My 3D filament printer (Ultimaker2) recently stopped working; the extruder failing to heat up. The heater cartridge measures correctly, so something else in the chain has failed.

The Ultimaker2 is 12 years old, has printed thousands of parts, and has had a series of print issues recently. The printer is no longer supported by the manufacturer and while some limited spares are available from third parties they are a pain to purchase. While I could continue to troubleshoot the problem I have done enough debugging professionally to not be thrilled about doing more. Given these points, and the fact that 3D printing has moved on in the last 12 years, I decided to invest in a new 3D filament printer.

Having bought a 3D resin printer from Prusa a few months ago I looked at their new 3D filament printer, the CORE One. Unsurprisingly this is leaps ahead of the Ultimaker2, so I ordered one. I went for the assembled version of the CORE One rather than the self-assembly kit as the cost saving wasn’t great and the word is that kit assembly takes a lot of time. It took about a month to ship and I got it at the beginning of this week. I’ve been away helping my mum for a couple of days, but have finally got to use the printer. Here is the CORE One in situ:

Setting up the printer was fairly simple, just follow the instructions on the LCD display. The only hiccup was connecting the ribbon cable connector on the back of the LCD module. Not sure what make of connector it was but not one I would ever want to use in my designs. After printing a test piece I printed some of my own parts:

These are simple fixtures to hold parts for my engines while they are being painted. Nothing fancy but I am very impressed with the speed of print and the print quality. The build quality of the printer is also very good.

Julie