You get a bag of haribo golden bears with the kit, manual has callouts after completing a section to treat them as a reward for completing a milestone, intro page talking about it

Building my v2.4 was spread out across multiple days, I didn’t rush anything. A lot of that time was spent making sure everything was square, tramming the gantry, cabling took a while. There’s a lot of small fiddly stuff, bearings that you’ll not want to damage, things you don’t want to accidentally pinch so while you could probably bang out a kit pretty quick once you’ve had some experience, I’d still really want to take my time with it, put time and care into the assembly and it’ll pay off with quality and reliability.

And to be fair to the total time I spent, I spent time trying to understand how things all worked together while assembling it, active assembly time was only a fraction of it.

If you’re going the route of a stealthmax, the v2 version has a servo controlled vent, original version it’s manual. All filaments give off material you don’t want to breath, nevermore has good info on this in the micro repo. Personally, I’d always aim for enclosed no matter what, the most I have in my garage is a box fan w/ decent furnace filters taped to it (works for wildfire smoke), I’d be venting outside if I had to setup inside the house.

I only ever had filtered recirc and exhaust on my enclosures, I’d rather keep it slightly negative to ambient air to try keeping the atmosphere inside the printer.

While the tn issue is better, personally found I a lot better to not use external geometry at all and instead build my references wrt the base plane. At worst I have to change a sketch attachment, that and doing chamfers absolutely last has saved a ton of grief on some recent models. I hand sketch first, how I learned cad in the first place, that workflow seems to mesh well with it.

Still the odd crash here or there but I’m accepting of it.

It’s nice to have just in case but seriously, I find my 350x350 way oversized for what I print on the regular. The best use I have for that size is printed panels, but the z height us mostly useless for 99% of what I do.

Total anecdote, I had similar washboarding with my mk3s, I did a bed levelling mod that replaced some of the standoffs with silicone tubing spacers and that helped a lot. It was always in the same spot and it would mostly show up on prints that covered large areas and toward the edges of the bed.

I do echo others though that I do think extrusion multiplier and first layer offset do play a role with it, petg doesn’t like the same amount of squish that you can get away with using abs (not to say it doesn’t happen, just doesn’t look as rough, it doesn’t cause a failed print for me and I don’t mind a quick cleanup with a deburring tool depending what it’s for).

Does it show up if you flip the sheet just as a thought? I recall having a bit more of an issue with one side of my satin sheet for example. Last thought, could be worth giving things a long heat soak before doing meshing and homing, make sure everything is more or less stable expansion wise.

I’d totally suggest looking for used prusas personally, something like a mk3s is definitely slow by today’s standards but they’re super capable, very simple and easy to maintain. I’ve modded mine to the point that the rails and axis steppers are the only original components and planning another mod right now. If you could find one for a reasonable price it’s a great platform.

If you are willing to spend a bit and want a kit/something new, I really like Vorons and other open source printers, I’ve seen decent reviews of some of the formbot kits for something like a v0.2, includes a bunch of mods you’d probably look at eventually anyhow, I’m not sure if this is in USD or localised to CAD but with printed parts and a dragon hotend (highly recommend, v6 hotends are a pain imo, they work but having the block fixed is so much nicer) is $429 from china. It’s capable of printing every part for larger Voron models (and obviously stuff like abs) and is more importantly enclosed.

Add something like a nevermore micro to it (component kit) and you’re solid (recommend enclosed and filtered, ideally you don’t print in the same room you’re in without good fume handling, I’ve done unenclosed abs in my office back 12 years ago, abs these days doesn’t stink as bad but from experience it’s super unpleasant, 0/10 do not recommend, I did it exactly once)

There’s so many mods out there for them too because of their openness, I’ve got a v2.4, flying gantry is cool as heck but I’d consider doing a trident, the 350mm bed size is overkill for most of my prints.

I find mine produces some really nice parts, able to hit chamber temps into the 60s pretty reliably, warp isn’t really a huge concern for me with it.

