Prusa3D Core One assembled from kit ( https://www.prusa3d.com/product/prusa-core-one-kit/ ) in roughly 36 hours, including 5 hours of sleep and frequent toddler-herding
Quite fun and satisfying
I did make a few mistakes, but wholly my own, and avoidable by reading the actual instructions
Benchy test print (15 minutes) is complete, so I guess I can start planning holiday show-bag gifts for nieces and nephews
You spent 30+ hours working on assembling this, or you finished it 36 hours after starting it, but spent a lot of time focusing elsewhere as well?
Howdy!
In the Core One kit, the only pieces that are already assembled for you are things that would need soldering, e.g. electrical components like PCBs and motors
Everything else is separate and needs to be screwed together carefully with the hundreds of different screws they provide :)
It’s my first time assembling such a project, and my other issue is that I have a very curious toddler that was playing games with me and with the pieces when I wasn’t looking: I’m sure a much faster assembly time is possible with dedicated focus and not having to frequently stop a child from hurting themselves
It says right in the post that at least 5 of those hours were sleeping
And I subtracted those hours and more from my question in the first place. Still a strange way to count your time. The title gives a sticker shock of taking 36 hours to assemble the kit. How much time did it actually take to do so? Five or six hours spread across a day and a half? Could it have been less if a focused effort could have been afforded? I am just surprised at the idea that it could have taken more than an hour or two, frankly.
You have a valid point about 36 hours being crazy, but an hour or two is also crazy. The kits are not in 3 pieces instead of 1, they are in pieces, and the parts come in bags like Legos. My Mk3s+ took me 10 solid hours to assemble.
The assembly instructions PDF is 210 pages long.
If you own a 3d printer, imagine entirely disassembling it: take out every single screw, nut, bracket, motor, pcb, wire, bearing, belt, panel - literally everything to as individual component as possible - and put them all in a box. That box is what Prusa sends you when you buy a kit.
One or two hours? Sorry but I don’t think you realise exactly what’s need to be done here. It’s not like some other kit which are partially assembled, and the assembly process is probably the main key part to get very good print quality. Can’t recall how often I’ve seen people trying to diagnose some print errors while the issues were not due to calibration or settings but due to assembly, so being focus and taking all the time you need for this process is crucial as it isn’t like assembling some IKEA furniture. Does 30 ish hours sounds a lot, yes but if it the time that person needed to do things correctly because of its lifestyle and knowledge/confidence, that’s perfectly fine. Would some other do it in way less time? Sure, but maybe they have mount several before and know exactly all the key points to look out, they will recognise every single piece on one sight and will need way less time to think about the next step and how to do it correctly.
I don’t know what the kit consist of, hence my asking questions about the process. My anycubic kobra 3 max came packed flat, but was maybe a 10-15 minute assembly including unboxing
Here is a part of the kit to give you an idea
https://www.prusa3d.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1024,format=auto,quality=85/content/images/product/e6c68262-6509-48cf-9761-0c5a91d74850.jpg
Yeah, I’m not sure 1-2 hours is normal here, haha: https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/1nxuhw7/core_one_build_time/
I think with experience and practice it could take 6-8 hours but most folks seem to take at least 12
Building my v2.4 was spread out across multiple days, I didn’t rush anything. A lot of that time was spent making sure everything was square, tramming the gantry, cabling took a while. There’s a lot of small fiddly stuff, bearings that you’ll not want to damage, things you don’t want to accidentally pinch so while you could probably bang out a kit pretty quick once you’ve had some experience, I’d still really want to take my time with it, put time and care into the assembly and it’ll pay off with quality and reliability.
And to be fair to the total time I spent, I spent time trying to understand how things all worked together while assembling it, active assembly time was only a fraction of it.