Dukenukem117
New Member
we recently bought a damaged stratsys 1200 es. on ebay
we buy everything damaged or not working. (factory tech says it can't be repaired are the bet deals)
12 x 10 x 10 build, big enough to be useful.
should be printing soon
not sure how we will use it. always wanted one
for now it will be "a solution in search of a problem" for us, we're not quite ready to print business card calling ourselves a. 3d printing service sompany, just yet
The problem with Stratasys is that replacement parts are SOOOOOO expensive. We started with a used 768 thinking the same thing, but then the extruder clogged. For any modern printer, this is a $25 part. For Stratasys this is a $4000 part. Even buying from aftermarket copy-cats, it was a $1000 part. Then we had electronics issues, and tried buying a $200 replacement hard drive. Keep in mind this is a 5400 RPM IDE HDD that is probably $5 in material. But that didn't fix it either so we were looking at replacing the chipset (damn near impossible). In the end, I probably spent as much money trying to fix the damn thing as I did buying it, nevermind all the time.
Funny enough, we then found a used 1200 on Ebay but noticed the guy was local. So I got in touch to see it in person and it turns out the guy use to be the regional sales manager for Stratasys and told us all kinds of dirt on how insane their markups are. Now he's a reseller for Markforge and when he took out some of the parts it made, we were just in disbelief at how good the quality was. This is from a printer the size of a large microwave, not a fridge. It uses a fraction of the power, generates a fraction of the heat, doesn't create fumes because its carbon nylon and not ABS, and is reasonably affordable to repair. There is simply no reason to go with Stratasys for FDM in my book.
If you haven't looked into it, get a chip-rewriter so that you can hack the cartridges to refill them with cheap generic filament. $260 for a kg of ABS is just criminal.