystery is that the build plate had a ghost of the foot print from a benchy. Who and how was the benchy printed?
I tried doing this for a bit, snagging machines off of returned merch auctions. That was pre-pandemic and I was living in a large metropolitan area, and close to a second. I've since moved to a smaller community and it's hard to sell *anything* for a reasonable price.
So take that in to consideration if you want to do fix and flips, or you may wind up under water on your printers.
Like Michael, I've had a few printers land on my bench with a ton of problems that I was mainly able to fix with parts from my spares bin, but one CR-10 in particular I got was literally a pile of loose components in a box. That was an adventure to get back up and running again.
I did this for about a year. Buy from returns auctions, get them working and sell. Went pretty well for me, was able to double my money on most flips.
Then why did you stop?
@@Ultrazaubererger a logical guess I’d posit is while he doubled money (sales price versus purchase price) the amount of time and effort resulted in it being a very low wage when all was said and done.
If you buy one for $100 but spent 3 hours tracking things down, not even counting parts cost, that’s $33/hour, minus expenses. But how much time is really used? And then there’s the time and effort required to sell them. There goes a lot of random time and effort.
It’s a weird spot to be in: if you know what you’re doing for the electronics and mechanics and troubleshooting, odds are you’re making more per hour of your time than you’d get from all the time involved, because you’ve got the background. If you don’t have the background, perhaps you make a decent living already, but it’s an effective deeply-recursive rabbit hole to go down, that can get quite expensive. If you don’t already have the background and don’t make a decent wage, then you have to take on a lot of expensive might-be-garbage and the risk.
Note: as of the time I’m posting this, I barely started playing the video.
@@Ultrazaubererger now that I’ve watched the video, well: it confirmed what I suspected would be the case, sample size of 1!
I wonder how much time he spent on this one?
The other day I was able to score a brand new condition Ender 3 Pro for $180 CDN!! The guy listed it on Marketplace and wasn't sure if it even worked. I took a chance and drove out to meet him. The entire thing had been taken apart and every piece of metal, nut, bolt, etc was loose inside the box. I was sure the metal was probably bent and it wouldn' t ever be square. But got it home, and it was all there. Went together just fine, and I quickly realized that what might have happened is that the original purchaser didn't flip the switch on the power supply from 230VAC to 115VAC, so it wouldn't power up. But leveled adjusted everything and it works perfectly !! Gonna add an extender kit and a direct-drive extruder soon !
Ive been doing it for over a yr now and its a fantastic supplement to my 3d printing addiction..... running a print farm i always have a stack of parts and with the popularity of the v2 i cant keep up with demand. 70-150 is the usual profit when i do it and i have learnt after taking baths on lesser know brands to only do it with Enders and cr's. I'll usually add a short vid of the finished machine on my channel. I don't run enders on my print farm :D
How do you make $150 profit with a printer that sells new for less than $300?
Who's gonna pay $200+ for a used printer if they just could buy a new one?
Best back of the hand footage on YT! Sub! 😉👍
Soldering thermistors is likely to affect the resistance and therefore the temperature readings or so I have been told.
I did exactly this to get my hands on a Flashforge Dreamer that had a bit of cosmetic damage to the extruder's PCB casing and one of the hotends disconnected, one trip to a spare parts website and a couple of all metal heatbreaks later I've got a high temp dual extruder machine for £225!
Thanks for another interesting video. I’d like to know more about the process about setting up profiles for upgraded printers. You mentioned that you just took the information from another printer that you had but not all of us have a lot of printers or the experience that you do. I’m in the process of upgrading the motherboard and hot end of one of my two printers. Unfortunately I bought a lesser known brand (Eryone) that doesn’t do Ender clones so it makes things a bit more difficult when it comes time to trying to configure changes. Would I just look for a printer profile that uses the new motherboard and then make the required modifications from that? Thanks in advance.
That low key main board drawer flex 🤣
6:57 I recently watched a lot of repairs of that kind (tho, for things like Phones and PS5's).
Follow the trace for a bit. Remove lose track, remove the solder mask, put in a jumper wire* (enamel need to be removed with hot solder iron till it takes solder) between plug and the new pad by tinning it generously. Optional step: Apply solder-mask resin and cure it UV. (in a pinch, probably any UV resin will do, as this is low power anyway)
⇒ Board fixed
*=one repair channel got theirs from the secondary of a (speak: one) microwave transformer. Says that wire will last for the rest of his life.
