@Billy I was talking about closed-source hardware in general, I’m not up-to-date on how Makergear is licensing their machines today.
Apparently neither am I because from Ecker’s link it looks like the M2 has a bunch of it’s source available.
@Whosa_whatsis Bukobot is on the list for sure - saw it at Makerfaire. We support local and Crashspace is our sister hackerspace (my husband @Sean_Bonner is a founder). I’ll ask @Joseph_Chiu who is helping with research to visit you guys!
@John_Schneider Sure! It’s a hella lotta work but we always looked at it as more of a community outreach mechanism than fundraiser.
Whatever we buy I just want to make sure we can get support and use PLA even if some mod is needed. We are family friendly so I’d like 1 to be kid friendlyish
I wanted 3 printers with the hope 1 is working at any given time but 2 is OK. I bought my husband a MB Cupcake and that thing hardly worked but I know we’ve come a long way since 2010. Or I hope 
Sumpod! Its cheep and works as a cnc milling machine as well as a 3d printer. A delta cnc/3d printer in alu is on its way.
@Tara_Tiger_Brown in my experience, PLA is the easiest plastic to print. It’s the only one I’ll use for public demos because the smell is both subtle and pleasant. It doesn’t have warping issues, and bed adhesion is quite completely solved. You can even print without the bed being heated at all if necessary, although it’s a lot easier if you do heat the bed.
To my knowledge, the only printer you’ll have trouble printing PLA with is the UP! because they lock their hardware to their secret sauce
+1 for PLA 
I’d say the only downside that I’ve found is that it’s harder to source good PLA in the U.S. than ABS but not that much harder.
@Billy that’s cool they are keeping it open. FWIW my Prusa is a Makergear and they seem to be a decent folks, so it’s good to hear they’re not pulling a “Makerbot” on us.
@Triffid_Hunter Thanks! @Jason_Gullickson Good to know. I won’t get into my thoughts on Makerbot, but didn’t they only close the newest one? The other ones are still open source.
That’s my understanding (that the old models are still open source). Although I believe they have closed up the software so afaik there won’t be any updated open software support (from Makerbot) for the old machines either.
@Tara_Tiger_Brown We know @Joseph_Chiu , he’s been to the shop a couple of times.
If you want to print PLA, you’ll want to go with a machine that prints 3mm filament, because there’s no US supplier for good 1.75mm PLA yet, and you don’t want to be stuck using the stuff from Village Plastics (seriously, its bad, you’re better off buying from China). The US distributer for Diamond Age PLA (the really good stuff from New Zealand) is local, but it only comes in 3mm.
Jordan said that he’s going to start carrying 1.75 at some point. I have a bunch of 1.75 PLA and I can supply LAM with that close to cost, so that’s not an issue.
Oh, and MBI carries PLA 1.75, don’t they? They need that for their R2’s.
Yes, but it’s the same garbage from Village Plastics that all the other US places sell.
Is Ultimachine PLA from Village because it’s just fine? What specifically is your problem Village plastic other than it is “garbage.”
I’m still working off a bunch of 1.75 PLA I got from Makergear when I ordered my Prusa kit (over a year ago), also picked up a sample pack of Faberdashery 1.75 from Handmade Circuits (http://www.handmadecircuits.com/) and it seems like pretty good stuff, I might import some larger amounts if the rest of the pack goes as well as the first 10m
I used to only buy PLA from Ultimachine. It’s the reason I swore off PLA for two years before I got my hands on some from Diamond Age. You can easily identify Village Plastics PLA by looking for the barely blue transparent and the slightly translucent green color. They are very distinctive, and are a dead giveaway that a supplier is selling the same garbage as every other US supplier. I just tried pulling some out again over the last couple of days because I needed some of those colors, and it’s been painful. PLA is supposed to print around 180C, but it takes closer to 210 to get this stuff to print, and using that much heat on PLA causes it to string and have all kinds of other problems that the Diamond age plastic doesn’t have.
Faberdashery also seems good, but unless you import it yourself, you’re limited to the 1.75mm sample pack that @Jason_Gullickson mentioned right now.
The only problem I have had with Ultimachine PLA was tolerance and Johnny bent over backwards to replace it. My main machine is calibrated with an external thermocouple and I print at 178C on that machine with no stringing. It sounds like you just got a bad roll. Also if your bad experience/roll was from 2 years ago a lot has changed in PLA land. PLA was not even popular and extruders were not designed for it back then.
@Whosa_whatsis I’m sorry you had trouble with a spool of filament from us (UltiMachine). We are serious about customer satisfaction. With most setups our PLA extrudes well below 210C. Our filament is one of (if not) the most trusted in the industry, but occasionally something goes wrong. We always try to make it right. Please contact me through our website and we will arange for a RMA to get it straightened out. Also, I just found and posted to your thread here https://plus.google.com/u/0/105535247347788377245/posts/7r5eJZTMuVD
@Johnny_Russell I won’t bother with an RMA. I used most of it back when I didn’t have other options. I just tried some again the other day (on a machine MUCH more reliable than anything I was using back then) and noted that it still had much more stringing and required a significantly higher temperature than the Diamond Age PLA I’m now used to working with.
I do intend to try your ABS again. Do you still include PLA samples with every order? If so, be sure to throw some black and white in my box (the colors I primarily ordered previously) when you see an order from me in the coming weeks, and I’ll report back about the current quality. I do suggest, though, that you look into other suppliers of PLA, as I definitely consider your current supplier to be sub-par, and have recently come to understand a few of the mistakes they make in their extrusion process that result in discoloration of “clear” PLA and generally inferior chemical properties.