I ordered my hardware kit, essentially the RepRap “vitamins” from a company by the name of A2APrinter in Toronto. I am writing this post after the fact, but I did make note of my experience with this company so far.
The filament I specified on my initial web order was out of stock, however they informed me while processing the order and I was able to choose a different one they had in stock for the same price. It took them about a day to respond to my response. I was OK with this, the actual colour of the plastic was not important to me as long as one spool was PLA and one was ABS so I could try both.
Upon receiving the package I was surprised at it’s size, I expected it to be a bit larger. With great anticipation, I opened it to this sight:
Everything is packed using scrap styrofoam to roughly fill the spaces. Not ideal, however most components survived the trip. I say most because not everything survived, but it was a minor fix to repair it.
After the filament and chunks of foam are removed, we see the rest, right at the bottom of the box unpadded:
Here is the contents of the box laid out:
This kind of packaging produces this – bent components on the electronics. Thankfully the pins were not stressed to the point of breaking. I cannot say this about the resistor on the MK2 heated bed which I needed to replace due to shipping damage.