That printer was violated! Your friend is a monster, but that usually happens when you dont know how to treat a machine
I just bought a ender 3 Max neo. The original one and only owner messed up the z rods. It took me about 4 hours to figure out how to fix it. I save $75 off a new price and I learned my lesson. Don't buy a used 3D printer. Too many people who think they're geniuses when they're just starting do so much damage they're not worth the trouble. The guy I bought off of bought a brand new bamboo. That poor bamboo machine is going to be in a mess within less than a year.
A friend and I were going through bins at an Amazon return outlet and he found a Cubicon Prime. He had no use for it and handed it to me. Took a week to find the wire to the thermistor was broken, though the insulation wasn't. The $20 nozzle was also clogged. Had to put that nozzle on the electric range to get it hot end to end. Now, it's a good, if not great, printer. Total cost was $10 for the printer, couple bucks for the thermistor and the cost of 2 nozzles. I'm going to figure a way to modify that hot end to use v6 or mk8 nozzles. Maybe volcano, since the cubicon nozzles are pretty long in the threads.
I bought my CR-10 as broken. The hotend was inside a large blob of PLA and didn't survive the removal process. A new hotend at the time costed around 8€, but I had the repaired remains of one from my Ender 3 still at hand, so it was quickly repaired. Updated the firmware to the newest at the time, got the new glass bed and everything worked perfectly. Then I started upgrading, modding and tinkering and now it is in some regards my most modern and reliable printer. I would never sell my cute adopted puppy though.
Given aussie money is made from plastic, I should think it would be easy for you to print some sweet dough ;) Canadian and Philippine notes are also plastic and are, as far as I know, made by the same company.
Printers might cost a bit though, in the order of tens of millions. Plus its more than a little illegal
@@francistaylor1822 It's not about how illegal it is, it's about how fast you can run.
I belive that the plastic film used for money was Canadian tech.
I happen to be electronics engineer but knows nothing of 3D printer, that was 9 years ago. My first printer for £100 was a bog, every nuts bolts washers were made incorrectly, wrong placed bearings. I had to strip everything apart and start again, I have no instruction of how to put it together and I DID put it together correctly. Few tests I done under the instruction from the internet, it does run beautifully. That was then, now I owned 12 printers.
I got last month a CR10S Pro v2 for 100US, guy wanted $300 but it had problems with Z axis, everything else was working perfectly, changed all Z axis (steppers, lead screws, anti backlash nuts, bowden tube, glass bed (it had no bed) and printed some better supports for steppers, all of that was 100us more, so I got a great 3D printer for just 200us, totally worth it!
There are many good deals to be had, a little know how goes a long way. Out of the 13 printers I have now only 1 is brand new the rest are ebay "not working for parts" category. 3 are resin printers and my easiest fix was waiting 3 seconds for it to power on, that's what was wrong with the mars 3 4k that I got for 59 dollars shipped, everything was new and still wrapped except the power cord.
As for newbies expecting an easy life, then taking to Facebook to slate the printer when often it's their own inadequacies, stating how they're going to burn the printer is actually something of an annoyance.
If your new don't just buy a printer - learn what they are and what there are / not capable of. Waiting 6month before buying and learning about 3d printers won't do any harm - I was interested for years before I took the plunge.
Don't upgrade - learn. The no. 1 reason that newbies gall out with their printer.
As for flipping, you have many spares and if you had to pay for replacements, it wouldn't have been worth your time, unless of course you love 3d printers and enjoy the reward of I fixed this..
I picked up a crealty cr-6 se for $60 last week, the seller said it needed a new main board and hotend and when I picked it up he also said it had been stuck in chinese since he updated it.
An afternoon of reading showed a common issue where user's neglect to update the touchscreen firmware when updating the main board, so i did that.
And i had a 100% functional printer with zero repair costs.
I´m currently doing this by getting cr10 machines and ender 3 machines re assembling all the parts and the profit vary depending on the faults, usually I do a quick check and offer to buy the machines depending on the faulty part. Here in Costa Rica a brand new CR10 V2 can be purchased for something around 700$ and I buy this deffectives machines under 100$ invest 100$ and buy them at 400$ so it´s a win-win
That is exactly how I got all my printers... 1st one was new and after gaining enough exp turned out you can get used or broken printers 3+ times cheaper... Even with new printer you will have spend time anyway... So it's perfect way for people who doesn't have much money to get good machine and jump in some very nice hobby.
yeah I think it is espially valuable for people that want to get many printers at one time too. You can scrap one or 2 out of your 10 and fix most of the issues and then order all the small bits in bulk. Or as a base for upgrades, keep nothing but the frame and motor and just replace the rest
Problem is that you don't really know what you are getting until you open Pandora's box . I will usually only buy new from local suppliers (exception being Prusa ) so there are no warranty issues and if a printer doesn't run straight out of the box it goes straight back to the vendor and they can either fix it or give me another unit . Could be an option if you wanted a printer to modify and upgrade because you could use the money saved on the purchase to buy the upgrades.
