After a long wait my Prusa i3 Mk3 kit arrived last week, it’s my first 3D printer so this is written from a noob’s perspective. I went for the kit as I felt the experience of building it would provide an interesting insight as to how some things were achieved using 3d printed parts since all plastic parts (except the new spool holder) are printed on Prusa i3 printers. Also it would hopefully be a great activity to do with my son (age 14), I also invited my Dad over to join the fun.Everything you could need is included including tools, spares, filament and Gummy bears.The experience of the build was excellent. The assembly instructions are very well written, we only had slight difficulty in a few areas:

1.) A bit difficult to get the bolts into the holes at times, but the mentioned technique of using a screw from the opposite side to pull them in works very well.
2.) One of the vertical smooth rods would not slot into it’s hole in the base plate above the motor, well it would, it just required finding something hard to rest on the top to apply a reasonable amount of pressure.
3.) Getting the extruder into the casing, just a matter of sliding it in right, but a bit awkward.

It took us a day and a half with plenty of quality control and double checking by each party.Curiously only the first few chapters tell you to reward yourself with the gummy bears, perhaps they felt we would have eaten them towards the end. It helps keep the build fun.

Finally it was time to switch it on, life! After 12 or so minutes of running the initial XYZ calibration a success message! We’ve actually built it. Time to print something, the Prusa logo:Great, what else, the whistle looked interesting, especially how it bridges the relatively large gap across the top which I make a video of:

Interestingly during the print of the whistle it thought the nozzle crashed and re-homed the print head and then continued, you can watch that in the video at 1:42

Finally time to print benchmark Benchy.
Well, it’s recognisable but there are some issues. The printer felt that the extruder crashed 22 times which resulted in some hairs and slight layer offsets, I was watching though and there was no crash, it just ‘randomly’ stopped and lifted the print head up, re-homed and continued.. Time to wrap this post up and do some research on these Y crashes causing Benchy to look like this. All in all a great experience, just a shame about the final print. But hopefully I’ll get to the bottom of that.