A 3d printer is an invaluable tool for the garage or wood shop and even the cheap ones nowadays are pretty darn good. I've had prusas, ratrigs, built a voron 0, but I picked up an open box ender 3 v3 ke last year for barely $120 and it's fantastic. I don't think it has ever failed a print and it just works.
If you like fiddling, there is so much you can do with a printer. Jigs, inserts, repair parts, just generally very useful, and the knowledge largely transfers to and from cnc machines as well.
Agree! I got my 3d printer a year ago to work on
this project. It's an Ender 3 V2 Neo and I've used it for much more than I thought I would. I bought it for about $200 at the time and have since done a few upgrades, most recently replacing the hot-end to an all metal one (Creality Spider 2.0).
I have SOME basic familiarity with a 3d printer, as I have colleagues that use it at work. What little I do know is all related to that one machine. That would not give me the confidence to buy an open box machine (like I would for a wood working tool).
So for a programming novice like me that might like to explore this for WW jig making, what would you consider the important features to look for or know about? Print size and resolution I understand - what else should I look for?
You'd be surprised that the little you know will transfer quite well to other machines.
My printer uses Cura for the software slicer. I could also use other slicers out there as well.
The main thing I'd say is that you have to expect that at some point, you're going to have to fix something. Good thing is that there are probably loads of videos on Youtube of people with your exact printer showing how to fix things. My recent example was replacing the hot end, mentioned above. I was consistently getting low temperature errors about 4 hours into prints (
highly annoying). Research pointed to replacing a thermister (which I had tried and worked for a bit) and then I decided to replace the whole hot end and that's been working. Point is, expect to tinker with it.
Don’t want to add cost? Probably, and as long as the competition doesn’t do much better, why add cost. Which leads me to the next question.
Are most of the US companies using the same designs? Probably.
Don’t want to pay for development? Yep.
Cost, I wager, is a big part. But also their target demographic. I'd guess that most don't care about better dust collection, and the ones that do are getting better machines. My expectation when buying a cheap machine is that it's cheap for a reason, and cutting corners like this is why.
I have a Delta 36-725 from Lowe's. I redid the dust collection on that by chucking the dust shroud around the blade, sealing up the "cabinet", and putting a 4" dust port on the bottom that goes to the DC. Works much better now! I can feel the downdraft from the insert.
I have 3d printed some dust collection shrouds for my bandsaw, but i haven't been able to test them out yet.