Could the reason you couldn't get the main board to work with the LCD have something to do with the LCD library ? The library in the programme has to work with the drivers on the LCD and then there is the pin out configuration - just because the plug fits in the socket doesn't mean that the pins are the same configuration .
Hi !...
Can you please, tell me the difference between the two types of printers: Ender 3 and CR?
Wich is better and why? Or maybe to make a video to explain differences?
Thank you
I have always thought that second hand 3d printer prices are probably insanely low. Need to check them out, could be way to get a lot of parts for cheap.
Seeing as I'm making a recreator pulltruder, I'm wondering if this is a way to get started cheap.
Hell even buying a new printer is often a lot cheaper than purchasing the parts its made of, so yeah, its probably worth it.
Hi, accurate conclusions! When in 'the troubleshooting business' you never know what comes through the door. 'You win some / lose some' is very much the base of it all. That means you'll need to get good at TRIAGE as things come in and make a quick yet accurate assessment as to what the issue is and how viable a repair is, given the expected price for your efforts.
I got a Maker Select Plus (wanhao i3) many years ago and have upgraded it with many quality parts. E3d hotend, magnetic textured bed, BL touch. ADV++ firmware to name a few. I was thinking about selling it for what I paid for it because of all these upgrades. It is actually better than it was new. Is that crazy?
Were you running your benchy test prints from a USB stick? I've found the same stutter problem with my BTT TFT35 when using USB stick. The problem doesn't happen with an SD card.
i lately bought an Ender 3 S1 for 129 €, it was advertised as returned and in unknown condition, sold by a well known retailer. It turned out, that a SMD Diode on the Mainboard was fried. I soldered a new diode, and the printer was booting again. But something else was wrong with the mainboard, it started heating up the bed and the nozzle for no reason directly after booting, resulting in a temperature protection error. So i replaced the mainboard with a new one. Now the printer is working perfectly, just had to tighten some screws and everything was fine. That means i paid about 200 € in total for a brand new machine that costs at least 330 € ordered directly from china or 400 € when bought from a EU reseller. I am going to keep the printer as it runs great. But thinking of buying and fixing machines for selling them in the future. Where do you guys buy your "broken" printers?
Been trying this recently and it isn’t’t working that well cuz the price has really dropped. The Micro Center Ender 3 pro at $100 has driven the used prices to the floor even around here where Micro Center is 300 miles away.
It's 2 days later and not seeing anything like $100. could only have been a short term deal. Best price Amazon offers currently is an Aquila for $169, which is $10 lower than usual.
@@brianmi40 the deal has been on and off for a while. It haas flooded the market with Ender 3 Pro’s. I think they just wanted to get rid of them cuz of the V2 and S1.
@@brianmi40 it did happen 3-4 times already.
I have been printing for over five years and always tell people to plan on many many failures before they get it right!
Had a good chuckle at the start of your story. Reddit is full of people blaming their machines when they can barely grasp that breathing contains an exhale and inhale let alone a machine that squirts plastic. .
i made a surprising discovery ! ... new cura 5 had a better quality on some parts, ... but worst on hollow 2 walls parts !! (simple tube) ... i then compare it to prusa, and saw that cura was doing a lot of back and forth movements !!
I know that in the Ender groups on Facebook, the vibe is "Buy a lot of upgrades using real money, then seel the upgraded printer as it was just 2nd hand non-upgraded one". Like people will make fun all day long if someone was trying to return a fraction of a cost of double Z, posh metal hotends and working Klipper. So doesn't sound viable to me.
Just picked up a free printer from a coworker that they got as a kit, partially assembled and gave up on. Got it home realized it has no main board in it at the moment and that the original one was kinda garbage anyways. I'm gonna upgrade it with a more modern board and screen and have a second printer for about $50 USD !!!! I just have to learn how to compile the firmware
guys I need help, What is the best printer in the range of 700$ max 750&, dual color, and with auto leveling.. plz help !!
Looks like you need me board repair skills on that LCD. Only a 150 km away.
I did well buying an ender 3 for a secondary printer with leftover parts from my upgraded ender 3 pro. I have 85.00 invested. I doubt I could turn a profit constantly. Idk.
