How much would you pay for a Duet equipped printer?
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I bought about 10-12 Printers from a guy who worked for M3D before they closed. They all come with Duet 2 Maestros and I've updated the firmware for all of them. My question is, how much would you all consider paying for one of these printers? I've been trying to sell them but not many people seem to be interested. The print volume is 235x235x250 and similar to an Ender 3.
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@Herve_Smith very few off-the-shelf printers come with Klipper, so that's a hard comparison to make. For a typical end user, Klipper doesn't offer any advantages over RRF and has some disadvantages, such as slow startup time and more complicated maintenance. [It may be different if you are an enthusiast experienced in maintaining Raspberry Pi/Linux systems and who can dabble in Python programming.]
Best practice in printer mechanics has advanced significantly over recent years, and older printers (whether from M3D, Ender, Prusa or someone else) can't match the speeds of more modern designs. That's going to reduce the value of older 3D printers. For any printer using nonstandard parts (e.g. custom hot ends) the value is also affected by the availability of spares.
The Duet Maestro has been out of production for a long time. Its processor has no floating point unit, so we may not be able to support it for very much longer. I was quite surprised that I managed to get input shaping working on it.
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I've had them listed for 175 on ebay with some success but ebay sucks when it comes to fees
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@DatTurtle A new Ender 3 costs 99$ at Microcenter, so a several year old printer by a defunct manufacturer with little known firmware is hard to sell for anything more than that.
Ironically, you may be able to sell the parts for more but that requires a time investment that may not make this approach attractive.
Unless you plan to run your own farm with these printers, I would assume you are sitting on hard-to-sell goods.
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Which M3D printer are they? Presumably they are the Bowden single-extruder kind, or you'd have mentioned that.
If so, then from most people's perspective (since it's not as well-known a printer) they're basically an Ender 3 with the dual-Z mod, and a better controller. New/used doesn't really matter that much since the company isn't around anymore, so you'll likely get ~$200-225 for it, stock.
If I were you, I'd upgrade them to use some sort of bed probe and update the printers to utilize it. Then I'd set up one of them, and run input shaping (because I'm betting they didn't include it in the stock configuration), and increase the stock accelerations a fair bit, then clone those settings to all the other printers. Then I'd update the listing to say that they were upgraded printers, highlight the improvements you made compared to an Ender 3 (since nobody's heard of Crane) and raise the price closer to the $300 mark.
They went out of business because their quad-extruder flagship product was unreliable, and their printers were mediocre at best without that feature. Make them less mediocre, and get a better price for them - tons of people are selling used print farm printers, selling a printer that somebody obviously actually put care into, tends to get a better price. For example when I finally got rid of my PrintrBot Metal Plus, I listed out all the extra parts I had for it, the mods I'd made, etc, etc, etc, and it sold REALLY quickly - cheap printers are abundant, good printers, at a low price, are not.
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@KnyteTech They are the single extruder kind, not any of the specialty ones they had. I think your idea of upgrading them is a good one, and I'll look into what kind of upgrades I could put onto it. I'm thinking of something like a Creality Sprite, and PEI Sheet would be good for starters. Not sure how much it would take to make one of these into a Voron Switchwire, but that'd be a lot of fun to build and sell. I bought a BLTouch and used it but didn't find it to be super helpful with leveling, the leveling screws are pretty small and don't move much on their own so I only have to re-level every few weeks.