zlacker

Nothing like a extruder that is not user serviceable and only prints PLA. When I was told that my office went through several of those extruders, I took some year end left over funds and purchased a lulzbot (Taz5). As far as I know that thing is still doing the work they need it to do.

>>sleepy+(OP)
Luckily the Replicator 2 and 2X were when MakerBot was still trying (or pretending) to be open source. The hotends were standard-ish MK8 (or 10). Everything was pretty serviceable on them as long as you didn’t need to fix the motherboard.

The printers after that switched to the new hotends that are not user serviceable. It boggles my mind why any home user or tinkerer would ever sign up for that crap.

BUT...

My brother in law teacher, who teaches various middle school classes and groups use them. I asked why they would waste so much money and he had a response that made it all make sense to me. He doesn’t have time to keep them all running all the time (like we had to do with the old ones) and when one goes down he gets replacement parts from MB at a discount, slaps it in, and they’re up and running again. Apparently the latest ones are fairly reliable and it doesn’t happen all that often either.

So I guess I would sum it up as not for me, but I could see why some would.