Seems like a loosing battle, meaning, if you were to charge an hourly rate for your time and also charge for the parts, the bill might end up being more than the original cost of the printer, and customers (people, in general) tend to balk at that. What I would be curious to know is, if you were doing this as a business, how many hours did you put in to this restoration, and what the bill would have been?
The only way I could see this making any kind of sense is to do bulk printer buys and repair sessions, ideally with all the same model in a batch at a time. That way, a number wouldn’t be useful for other than parts, and you’d save dealing with ordering parts, waiting for them (or getting scammed) and just generally take not a lot of time for each machine in an assembly line sort of arrangement, where you move to each one, instead. That way all the tools for each step are gotten out once for many printers at a time, etc.
But then there comes the issues of selling them and all that overhead.
I can’t see the math working out in the desired way, either, even with that methodology: if you don’t love it, find something else to do, because it’s not likely to be a labor of profit!
For a print farm it is best to have a few printers with exactly the same hardware and software. From heat break to motherboard to software version. For a print farm reliability counts. So refurbishing an unknown printer is no option for me. For a newbie neither because he/she has no other printer to print replacement parts. So what is left over? To buy a broken 3d printer and repair it as second printer? My opinion is that the best alternative is to but a new original Ender instead You might end up cheaper. On the other hand, when you can get a 1st class printer like an Ultimaker or so, it might be worth the try. Bu be prepare to spend a lot of money and time. Heat breaks, nozzles, extruders bearings. Maybe a motherboard or drivers. It all counts up very fast.Even with experience. ;)
Aus fiddy - represent!
I bought my first printer "used" from Amazon, because I was cheap and wanted to learn. A new display and motherboard and I have a working unit for $150 below the going rate. If I see some decent printer somewhere for sale at a bargain I'd probably grab it and fix it up to add to the fleet. I wouldn't be interested in flipping to try to make a profit.
I think this would only be viable if the printer is a very expensive high end one. Profit = sales price - cost and parts is part of the cost. Also you need to think about it in terms of hours of your time repairing. Say you make 200 profit but spent a day working on it (include the time spent online buying and selling as well because that's all part of the job). That's 25 per hour but if you are working for yourself you should expect double a normal salary because you have no benefits from some company. I just bought a printer for 500 and it's a nice one new. So realistically, the maximum profit would be if I got the junk printer for free (like from the curbside) and managed to sell it for near the retail price. I don't know the printer market but I expect a used printer to be about half price of a new one. Maybe 75% if you give the customer a warrantee and have a polished outlet to sell from. If the printer is worth thousands new and you get the broken one for dirt cheap and it's an easy fix that would be worth it. But more likely than not you'll get low end printers that are similar to the one you showcased. And just because you got the parts from your drawer doesn't mean it's free. You paid money for all those boards at some point. Maybe if you put in an add saying "I'll buy your dead printer - 100 any condition" you might have something. I've discovered that the trick is the cost of the old one more than the sales price. You'll get the average used price for any printer so there is not much you can do to get more money from the sale. In fact you'll probably find yourself reducing the price just to get rid of it.
Sooo.. 3d printing has Devolved into this . A sure sign of a waning craze.
I 've never seen you add the paper thickness to your Z offset. Usual paper is 0.08mm, so it's pretty significant imo. I 've never had to babystep in my life!
after a few years you don’t need a paper anymore… it’s all inspected by eyes 😉. At least when you need to level just the corrent first layer for minimal babystepping
0:27 Stop staring at me! I get around cleaning my hot end eventually. And then I also set up my (2nd) no-name printer.
@4:11 Look at that sagging x-axis beam, omg..
Did this 2 years ago from auction sites, made a tidy profit and learned about obscure brands! Today, no way. The used market is too low thanks to microcenter and $99 ender 3 printers.
I'm of a mind that overall, it'd be a poorly paying side hustle in terms of money but a lot of payoff in terms of experience. I've given coaching to someone else with printer problems when I knew nothing much myself yet, and fixing his problem over zoom taught me a fair bit about troubleshooting the half dozen issues he ended up having created. For me it's a case of being too hard to find unwanted printers . . .
Just looked at FB marketplace in my area. Mostly people trying to sell ender 3's for more than retail (microcenter has a $99 offer here)
I got a printer off ebay for broken/parts for $80 and im reality it was just a return and the print surface was damaged i upgrade it to a flex plate system and sold it for over double what I paid.
this is how i started my ender 3 farm, i bought broken ones on ebay
most cases you have 1 month to return or exchange you 3d printer if bought new. I'm sure none of them will tell you that so I would ask immediately if there is a real issue. such as the adventure 4 firmware, impossible leveling, and horrible stringing from a defective extruder assembly.
