Research

After deep diving into the Prusa i3 Bear Facebook group and just lurking for a while I was ready to pick up a kit of my own, the only problem was that during the time I was searching for a kit everyone was sold out and there were pretty long lead times. Once again I tried my hand at purchasing my own 2020 extrusions and tried to figure out if I could somehow get a friend to cut the extrusions to the desired lengths. While searching for the cheapest place to buy extrusions I went to visit an all too familiar site: Aliexpress. Sure enough there were lots of sellers willing to cut the pieces to the correct length, but out of curiosity I typed in “Bear kit prusa” in the search field and to my surprise there were a multitude of results. I clicked on the first item that appeared in the results. I quickly scrolled passed the description to the Customer Reviews and noticed that it had pretty high ratings from people from different users. The next thing I did was contact the store to gauge there response time and how helpful they were, this is something I do often when buying big ticket items off AliExpress, something I’ve also learned is to ask for QC(Quality Control) pictures if they can take any. That was a tip I picked up from some friends who usually make big purchases from places like DHGate or Taobao. Sealand Full Bear Kit

Purchase and Assembly

The seller was responsive and even decided to give me a discount so I was more than glad to buy from them. I chose the blue extrusions, I was excited that all the parts were anodized in the same color as this was something that the kits being sold buy official sellers were not doing yet at the time of my purchase. My biggest concern about buying this was the fear of inaccurate dimensions and poorly cut extrusions that may have burr on them. While I waited the usual 2 weeks that it takes shipping from China to the states I printed all the new Bear kit STLs that I needed, bought myself a really nice machinist square from Amazon to be able to be sure that the frame was completely squared and not skewed. When I finally received the box it was in really good condition. I opened it up and saw all of the extrusions individually wrapped in plastic and cushioned with foam to keep them from bouncing around inside the box. I was impressed with the packaging and again felt like I made a good decision going with this seller. Once i unwrapped all the extrusions and verified all the pieces were there, I measured every single piece to make sure they were correct down to the millimeter. Sure enough, each piece was the exact length that it needed to be. I proceeded to putting everything together, closely following the guide on Github.