I've just finalised putting together a big Prusa i3v I've built to sell. The only way to get a printer with this size build area without paying easily double the price is to build them yourself. But anyone who has built even a small 3d printer will tell you that even when ignoring the importing hassles and time, putting them together and calibrating them is a horrendous and time consuming job, and so an electrical engineer and myself have put one together to take the hassle out for you!

It's got a 12" by 12" by 13.5" build area, one of the largest around, rocks a 3mm hexagon nozzle (uses the largest range of filament types), superior RUMBA board and graphical LCD display, a 12"x12" heated bed with hardened glass, bed leveling kit installed, and micro adjustable Z axis endstop. Power supply is sexily attached to the machine and being a prusa all the software AND HARDWARE it needs are open source. There's a massive active support community which the asian knock offs don't have. Also, being completely open source, you can make a heap of additions or improvements to it easily with a massive community of support. Heaps of these you can print yourself.

I've used it to print a few extra parts (new fan attachment to allow cooling as plastic is extruded, knob for the LCD control) and a couple of test prints, and it's working excellently. I'll be including a 1kg roll of PLA, and I'm able to sell 3 ABS and 3 PLA 1kg spools as well, and a 150mm Kapton tape roll if desired (I'd recommend it).

I'm happy to give the purchaser a run down of which programs I use and how, where to get models, how to adjust things, things to be careful of, and an idea of possible mods they can print.

The parts cost of this was just under $1400 NZ, and dozens of hours have been put into it's construction and calibration. Any questions I'll do my best to answer!