Well, it is more green than hoarding them and building up a huge collection.
So I'm one of the guys fed up with his first 3d printing experience.
Question is how to NOT end up as one of those people selling it way under its worth. Because so far the online resources, yes, including your step by step guide, have been absolutely unhelpful in finding out what I did wrong.
I asked on Reddit but that's seldom helpful. I asked in a German forum, but those people were assholes and I don't need attitude at the moment.
I can't even get my Vyper tramming correctly. And extrusion seems to be sputtering... to this day, I haven't found out how much impact the pressure the extruder has on the filament actually has on print quality. The Vyper user guide just says to measure the screw's distance from the housing... A very precise way of going at things.
All in all, that's basically my main beef with all you well-meaning "teachers" out there. You keep saying what needs to be done but either not HOW to do it, how to check if it's correct or what numbers actually are to be aimed for.
So far, every single "guide" has been incomplete IMO.
Also for f's sake, I keep seeing people fiddling with configuration.h... Could SOMEONE please have the human decency of telling me how one even does that?
There are TONS of videos that cover troubleshooting. you seriously can't find one on sputtering - aka under extrusion???
th-cam.com/video/V7fxY62gTkw/w-d-xo.html
"to this day, I haven't found out how much impact the pressure the extruder has on the filament actually has on print quality."
You DON'T need to know this: you just run a range of prints with different settings until you dial in the best one. It's like all the test prints that you calibrate with:
th-cam.com/video/kgCjDy_IgXg/w-d-xo.html
You don't do MATH to tune your printer, you do TEST PRINTS to reveal the best performance value to use.
"Also for f's sake, I keep seeing people fiddling with configuration"
Configuration is just the settings passed on to your printer as the PREFACE to the Gcode that will print your object. In Cura, it includes Line Width, Height, Extrusion Speed, Rectraction Distance, etc. ALL THESE:
th-cam.com/video/6Lk4RyD0VbU/w-d-xo.html
Everything you need is on TH-cam, and I mean EVERYTHING, every possible troubleshooting and everything you need to operate a 3D printer nearly flawlessly. You need to back away from the printer and watch 5 hours of TH-cam videos until you understand everything about your printer.
Have you solved the extrusion thing yet? Make sure your filament is dry, I recommend making/buying a dry box. To be able to edit a config.h file, youll need to upload your own software. Marlin is a popular choice, although youll need to find the correct display drivers, otherwise your display is useless. The vyper should be capable enough of printing well by itself though, dont try and upload any software just yet. What issues are you having?
@@userblame632 I hopefully just solved the x acis being out of parallel with the bed... I printed adjustable endstop "fingers". Since then, the bed level test prints have come out beautifully.
Yesterday I did PID and extrusion calibration as well as calculating ideal flow in Cura.
Don't know off the top of my head what the next steps will be... among them retraction.
Who knows, perhaps the endstops being out of sync were all that was wrong. If so I sure wish someone had pointed that out. People kept saying just force the x axis al the way to the top and it'll sync that way... only whenever the thing homed, it would go out of whack again...
This does not pay off if you do calculate your own labor time with about 15-20usd or even less per hour. May work out if you want to work for free on your own projects. If you do it repetitively then you're starting to be a professional and has to offer warranty an so on, pay taxes and so on...
The low end printers are to cheap to make it on a level level where it worth the effort.
I think if you want to 3-D print you must be a tinkerer . I have done a lot of 3-d printing and you are always tinkering with the thing. If you have no mechanical skills you should not touch a 3-D printer. Yes a lot of people have no mechanical abilities.
See... most people don't know all of that computer stuff... not everyone knows how to alter the programming... there's a ton of things that you fixed that most people wouldn't understand in a million years
You are correct.
I have the formal electronics background and despite poor coordination, I’m very mechanically-inclined otherwise (not employable for speed where mechanical dexterity is required!) and I’ve been in the computer software realm (developing it, etc.) since I was in elementary when introduced to a TRS-80 when it was current tech. Knowing the hardware AND the software side of things required to do what he did on this one project makes you very employable at a wage where your time is best spent keeping your regular day job you qualify for, and only doing this if you love doing it.
