There's lots of knowledge on here about small cheap home 3d Printers, but does anyone have any knowledge of small professional units in the $3, 4, 5K range? This is for prototyping components. Must me able to print glass reinforced Nylon 6 or 66 type materials.
Maybe a Lulzbot or Markforged? Those two seem to be the most common makes I see small businesses using on various social media accounts.
What sort of info are you looking for?
Matterhackers is a good place to look around. You will need a printer that can do at least 300C on the hotend, 100C or better on the bed and have an enclosure to print Nylons reliably. I have not heard a bad thing about Raise3D printers. That price range you should also look at BCN3D, Makerbot and Ultimaker. They all make nice professional printers that should be able to do Nylon without issue. I would look at the cost of replacement parts, you will clog nozzles from time to time if you are printing fiber filled Nylons. IIRC Ultimaker does not have a serviceable hotend, you have to replace the whole hotend assembly which is north of $130. When my E3D hotends clog it's a $4 chinese nozzle and it goes in a acetone bath to get cleaned out.
Also, I would look at getting a printer with dual independent print heads so you can do soluble supports. Nylon you either have no layer adhesion or all of the layer adhesion and removing nylon support material from a good nylon print is a PITA. Stay away from single nozzle printers that have "dual material" capabilities. The 2in 1out printers are more trouble than they will ever be worth.
Another thought, you can get a used Stratasys Dimension for that money all day long. I'm pretty sure people have hacked the older ones so you don't have to use propietary filament anymore.
We ended up with a bank of Markforged printers due to the print quality. You're stuck with proprietary materials, but it's strong and it just works. Removing support material hasn't been a problem.
We currently have three printers that are running 24x7. We've had to replace one nozzle but it was right at about the time we expected it to go based on hours. They're consistent and basically trouble-free.
We looked at Ultimaker as well but they couldn't match the quality.
Cool guys. We've used Stratasys for making parts in the past, and we've been delighted with the quality and speed, but we want in house capabilities to try things. I'll post a couple of pics later when I can get someone to snap them as I'm not in the office. The thing is I don't know what questions to ask of reps TBH.
Here's the kind of thing we need to do. Assume eight-ish inches long.
First a printed part. This is 30% glass filled nylon.
Then from hard tools
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