The story told so far of Sawppy the Rover is about its development and construction, and that story has reached the point where Sawppy is running into shortcomings of PLA plastic. The next step in that story is to look into rebuilding Sawppy in PETG plastic, but before we take that step, I’m going to rewind a bit and tell a different aspect of the story.

The story of the 3D printers behind the rover parts.

A very deliberate design goal for Sawppy is for it to be accessible to interested builders who don’t have a high end expensive 3D printer. Designing to be printable on low-end machines means avoiding printing parts that demand tight tolerances, so Sawppy uses pre-made gears and bearings instead of printing them. I’ve been pretty happy with my Monoprice Maker Ultimate (Wanhao Duplicator i6) but I know it is a few steps up from entry level. To make sure Sawppy can be printed on entry level machines, the best thing is to buy one and use it to print Sawppy.

So off we go to Monoprice.com to buy an open-box Maker Select (Wanhao Duplicator i3) which is one of the most affordable Prusa i3 clones available on the market. There are cheaper printer kits, but ready-built printers don’t come much cheaper than these either in price or quality.

This is actually my second go at one of these printers. I had purchased a new (not open-box) Maker Select before as a relative 3D printing beginner and it printed well for a month. But a few days out of the 30-day satisfaction guarantee period, the control box started filling the room with smoke of burnt electronics and it never powered on again. I returned that machine under the 1-year warranty and used the store credit towards the Maker Ultimate I have now.

This time around, in exchange for the open-box discount, I fully expect a problematic printer. People don’t return 3D printers for no reason, so it’ll be a complete luck of the draw on the particular…. personality… of an open-box 3D printer. And this time around, with a year of 3D printing under my belt, I hope to better able to deal with printer issues.

I expected an adventure, and I got one! This is the story of an open-box printer that was (eventually) able to print PETG parts for Sawppy the Rover version 1.0.