On a quiet day, Ender 3 printers sell for just over 200 euros. When special discounts and Black Friday-style campaigns start, they can appear at half that price. However, nothing compares to Eastern e-commerce stores for finding products at almost impossible prices... as long as quality takes a back seat. That's how we arrive at the Made with Layers channel by Thomas Sanladerer, who decided to roll the dice on AliExpress and buy an EasyThreed K9 for under 75 euros...
If we think about it, everything has its own "for kids" version. Not to go too far, a tricycle serves as a "first vehicle", but there are also things like chemistry sets (my mother regretted it a bit when the first test tubes flew into the air), and packs with "my first tools" to nail and screw every object in the house.
Now imagine a 3D printer for kids. I mean a design so cheap and 'plastic' in every sense that you almost expect its instant collapse and subsequent reduction into an amorphous mass of PLA. That's the feeling the EasyThreed K9 conveys from the first minute, but Thomas Sanladerer from the Made with Layers channel decided to put one of these printers to the test, and what he discovered is... a project.
EasyThreed K9, the €72 3D printer
That's right, Thomas paid for the printer what some people pay only for a set of nozzles. The simple act of taking it out of its box was an adventure: The bed is magnetic, but it has no built-in heater. The power supply is nothing more than a small 12V 2-amp brick, that is, 24 watts for the whole 3D printer. The rods of the three axes are hollow, the motors are tiny, and the cables are exposed.
Thomas believes the "best part" of the EasyThreed K9 is the hotend, with a reasonable design considering the cutbacks on the printer. And as for the base... it doesn't even have an LCD screen. All necessary commands were reduced to a total of six buttons. The controller uses some kind of STM clone and reports itself as a Robin Lite, but it's clear it received several modifications.
And despite all this... it prints. Any idea of high precision or speed goes out the window, but if someone needs small, generic parts, the EasyThreed K9 gets the job done. Of course, Thomas does not recommend buying the printer, since there are vastly superior options at acceptable prices (any used Ender is a good starting point)... but the modding potential is impressive. I imagine several enthusiasts (by which I mean those who already have several printers) will try to get a pair of EasyThreed K9s to see what craziness they can do with them...
