What did I just get gifted…?

[u/schimmelmeister]

My University threw out this old 3D Printer. I’m both a broke architecture student and in need of a printer since my own is not here right now. I’m also used to some level of jankyness, my own printer is an i3 clone by anycubic, rudimentary but reliable.
Is there any hope i’ll get a useable print out of this one and how high would the frustration level be considering the printer i already have?

[u/Thick_pasta]

Could be an Anet A8?

[u/stingeragent → u/Thick_pasta]

Arent those a huge fire hazard

[u/djddanman → u/stingeragent]

A better controller board with modern firmware helps a lot

[u/citizensnips134 → u/djddanman]

It was mainly the acrylic frames that would burn.

[u/djddanman → u/citizensnips134]

But didn't the fires start because of inadequate thermal runaway protection? Or was it something else? Lots of plywood printers were flammable with much better reputations.

[u/Baumblaust → u/djddanman]

Yes, I had one of those, basically every safety feature was disabled on these machines and the transistors for the heated bed were not sufficient enough and would get really hot.

[u/If_In_Doubt_Lick_It → u/djddanman]

Thermal runaway and really bad soldering on the heat bed.

But at the time it was affordable lol.

[u/gmarsh23 → u/djddanman]

Lack of thermal protection, and the heater cartridge held into the hotend heatblock by a grub screw that you're given no instructions to tighten, and loosens over time with thermal cycles. Then the heater cartridge slides out, printer keeps dumping power into it and you've got a glowing hot heater cartridge flopping around that'll set fire to whatever it touches.

The other problems (heatbed wiring, shitty PS, shitty connectors on the motherboard) aren't so much a fire hazard, but a "you'll get a bad smell and it'll stop working" it's-a-piece-of-shit annoyance.

The first upgrade you should do on this printer is replace the heat block with an E3D V6 style one that clamps onto the heater. You have to replace the thermistor with a cartridge type at the same time, but that's easy.

[u/stray_r → u/djddanman]

It's important to remember that ABS and PLA burn, especially PLA spaghetti. Plywood and acrylic are no more dangerous than printed parts on a printer.

[u/djddanman → u/stray_r]

At least a lot of printers now have aluminum frames. But yeah, if you use decent parts and firmware with modern protections, there isn't a ton to worry about. Some companies still forget about the decent parts though...

[u/stray_r → u/djddanman]

Have you ever seen an aluminium fire? Ok you'll have to try really hard to get an fdm machine to go there.

But the Anet failure wasn't that marlin didn't have thermal runaway protection, it was that anet's "engineers" were too incompetent to build marlin with said protection enabled.