But my intention is not to promote doing this instead of buying the real Prusa MK3.
I have great respect for Josef Prusa and what he did for the 3D printing community. Last, but not least it is his open source philosophy that made this possible in the first place as he shares all designs, for the printer parts, the electronics and the software. Only this enables the Chinese companies to make money with his intellectual property.
So again, I encourage you to buy a real MK3 from Prusa and support Josef, rather than support those Chinese companies that just copy his designs, bring no innovations to the community and also often don't share anything as open source.
This applies of course also to E3D. They designed the most copied 3D printing hot end, the E3D V6. You can buy a cheap clone for less than $8,-. But beside from the quality, the companies that produce and sell those clones will never bring any innovation.
Having that said I want to explain my intentions. I want to try to build a MK3 from cloned parts and see if this is really worth the effort and what the real savings are. But I also intend to improve things, where possible. Once the clone is ready I am going to compare the price, the features(if there is any difference) and of course the print results.
Recently I discovered that a Youtuber that I follow build his own I3 clone. Take a look at his channel "myfordboy". What stood out of the other clones I have seen, was that he build an all metal version. Well, as his channel has a lot of videos about aluminium casting and machining, it was obvious that we would come up with this kind of clone.
The I found some aluminium parts for the MK3 on Aliexpress.com, a Chinese platform for cheap products and clones. I knew that they sell the MK3 frame and the Y carriage as cloned parts.
Looking deeper into this I discovered that most of the 3D printed parts from the Prusa MK3 are also available in an aluminum version. The Y belt tensioner was even a better, adjustable version than the original. You get nearly everything in an aluminium version, except from the hot end and extruder housing. Well, myfordboy made a casting go the extruder housing as well, but I have not seen anything like this for sale.
They have also copied the Einsy Rambo board, the P.I.N.D.A Probe V2, the filament sensor and the power panic board for the power supply.
What I really love about my original MK3 is the flexible steel build plate. And even this is available as clone including the MK3 heat bed with magnets.
While looking for the best offer, I discovered that they even copy the Prusa MMU V2. You can get the board, the stepper motors with shafts, even the 3D printed parts, if you don't want to print them yourself. And of course all the small parts including the orange PTFE tubing.
The only thing I don't like much is the extruder assembly from my original MK3. I am one of the people that have seriously problems with PLA and retractions since a few months. I have upgraded to the version R3 (B7) of the plastic parts, the PLA compresses like an accordion until it is stuck in the heat break.
So this is an area that I want to improve. I do have a original E3D Titan Aero lying around here that was supposed to go on my Creality CR10. First I wanted to install this Titan Aero, but recently I have seen that E3D has now also a water cooled version, the Titan Aqua.
And surprisingly the Chinese already copied that design as well. Besides that many Titan Amor clones, you also get the Titan Aqua clones now from China.
I have decided to try the Titan Aqua, a clone from Chine of course as this project is all about clones.
The idea I have is that I could put a housing around the clone for printing Nylon and other warping materials. Usually the increased ambient temperature in such a housing can cause problems as the cooling for the hot end is not sufficient any more. But with a water cooled version I could place the water reservoir and the cooler outside the housing.
Just recently I decided to give the MMU V2 a try a well on my clone project.
I have started ordering parts, but some order I will hold back until the 11.11 as there is a big sale on aliexpress with some discounts. Some parts I had to preorder and make a deposit, then pay the rest on the 11.11.
I will share the details on the parts I have ordered in my next post. Then I guess there will be not much to share until the parts arrive. But then I will update this blog with lots of photos and videos that guide thru the build process.
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