Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

So anyone who reddits has already seen this I'm sure, but I ran across this article today: http://makerflux.com/possible-class-act ... eneration/

What was really surprising to me was that the extruder was only rated for 200-500 hours?! (Maybe everyone except me already knew that, but WOW.)

I can't imagine any piece of a printer being normally expected to fail after 10 or so long print jobs. I just broke the 30 day mark on my Max (720 hours) and it's been fully reliable - I certainly don't expect any major maintenance in the near future.

And it costs $175 to replace? That's pretty much the cost of a new RAMBo, imagine if RAMBos failed that often... no way! That's just crazy!

Now you're drinking the koolaid. Open source is the way to go. Parts availability and pricing is awesome. Design is driven by... design, and not the need to skim down material or production costs. R&D is crowd sourced and has better results by an order of magnitude... I can't name a single thing bad about it from the consumer's point of view.

Yup. This is why I'm always vocal against people coming around and trying to sell us other peoples' ideas with a new patent on it...

Looks like it's come one step closer to reality; court papers were filed on July 1: http://makezine.com/2015/07/14/makerbot ... extruders/