Are you able to mess with the first layer offset on the bambu printers? May need to bring your nozzle a bit closer, especially with a textured surface. Temps seem comparable to the stuff I have on hand.

For cleaning, is soap and water compatible with your surface? Personally found that while IPA is fine for maintenance, a few drops of unscented dish soap in water works extremely well as a degreaser, I’ve literally washed stubborn surfaces in the sink. Petg is super picky with any residual oils and the small nozzle could totally make that worse.

Maybe try running slower? Just to eliminate variables, may be worth running a quick extrusion calibration? Petg can be an absolute pain for bed adhesion in my experience.

I posted this a while back, came across a post on hackaday on doing clear lens on a resin printer with lower effort, the article links an older one about doing clear resin prints that might be helpful. To me they look pretty decent, certainly a heck of a lot better than any transparent prints I’ve done with a filament printer.

As others said though, easiest would probably be doing something like laser cut acrylic and sandwiching the picture between them.

I hope not, it’s apparently pretty awful. You were up to fairly recently able to get Acetaminophen w/ caffeine and codeine (8mg) over the counter in Canada, found an article about a decade ago that mentions liver injury in people, definitely recall reading articles about bans on the sale because of the injury risk.

It’ll cause more zits and the like, more stringing, don’t know that’d 100% cause the issue but certainly won’t help.

I just did a round of nylon last week which is also super hygroscopic, bag’s like at most 8 months old but seal was intact. Even printing out of a drybox with fresh desiccant I noticed more stringing and occasional blobs + nozzle buildup over the few days (Was redoing my hotend so I inspected it, no sign of nozzle leaking), can definitely make overhangs worse.

It’s pretty easy to overdose on Acetaminophen, Wikipedia suggests >100k a year in the us (it’s in so many OTC medication, stuff like cough syrups and the like, really easy to hit the 4g/day max dose)

I’ll still use it, just use it responsibly.

Could try turning the bow forward and see if that changes anything. From what I’ve read, start low with the fan, like 10-15%.

All else fails, still say worth drying it if you can, I’ve had some really damp spools fresh out of the bag before.

What printer and what orientation did you print these?

Almost looks like some of the ones I’ve done in abs where I didn’t get proper cooling (turned to have the bow @ 45°, 90° being straight toward the rear of the printer for reference) either from my fan settings or orientation, could try increasing the fan speed? I know you said you’ve dropped the temperature but personally I still find I need to have the part cooling fan on (do print enclosed though so YMMV)

How dry is the filament, afaik tpu is hygroscopic (been a while since I’ve printed with it unfortunately), I’ve seen messy bow show up on less dry filament, always worth a try anyhow just to remove variables.

Semi related, I was thinking about turning my mk3 into a core xy, came across a conversion for a mk3s that looks to reuse quite a few components, ProosaXY. I really like how many different mods people have done with these old machines, definitely helps keep things useful

100% this, bed cleanliness is the first thing I’d look at for any adhesion issue. Dilute soap and water works well too, just pay attention to your surface, some don’t like any solvents or water, just a wipe with micro fibre.

FiiO has some that aren’t super pricey (they run a range, their entry level stuff is usually really affordable), their amps and DACs are pretty solid in my experience so I’d totally look into one, second hand would definitely be an option there too.

It was one course (had a you fail the course if you got a sub 40% on the final) and I was able to rewrite the exam in the summer, loss of structure killed me coming from hs. Was definitely a wake up for me as well, had study groups and roommates in subsequent years which helped me (and unhealthy quantities of caffeine)

Got diagnosed with ADHD around a decade after graduating, which explained pretty much everything looking back.

Yeah, was like just over a year later, they still are the independent & small label place imo, I don’t have faith that’ll last forever unfortunately. They still are my go to place for discovery and exploration, bandcamp daily still has some interesting finds, I just make sure I download my purchases.