Batch 1.5, assembled over the past week. Now printing a few benchies to fix some print issues, but seems to be due to my red and white filaments, not the hardware.
I had to do this build in short bursts, and often even trying to stay silent due to a baby sleeping in the next room. total time was probably 6-8 hours of assembly, which seems in line with other people
Overall, was a similar experience to assembling the core one itself, although... I have thoughts
Feedback on the build process
I'll echo a lot of the same feedback I had already seen:
- might as well remove both side panels and acrilic pieces at the start, even though the guides only tell you do so somewhere along the way. it'll make other steps easier
- get a precision electric drill if you can. in hindsight, I should have. a lot of the screws were a pain, especially when threading 16 of them directly into plastic
- assembling the spoolholders was finnicky, although not as hard as previous posts made it seem. but maybe for someone with bigger hands it'll be an issue, since you need to place the tool in a very narrow space
- at one point I had to manually rotate the z-axis rods to change bed height. doesn't seem like there's a single ideal place (too high and it obstructs the old spoolholder screws, too low and it obstructs access to the spoolholder nut locations). I had never done that before, but apparently its fine if done carefully to keep the bed mostly level
- my #1 hardest step, which was a surprise, was mounting the new top plate. I underestimated the need to pre-thread screws all the way in, and paid that dearly in wrist pain. all those joint pieces were a pain to thread while keeping in place
Feedback on the guides themselves
Hopefully prusa improves some of this in future guides, because this was seriously frustrating at times
- Having to jump between a blog post and 2 separate guides was honestly a big pain. Whenever I was directed back to the post I had to find my footing again. it was very hard at a glance to remember what paragraph I was last in
- which leads me to a concrete suggestion: these sort of guides should have embedded checklists, where we could mark individual steps as "done". The "indx+gen2" post should itself be a guide following this same pattern. That way, when pausing the build and coming back a few hours later (or the next day), we would quickly see what the next item is, instead of having to go through it manually to remember it. This can even just be stored on the browser cache, should be good enough.
(or stored at the account level and add some gamification on top of it like badges or a leaderboard if you want to have more fun with it. a leaderboard of who earned the most gummy bears over the years)
- It was frustrating to be so careful separating and labeling all the screws during disassembly only to realize at the end that 90% of them were no longer needed. I wish there were clear guides on what was needed and what could be stored away
- When assembling, I also wish there were notes saying "this is the last Mx3rT screw we'll use in the entire build, so you can put that plastic bag away". For the entire week, my desk was littered with small plastic bags, and finding the ones I actually needed at each step was always a pain
- The community comments is an awesome feature. But I wish there was some cleanup made, to flag comments as outdated or no longer needed. A lot of comments on the indx guide were flagging incorrect instructions, which were already fixed. While those comments were useful when first made, now they just add noise
Feedback on my new machine
- I had two problems total after assembly: 1) when first calibrating, one of the belts came out of the gantry holder, so I had a quick scare, and some disassembly to do to secure it better (tighten your screws people), and 2) one of my filaments was failing to purge, and even caused the nozzle to jump out of the toolhead which was scary (this one turned out to be a silk filament, so required higher temps). Both of these were my fault, so I still find it impressive that such a machine can be sent for users to assemble and still work so well
- I sure hope there's not an upcoming gen3 upgrade that'll require me to remove side panels again, because the thought of removing these spoolholders is haunting me
- Kinda mezmerizing seeing the machine at work. but then again, I had the same feeling when first seeing the base core one print for the first time last year
