I bought a Monoprice Maker Select v2 printer about 2 years ago and I’m still using it now.

I’ve spent over $600 on upgrades, replacement parts, and modifications in order to make it last so long.

This is a link of all the upgrades I’ve made

Several of the items on the spreadsheet are duplicates as it’s more to keep track of what I’ve spent, rather than what is the de-facto solution to a specific problem. Several of the upgrades were a result of careless operation of the 3D printer, so if you’re more careful, you won’t spend as much as I did.

I’d say the biggest upgrades are the all-metal hot end and swapping out the power module. The former for quality, the latter for safety. If I knew I would spend a total of $1000 on a 3D printer, I would’ve opted to invest in a Prusa i3 kit.

Indirect upgrades

In addition to all the modifications of the printer, I’ve also built an enclosure for it following Punished Props’ video.

The end result was improved bed adhesion when the ambient temperature dipped low enough (below 90) to make PETG shrink when cooling.

OCTOPI – SMH

So it turns out that when I installed Octopi on my Raspberry Pi 3… I unknowingly handicapped myself and wasted a good 30% of my resources. I would log into the Octopi interface, upload my file, start the print, and then RANDOMLY, just, fucking RANDOMLY, my prints would stop. Sometimes it would be right before the end of a print, sometimes it would be 10 minutes after I started. There didn’t seem to be any connecting dots between the failures. I replaced the SD card, reinstalled Octopi, replaced the USB cable, but nothing worked. After several months of failed prints, I simply acknowledged that there was something wrong with my printer and that this is how it would be from now on.

After half a year of the printer stalling mid-print and experiencing numerous unexplained timeout messages, I thought to just remove the rPi from my workflow and simply upload files directly to the SD card and stick that into the printer. I get no fancy temperature graph, no fancy ETA, no remote administration, but GUESS FUCKING WHAT. The prints stopped failing. There has not been a single stalled print since this change some 4 months ago.

The moral of this anecdote is to thoroughly AB test when troubleshooting and to just not use OctoPi.

That’s it for now, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say at some point.