This started off as a review of the Printrbot Simple, a low-cost 3D printer by the people at Printrbot in California. Printrbot originally came about through a Kickstarter campaign by a guy named Brook Drumm. The intent was to build an affordable 3D printer that normal households could purchase and use—as opposed to the $2,000+ that most other home 3D printers go for.

Ars Senior Business Editor Cyrus Farivar recently spent some time out at the Printrbot workshop in Lincoln, and while he was out there, Brook Drumm and the other Printrbot folks offered to send a review unit to Ars. I volunteered to put the Printrbot through its paces from the perspective of someone who's only vaguely aware of home 3D printing as a technology. Before getting my hands on the Printrbot Simple, I'd never even seen a home 3D printer before.

What I found as I dug in was a pit without a bottom—an absolute yawning Stygian abyss of options and tweaking and modifications and endless re-printing. To own and use a 3D printer is to become enmeshed in a constant stream of tinkering, tweaking, and upgrades. It feels a lot like owning a project car that you must continually wrench on to keep it running right. Almost from the moment I got the Printrbot out of the box and printing, I had to start the tweaking. And as a total 3D printing newb, it really soured me on the Printrbot and on the entire concept of low-cost 3D printing in general. "Surely," I thought, "this frustration is because I'm cutting my teeth on a $299 3D printer intended for early adopters. Surely a higher-end 3D printer is easier!"

And so, in order to see how a higher-end home 3D printer works, I found myself in possession of a much more expensive, much more impressive-looking Makerbot Replicator 2. That device costs $2,200 as opposed to the Printrbot Simple's $299. The first few things I printed out with the much more expensive device were amazing. It was like leaving the project car in the garage and driving the Lexus to work—you get in, press the button, and go. But then, after perhaps 20 hours of print time, the problems started. Filament would fail to feed. The printer would clog. The printer produced spaghetti instead of actual models, ruining overnight print jobs. I had to replace the plunger-based filament extruder with a new spring-loaded version to overcome a design flaw. I found myself re-leveling the build plate and disassembling and reassembling the extruder way more than I ever had to do with the little Printrbot. All of that was as fun as it sounds.

The Makerbot wasn't turning out to be an expensive but reliable Lexus. It was turning out to be an expensive and you-better-own-two-because-one-will-always-be-broken 1970s-era Jaguar. It wasn't just frustrating—it was actually enraging. If I had paid $2,200 out of my own pocket for the Makerbot, I would have been sorely tempted to drive up to New York and fling the thing through the windows of Makerbot's office.

Video: The Makerbot Replicator 2 air prints, then vomits spaghetti, ruining an overnight print.

I took a step back and reassessed before I destroyed a few thousand dollars worth of Ars Technica property. My expectations, it turns out, were driven by excitement and hype. They were also sorely miscalibrated—almost as miscalibrated as the thrice-damned build plate. You're not going to use either of these 3D printers, cheap or expensive, to dash off single piece high-fidelity complex constructs. They're not going to build you a new house or a new computer or even a new keyboard. We're still at the very, very beginning of the home 3D printing revolution, and things are just (albeit barely) getting off the ground.

Before totally spoiling all the juicy details, let's rewind a bit and go a bit deeper with each of these 3D printers. First up is the one priced so that a normal person might almost pick it up as an impulse buy: the Printrbot Simple.

The Printrbot: so simple, anyone can do it!

"The Printrbot Simple is my quest to get the price down to an affordable level for the common household," Printrbot founder Brook Drumm told Ars. As such, Printrbot's products can be purchased as kits. 3D printing enthusiasts have the opportunity to assemble the device themselves (and potentially install mods as they do so). We opted for a preassembled Printrbot Simple, which increases the purchase price from $299 to $399.

It's good that we got the preassembled one, because putting the Printrbot Simple together looks to be a multi-hour task if you're not particularly good at building stuff. (Sadly, my skills don't extend much beyond computers and the occasional bit of Ikea furniture.) As much as opting out of assembly violates the "maker spirit," it meant that we could dive right in and immediately get our review on.

The printer's laser-cut wood components and zip-tie assembly lend it a charming garage-built look; it's compact enough that it looks like a fancy desk toy. The Printrbot guys did a great job with the assembly, wrapping the wire bundles and neatly clipping off the zip-ties. The bot arrived with a small test object already in place on the print bed as proof that it was tested before it shipped out to me. The bed also had a couple of swatches of blue 3M painter's tape applied. As I later learned, this was to make it easier to separate printed 3D models from the bed. Even with that, the test rectangle needed a surprising amount of torque (and some assistance from a putty knife) to get it pulled free.

3D printers "print" in three dimensions by heating and extruding a thin bit of filament, most commonly PLA or ABS plastic. In order to do their printing, a 3D printer needs to be able to move its extruder tip to any point within the printing field. The Printrbot Simple uses pulleys and teflon string for its X and Y axes—the print bed is pulled back and forth beneath the extruder tip by motor and pulley, and the print arm on which the extruder tip is mounted is sawed back and forth across the print bed with another motor and pulley. The third axis, the vertical Z axis, is addressed via a worm gear and long threaded rod. The entire print arm rides the rod upward as layers are printed.

The Printrbot's documentation recommends downloading and printing a calibration cube or something similar as an easy first step to ensure everything operates correctly. To do that, you must download and install an application to print with. I went with Printrbot's recommendation of Repetier Host. It's available for multiple platforms, and more importantly, it's free.

The process for printing a 3D model with the Printrbot starts with actually locating something to print, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to hit up Thingiverse, a repository of 3D models suitable for printing. Per Printrbot's recommendation, I grabbed the 5 mm calibration cube. Models come in a variety of file formats, but STL is a common one that Repetier Host can read. I stuck with that.

Repetier Host needed a bit of configuring to work with the Printrbot. I had to provide the application with information on the Printrbot's print bed dimensions, the temperature I wanted its extruder to run at, the height at which the print head should sit over the printer bed, and a number of other things. Fortunately, the Printrbot's documentation had all the required parameters—I just had to feed them into the app. After that, you must "home" the bot. This means manually positioning the print bed and print head to correspond with the origins of the X, Y, and Z axes. More expensive 3D printers automatically handle this step, but to start printing with the Printrbot, you have to do it yourself. The documentation said to move the print bed to the "front left" position; unfortunately, there was no obvious way to tell which sides were meant by "front" and "left." I took a guess and ended up being wrong—using Repetier Host's manual jog buttons resulted in expected travel in the Y axis but grinding when I tried to move the X axis. I slid the print bed over to the other side, re-homed, and tried again, this time with free and correct movement on all three axes.

After I got Repetier Host fully configured, I imported my calibration cube model and virtually placed it on the print head. The next step was to "slice" the model. All the major consumer-oriented 3D printers, including the Printrbot, do their printing via fused deposition modeling. They melt plastic and extrude that melted plastic through a print head as a thin thread and then lay that thread down in layers to construct whatever it is they're building. "Slicing" a 3D model is the process by which the 3D printing application figured out how many layers will be necessary to build the model, and it next maps out the movements of the print head in each layer. More precisely, at least in the case of Repetier Host, slicing translates the 3D model file into G-code, which is a manufacturing programming language consisting of instructions that the 3D printer acts on (move the head so many millimeters, feed filament at such a rate, and so on).