Buying a Used 3D Printer Sight-Unseen off eBay Is a Bad Idea

After contemplating the purchase for ages, I decided to pull the trigger on my first 3D printer. It was beginning of a lifetime of enjoyment... or it should've been. Instead of buying a brand-new Ender-3 like everyone else did, I decided to buy my printer used, from eBay. What ended up arriving at my door was nothing short of a complete disaster.

"So why eBay?" you the ever-curious reader might ask. Well if you don't already know, I am a habitual cheapskate. I will go through absolutely stupid lengths to save a buck, but I am also utterly uncompromising on quality and performance. It's a stupid combination. I demand the best, even if the "best" winds up being a smoldering pile of ashes in a cardboard box because I was dumb enough to pay a quarter of the market value for whatever it was supposed to be.

In the case of the 3D printer, I set myself a modest budget of $200 not including tax or shipping and pulled the trigger on a used Creality CR-6 SE; a now solidly "middle of the road" printer that has almost everything you'd want in a printer like auto bed leveling and great out of the box quality, but nothing too extravagant. In my case, this was all for over half off it's MSRP. "A steal!" you might say, but more often than not, there's a catch.

Now I'm fairly experienced in eBay dealing. I know how to pinpoint obvious scams and identify when a seller is probably selling shit. There weren't many red flags with the seller of my printer (the name of whom I won't share) and although they were based out of Hong Kong, they had a 99.3% positive feedback rating, over 5000 feedback score, and the printer itself was located in the US. While dealing with an international seller might seem a bit sketchy, they certainly have enough visible experience under their belt to ease my worries about dealing with them. Plus, in the event things did go south, I've had good experience with eBay's buyer protection.

As for the printer itself though... well, it was almost a total toss up. The printers were sold out of a bulk selection, so I had no idea what my exact one would actually look like. Plus there was no guarantee it would work right out of the box, however this wasn't a huge deal breaker for me since I was fairly confident I'd be able to fix whatever issues there were with the printer, assuming they weren't anything major. In hindsight, those details should've been all it took to make me walk away from the deal. 

But like an idiot, I proceeded forward.

The printer took a week and a half to arrive at my front door, and it would've arrived earlier had FedEx not decided to recall my package for inspection. This is not something that happens often and it usually means the package in their possession is so beat up that if the driver isn't confident it will be safely delivered, they won't do it until the next business day. I immediately contacted the seller to basically let them know that if this thing arrived looking like it was packed inside of a brown paper bag, I'd be getting in contact with them again very soon.

Needless to say, I contacted them the evening I found the box at my door after I got home.

Look at that shit! I kid you not, I thought some jokester decided to drop a bag of dirt on my front porch based on how it looked on my doorbell camera, but no. Calling this thing a box at this point was almost a stretch. Sure it might have began life as one, but now it was just a crumbled mass of cardboard and tape barely containing it's contents, some of which were protruding out of numerous holes. 

To make matters worse, it wasn't even the right printer! Instead of what should've been a CR-6 SE, I found the battered pieces of an Ender-5 Pro, a printer which doesn't even look remotely close to the one I ordered. The printer was so poorly packed that every visible component looked like it has been rolled around in a cement mixer full of rocks and the only thing passable as "padding" were a few crumpled up paper napkins in the bottom of the box. It was just so mind-blowingly careless, that it was actually more hilarious than upsetting. 

The seller got back to me the next day after I provided them pictures of the sorry state the packaging and printer were in and thankfully, they quickly issued a refund. Kudos to them for taking responsibility. Now I was stuck with a free - but beat to shit and very likely broken Ender-5 Pro that I didn't really want, but it was also in totally unsellable condition. As it sat, it might as well be considered junk.

Ultimately though, I decided it was worth my while to try and bring this printer back from the dead. In spite of all the wear and tear, nearly all the original components were in the box, including an unopened roll of white PLA filament. The only things missing were all the metric socket cap screws for the full assembly but thankfully the quantity of screws and full assembly instructions were printed on the main housing. One trip to the hardware store later I was ready to build... or so I thought.

There was damage apparent all over the printer pieces. While the aluminum extrusions were all straight, one of the bottom pieces had severe deformation on one of the corners that would prevent me from making the entire frame square. The housing surrounding the power supply and mainboard was badly bent, as were most of the mounting brackets for the stepper motors and belt pulleys. So I harnessed my inner Jeremy Clarkson, and started hammering.

With the help of some metal shaping tools, the flat brackets were able to be pounded back into shape fairly easily. The damaged aluminum extrusion was another story.

The complex shape of this extrusion meant I had to hammer at it from several different angles to correct the shape. To make things even more difficult, it was very impact resistant. I had to heat the bent portion of the rail up with a torch then quickly hammer the bejeezus out of it. Thankfully, all of this racket worked, and the pieces were back in correct shape.

The main good news from this fiasco was that there wasn't anything wrong with the printer electronically speaking. The mainboard, screen, and steppers all survived and they powered up without any trouble. What busted components did remain were fairly easy to address. All the limit switches were destroyed during shipping and the couplings for the Bowden tube were shot. These were all readily available on Amazon, and after installing those, the printer was ready for final assembly.

It certainly doesn't look factory fresh, but I'm honestly surprised this Ender-5 Pro survived the tumbling it took as well as it did. Beyond the couple of dings in the paint, you'd have been hard pressed to tell this thing took a cross country ride in an unpadded box. The printer was no slouch either. I didn't calibrate it any further than a bed tramming and setting the E-steps, but it printed a very respectable looking Benchy. Mission accomplished.

That said, I had no need for this printer since I had already placed an order for an Ender-3 S1 while I was working on fixing it and sold it shortly afterwards. You might be thinking after all this, "Well, that wasn't too bad. Maybe something like this is worth the gamble, especially if you can get it for free?" Trust me when I say that it's not. You have no idea what kind of condition one of these mystery box printers is going to show up in, or what kind of a seller you're stuck dealing with in the event things go south.

My advice if you're buying used (and this applies to about anything really), always buy from somebody who's willing to show you the exact item you're getting. That way you can minimize your chances of getting screwed over. Or just buy a brand-new printer. Entry points into the hobby - such as an Ender-3 or a Neptune 3, are so cheap that it's absolutely worth considering. Generally speaking though, 3D printing is not a hobby that's plug and play. Even on new printers you're not going to escape the need for fine tuning right out of the box, but you can rest easy knowing you're not going to need a hammer to assemble it.