Big Gutenberg Pt. 2 – Unboxing and repair

Our Prusa XL had been shipped to us from Czechia via FedEx, costing roughly $500 along with a $600 import tariff (are we great yet?), which unfortunately wasn’t enough money for FedEx to treat the obviously expensive package with any sort of care (having later heard from Mr. Waide that the boxes were practically dropped by the delivery driver). When the boxes arrived beat-up, I still had faith that the printer would be in good condition, of course, that later proved not to be the case…

When unboxing the printer I had noticed a few broken plastic pieces floating around inside the packaging, I soon saw a cable cover on one of the bottom corners of the printer was broken. I figured it wasn’t a big deal and I should easily be able to reprint the part. It wasn’t until I got the printer set up on the table that I noticed the severity of the damages.

The entire back panel of the printer had snapped off its brackets and fallen crooked into the frame, this panel is fairly crucial and is what the cables for the heatbed are attached to, along with the three power supplies and the PDU. I quickly went on with customer support about the issue, the conversation soon became one of the best customer support inquiries I have ever experienced.

The support representative walked me through troubleshooting steps to ensure that it was just the back panel that was crooked and not the rest of the CoreXY gantry. After finally reaching the conclusion that it (thankfully) was just the back panel, they offered the choice of sending the printer back for repair or sending out some spare parts and walking me through how to fix it myself, acknowledging that it would be another few weeks of waiting for the printer. I chose the latter, and since the major damage had only occurred to the 3D printed plastic parts I was able to print new ones off in a few hours. Since there were also damaged bolts and a bent grounding bracket, they offered to send me replacements for those as well. I declined, citing environmental/emissions as my reason, and that I could find enough spare M3 bolts lying around. They told me I could then just bend the grounding bracket back, and as long as I didn’t snap it, all would be well, and if so I could get away with any piece of steel in its place.

Since the issue was now resolved and I knew what all I had to do, I thanked the representative for their time and cooperation. In turn, they congratulated me on my willingness to leverage my right to repair and resolve the damage myself. As compensation for the troubles caused by the damages and a bonus for enthusiasm in DIY they gifted me a voucher for 1 Kg of free PETG filament. The also reached out for as many pictures of the damage to the packaging as we had, in order to see what failed and how to improve it (as this is, unfortunately, a fairly common issue for US-based Prusa users).