Starting Out in 3D Printing, And Learned My First Big Lesson

That is that cheap printers are cheap for a reason.

I’ve resisted jumping into 3D printing for a long time because I didn’t want to waste a lot of money on consumables. Over the last few months, I’ve seen articles raving about the Anycubic Kobra 2 line of printers, most notably that they were reliable AND affordable. It was definitely affordable at $209. The reliable part? No. Just, no.

And it’s not just a quality control issue, it has some fundamentally bad design decisions that make it unreliable.

The Anycubic Kobra 2 can print parts that are up to 230x230x260. Setup was easy and the Anycubic Slicer software it comes with is configurable enough to adapt to most filaments that the machine supports. This printer is definitely approachable, and for a week it felt like an absolute bargain while churning out mostly successful prints. Then I committed a n00b no-no and left it unattended overnight on a job estimated to take 8 hours.

I woke up to a giant mess. The filament started collecting in the rubber housing of the hotend. It filled so full that the filament wedged it off the hotend. The filament then commenced to encase the entire hotend, completely filling area inside the print head cover around the hot end. Then because it was unattended, it kept extruding filament until it ran through the whole model, then parked the head…