It has been quite awhile since I had time for a tech related project. We finally bit the bullet though and ordered a 3D printer. There are a number of house repairs and projects that we could use a 3D printer for. Some older furniture needs parts manufactured that are either unavailable or too costly to replace. There are also some things coming down the pipeline for the home lab that could use some additive manufacturing prowess.

We purchased the Prusa Core One + after many months of saving and research. We wanted a heavy duty printer that could handle industrial materials such as nylon, glass filled nylon, carbon fiber impregnated nylon, ABS, and other durable filaments. I also wanted a unit that came with an enclosure to help with fumes and microplastics. The Prusa unit checked all the boxes for what we needed. The US supplier, PrintedSolid.com had units in stock. The pricetag was much steeper than Prusa’s main website due to import fees and shipping. That meant the US based version was a bit out of the budget. All was not lost, because PrintedSolid had the Core One+ kit that I could assemble myself, and at a $300 dollar discount from the fully assembled product. Another factor that influenced the purchase of the kit was items get damaged in shipping out here in the sticks, and there is little recourse. A disassembled unit was going to survive shipping much better.

The box came, about 60lbs or so. The items were well packed and you get free gummy bears to boot!

Online I read that the assembly process should take between 12-15 hours. I will post some of the assembly process along with things I found worked well and could aid in someone else building this.

There are no assembly instructions in the box, but Prusa’s website has an interactive step-by-step instruction set that is great. It features multiple images and forward/back buttons along with detailed written instructions. Prusa also provides a non-interactive PDF with instructions as well. I setup a laptop near the assembly area to make it easier. Reading the PDF on my phone was too difficult to see small parts pictures on without tons of scrolling.

My wife and I were able to get through two chapters our first session; it took about 1.5 hours. We assembled the base and the Z motor mounts.

These first steps went smoothly. The parts are high quality with good tolerances. The one minor issue we ran into was screwing the motor mount machine screws in. The plastic 3d printed mount bases seemed to have threads, however getting them to line up straight and having enough torque to tighten them with the provided tools was quite difficult.

The solution was to break out the small driver sets I have in my IT tool kit for work. It consisted of a Kobalt driver and bits as well as a Quinn brand multi-bit small electronic repair kit. The Quinn kit was about $50 at Harbor Freight and is a near exact clone of the iFixIt kit.

Having the knurled driver handle made putting the mount screws in much easier. Having two sets allowed my wife the freedom to assemble with ease as well.

Stay tuned for part 2.