I read a post where someone was asking what they should do with their aging Ender-3 3D printer.
They received a lot of feedback on their question, but it made me reconsider the situation. The typical advice was to donate it to a library or other worthy institution or individual.
I don’t think this is a good thing to do anymore, and let me explain.
Today’s 3D printers are so massively better than the early Ender-3 devices that it no longer makes sense. A 3D printer purchased today will print 3-6X faster, be far more reliable, and probably integrate with cloud systems for remote control.
The main issue is not the speed, but the reliability. Older machines tended to break quite frequently and required a huge amount of effort — and knowledge — from the operator to rectify these situations.
Consider that most people who want a 3D printer already have one, and those who don’t are far more likely to be less technically capable. Giving them a machine that will inevitably require repairs is just not a good idea.
Sure, the Ender-3 might still work, and perhaps there will be peculiar situations where they still may make sense. But those situations will be decreasing in number.
At my lab, I have a number of 3D printers, but some have gone through the aging process, right to the end. For example, I have an original MakerBot CupCake. Over time, I obtained machines that were somewhat better, so I used those instead of the CupCake. This repeated for many years, and eventually, I realized that I hadn’t used the CupCake for several years, and its capabilities were so far below the then-current equipment that it wasn’t worth operating.
Now that machine is probably not even operable. The software to drive it would be difficult to find, spare parts even more so. Even if you spent the massive effort to get that machine back to running state, the prints you’d get off it would be terrible quality. There’s almost no point in trying to get it to work for production purposes anymore.
That machine is therefore a dead machine. It’s so utterly obsolete that it is not worth running. It’s literally a museum piece, kept only for the memories. (In fact, I am considering donating it to my local museum.)
At some point, the Ender-3 would reach that state.
Is that today?
I’m thinking that it’s getting dangerously close to fully obsolete status. Fixing it is increasingly challenging, and the print performance and results are going to be less than you can obtain from almost any current device. And it won’t be getting any better as time passes; the situation will only get worse as new machines arrive.
Is this a scenario you’d feel good about when giving it to a worthy recipient? I don’t think so, unless they are a tech-savvy person willing to spend money and time to upgrade the device significantly as a hobby.
I’m increasingly inclined to send aging 3D printers of this category to electronics recycling centers instead.
What would you do with a MakerBot CupCake? Definitely toss it out. What would you do with an original Ender-3? Consider tossing it.
