It’s the endurance. I am…hard…on 3d printers at this price point.
Most manufacturers, especially Creality, don’t expect someone to jam in ~800-1000 hours of print time into these things. One of the things I had ended up doing to my poor 3v2 is burn out 5 total Y steppers over the years of use. So…same thing, right?
Wrong. Can’t reliably lay hands on a known part for the 3v3 Core-XZ. I’ll have to bust out a Dremel and carefully carve out part of the black plastic cowling/holder/cover for part of the Y-Axis linear rods to be able to resurrect this, using an LDO replacement and a grub-screw attached GT2 pulley. I mean, it’ll fit, it’ll work. I can make it work. Thing is? I shouldn’t HAVE to. I should just be able to go onto their website or onto Amazon and buy one of these things. I should be able lay hands on a K1 Max stepper motor for the Mk1 of that model. That’s also quite impossible. No inventory and they rotated immediately to other models when they started seeing problems with the K1.
I’m at a turning point in all of this. I don’t know if I can justifiably keep going forward past a small bit with any of my Creality machines. They used to be a go-to. They’ve forgotten themselves seriously and severely.
Where it goes from here…don’t know. I suppose, dumb luck and all, a Creality person will reach out and maybe help. I doubt it. That would keep it going. But I can’t keep signing off on this crap. It’s either hobby stuff or professional stuff. And the 3v3 was slick, looked professional. But it’s nothing but proprietary from start to finish.