3D Printer Reliability: Prusa vs. Bambulab

(early) Black Friday Sale!

I'm expanding my 3D print farm which currently has 36 Prusa mk3S+ printers. I plan on adding about 9 more but want to know if the Prusa i3mk3S+ is still the best print farm production machine. It's been the gold standard for many years but are there new and better options? I'll be testing the Prusa mk4 and the Bambulabs P1P to see if they can outperform my current fleet. I was pretty shocked by the results!

Shop Nation Links:
----------------------------------------------------

This video is sponsored by Shopify

00:00 Introduction
00:24 Current Print Farm
01:06 What Makes a good Farm 3D Printer?
01:53 Test Overview/Comparison
06:11 Test Results
10:45 Final Decision
11:21 Setting up New Print Farm Rack
12:40 Closing Thoughts

[CursedByDesign]

I came to that same conclussion. For 5 years I have been running a print farm of over 40 Creality printers; mainly Ender 3 with a few CR-10S. I spent more time on maintenance and repair with them than I wanted to -- at any point, about 10-15% of the farm was down. In January 2023 I started swapping them out for the Bambu Lab P1P. By March the entire Creality part of my farm was removed and replaced with 15 P1Ps which all now have over well 5, 000 hours on them. The only thing I have had to replace across all the printers so far has been a nozzle that clogged and a hotend cooling fan. Everything else is stock, something I was not able to do with a Creality farm. It has only been 10 months, but so far they seem to last without issue. We have 5 more coming into the farm this week because they are just beasts at pumping out consistent parts.

[whiteb]

You do have to note that many of the parts available for the bambu printers are more affordable than parts directly from Prusa.

[Skott]

A 6 month follow up video and a 1 year follow up video would be very interesting to see. If the Bambu printers can hold up in duration like the Prusas can then the choice was obvious. Somebody is always building a better mouse trap (in this case 3D printers) so at some point Prusa will lose the crown as will Bambu someday. It is inevitable.

[nickrp]

This series has been super useful. Really appreciate the clean numbers and objective analysis! I am looking forward to seeing an update in a month or two covering the output and reliability changes on the MK4 with input shaping and new firmware, as well as long term reliability info on the bamboo machine.

[GeekGarageDK]

You're my new favorite channel hands down! You blend business, print experience and no BS talk about the product and not afraid to take chances! I've currently just sold my last 3D printer today (Ender 5 plus heavily upgraded). The quality I've seen just from the A1 Mini had me buying the full combo pack right away and I'm just waiting on delivery now. I work full time from home as an RPA developer for my municipality, so when i have a robot going through tests and i can't use my work laptop, I have time designing products. I will be trying to get my foot in the door of factories around me to start out with, making custom tools that could make their life and work processes better as this is what i already do just with software robots. Because I love problem solving, and the 3D design process, and having a machine that just runs to spit out parts is important, instead of alway have a printer that only runs with 90% capacity because of some random issue, The ender was my 3'rd printer and I always got stuck at the 95% mark, and never really got it fully tuned. so now I'm going with a platform where the majority of tuning is done by people who does nothing but making and tuning printers.

I really hope that i can at some point quit my current job and live off the income from my design and production work. This channel has inspired my so much that I've been binge watching you videos! It gave me the kick i needed! So thank you!

[mitchrand]

Installed your dust kit for my 12” Bosch. MIND BLOWN!! Excellent design and manufacturing! Best mod for miter saw period! Thanks for your hours of design and testing and making this available for us home diy’rs. Job well done🤜🏼🤛🏼

[peterlecraw]

As much as I love my old MK3S+, it's been collecting dust since I received my P1S. I don't want to tinker with a 3D printer, I want a utility I can use to reliably fabricate things for myself. I get some people really love the tool, but I care about what the tool is actually capable of doing. The P1S spitting out prints 3-4x faster than the MK3S+ (and doing so in a nearly fire-and-forget manner) is such a game changer for the industry.

[kevinmitchell]

It's really great to get the perspective from someone who understands what is most important for high volume printing!

[poppin_freshgaming]

I'm not quite a year into this hobby and bought a P1S a little over a week ago to go along with my 2 Enders that I've upgraded a bunch of crap on. I've been blown away by how fast and nice the P1S prints without me having to do anything. It's just crushing out prints at great quality over and over with no intervention from me. I get I'll probably have to replace parts at some point, but that's to be expected. That said, I also value the time I've had with the Enders. Running them for all this time and working through things has helped me understand the 3D print process and has made me a much better troubleshooter when it comes to printer or slicer issues/failures. I'm not sure how well that will work for people with a printer that prints flawless (out of the box anyway), until it doesn't.

[eternity]

Some of my P1Ps have been running for 8 Months every single day in a production environment and so far I didn't have any problems with parts breaking except the usual nozzle change and belt tensioning. It's a great machine

[JimHarmer]

Insanely well presented video! Thank you! We run Bambu p1s in our farm since we use materials very sensitive to temp changes. They have been extremely reliable.

[FlechetteArchery]

several thousand hours into my p1p and the only thing i've had to replace so far is the extruder gear. started having some extrusion issues, and after taking it apart, i could see that the drive gear was worn and starting to catch on some of the plastic housing, therefore not moving smoothly.
but one $20 part for several thousand hours seems pretty solid to me. 😁 (*knock on wood*)

[fdegasperis]

I'd love to see an updated comparison with the Mk4s updated with input shaping.

[crabwire]

Excellent video! Wish I had the need for a farm. I think using multiple machines to produce items/parts is totally impressive! Good luck!

[bastiian]

Thanks for bringing us along your testing, much appreciated! Exiting to see some more results further up ahead mate

[anon-means-anon]

The thing I like (and a way I got around the short staffed customer service problem) is that I was able to buy enough spare parts from bambu to almost build another machine for under $200. I keep parts stocked and if anything breaks I can swap it and have all the time in the world for the warranty part to come in and replenish my spares. So far I've put about 1, 000 hours on it of nearly constant high temp ASA and carbon fiber nylon with zero problems.

[MartinsonManufacturing]

Yep. Did the same thing January 2023. Was sick of my Ender 3 farm. Was slowly transitioning to Prusa when I discovered the Bambu. Took a gamble and bought 12 of them. So far they've been running almost non stop for over a year now with no issues. Just the occasional nozzle replacement.

[bylifeorbydeath]

You definitely are helping my decision to move with Bambu, I bought the best I could or was willing to afford was Creality 2 years ago. Now, I am looking to sell my printed designs I want something that is a workhorse. My stuff is only a couple mm thick, mostly) so first layer means the world. Filling the bed with print reliability would be a game changer.. Thanks for doing the talk about money, It is helping my wife and I decide if we will move forward.

[jameswilby]

I find these 3D printing videos among the most informative and helpful out of the crowd I've seen here on YouTube. I'd be curious to see a video on other stages of your production such as post processing.

[robthewaywardwoodworker]

Amazing what you've done here. You've come a long way in a short time, man! Congrats on your growth.