The new Gold standard

I want to begin this by saying that I am not paid to or have never been paid to endorse any of the 3d printer I am about to mention in this article.

I first started printing back in 2018 with a Monoprice Select Mini V2, one of the more capable affordable desktop printers on the market. I was quickly hooked.
A friend and coworker had taught me to CAD using inventor and then fusion360. I quickly took to making very small trinkets like chess pieces and board game markers, posting them on thingiverse.

Eventually I was producing parts for etsy on a fleet of Creality Ender 3s and an ender 5 with a significant number of upgrades. Along with some other models which I will eventually touch on, including resin. My entire fleet was running custom marlin firmware controlled by octoprint running on a raspberry pi with octofarm controlling everything from a central server. It felt powerful and cutting edge and capable, I was producing parts that people were paying which was all the more intoxicating.

After some time, I found that though my parts were beautiful and strong they were kinda slow and hit or miss and the machine maintenance was annoying and moving from apps to slicers to printer was cumbersome. I was slowly starting to loose my passion, more-so patience, for 3D printing and modeling. Really the only things I would print were my etsy orders. No more fun fidgets or project parts, just light switch covers and banks.

Then I heard about the Bambu Labs series of printers. I will say that for a long time I resisted the temptation of buying one of their printers, but as the product lines matured I was slowly being swayed. Eventually I was watching youtubers who were way less technically inclined using the A1 with an AMS and the bambu marketplace to auto-slice profiles and print parts with ease. I was so tempted but knew I would need to sell my old printers, or find a good and valid reason to buy another printer.