Why’d you have too call out me and my Geeetech A10M in the 2nd chapter😭😂
It would be interesting to know how many hours this took, I guess at least ten? With an hourly rate to earn a living, it would probably be much cheaper to buy a new printer.
Wait. Wat?! Ryobi makes Yellow tools?
The thing is: you had spare parts. Flipping’s goal is money received > money spent (original item plus anything you have to add plus the cost of your time). Once you take all of that into account, if you had to purchase those spare parts you grabbed from your drawer - plus the cost of your time - would you have turned a profit?
You don't always have to buy spare parts brand new as a single unit. Look at the ender 3 for $52 at the start. You can get a lot of good spare parts from tearing it down which is worth way more than $52.
@@nicholaslau3194 Yes but the concept of this video is "can you make a profit from buying semi-broken 3D printers, fixing them up, and selling them as refurbished?"
Let's say he got the semi-broken printer for $52.
Let's say our time is worth $25/hr. I'm going to guess the work he performed took him an hour. That means if no parts need replacing, he has to sell this for $77 ($52 + $25) to break even.
However, he also had to replace the mainboard and the LCD. What's that, another $75 possibly (guessing) if bought second-hand?
So now he has to sell this for $152 ($52 + $25 + $75) to break even.
Would anybody pay $152 for a refurbished version of this printer -- when (at least here in the USA) one can buy an Ender 3 Pro NEW for $99 after coupon at Micro Center?
@@philipschlesinger7595 He set out to repair this barely functional printer for certain reasons which he explained. For arguments sake, let's say it is 20% functional. Obviously it is a waste of time and money to fix it up to 100%. Instead if you take this 20% printer and tear it down for parts, you can use said parts to fix up an 80% printer. If you have many "broken" printers on hand, you will know which ones are worth fixing and which ones aren't. Michael even said that some listings are for almost brand new printers in which the owner simply doesn't know how to use a 3D printer. Of course you are not going to make money by making dumb business choices. The $52 ender-3 already has the mainboard and LCD (assuming they are working), if not then it still has other useful components like the heater block/ heated bed etc. I cannot stop you from spending $200 on a LCD board because you want to waste money, or give yourself $100/hr as wage. You can make up any numbers you want to fit your argument, not that it means anything because you cant really estimate profits on an isolated basis.
💕👍
9:02 Moral of story: Unfriend your friend and, for the love of god, don't give him any more printers to -adopt- abuse.
What he needs is an idiot* proved*² 3D printer.
*= I know there isn't such thing. In case you really succeed in making a device that is proved against all idiots, the universe instantly creates bigger idiots.
*²= I imagine a device that is closed off, completely calibrates itself (including leveling the bed, not just probing it), can clean itself, can auto load and unload filament, wear and tear parts come in modules that are clicked in place, can slice on its own, reads filament settings from the cartridge it comes in (that also implies that for that printer filament comes in cartridges)
In short, a device that isn't more complicated to use than any 2D printer you get on the market.
I think the time investment isn't really worth it, completely separate from the cost of printers and parts. Hacking on my own printers is fun, but without clearing more than the price of a new ender 3 in profit on each flip, I would have better things to do with my time. (Though picking up printers of unknown functioning to strip for parts doesn't seem like a bad idea. And anything is better than letting them become trash.)
Instead of flipping, have you considered offering a service in which you update the firmware and "test fly" the printer for "newbees" who otherwise get frustrated and give up? No capital investment.
Maintenance of 3D printers is what separates them from regular consumer items like 2D printers or cars. You need some mechanical sympathy to keep them running ... which is lacking from 75% of the population ...
This is how my maker space gets most of its printers.
I do most of the work on them, think I've parted down six so far. And boy do they get roughly used.
>Buys several hotends an all of them break.
>Still blames the hardware.
Some people really aren't aware that they are the problem, huh?
Yes but did you sell it?! Questions not answered....
I can't find any deals anymore. Everyone thinks their Ender 3 is worth $200+ used.
11:34 Dunno. I don't really think (/can't imagine) it's viable, given I've seen Ender 3 clones for 100€. That's so cheap you probably can even make a buck by buying those and sell the parts …
I do it all the time with Amazon returns.........
At 7:03...That's Why I stop buying crap from eBay.
Comgrow does this in bulk.
Not in germany
I burnt out the 24 v connector on my butt skr 2.0
The cost to pack and ship a used 3D printer will be high because it is big and heavy. Then it take time to troubleshoot, repair and refurbish the printer. There would not be much profit. Selling 3D printed would be more profitable.
Well, that was easy...
The answer is in this specific case very much no XD