Home Printer for CAD

SketchUp Pro
1

Hi. We will be using SK Pro for designing cabinets, interiors and woodworking projects. We currently have a BW laser printer which can only print up to legal size. I’ve found that I much prefer to work with at least 11x17 tabloid/ledger size prints. And with the Pro version, we would like to print full color when needed, especially for woodworking.

We’re having a hard time finding an affordable printer for these needs, not being a busy architecture shop but still having demanding reproduction abilities. There are affordable wide format ink jets, but we don’t print enough to avoid maintenance headaches and waste. Wide format color lasers are prohibitively expensive, and it’s hard to browse printer listings on ecommerce sites, they are full of errors.

Any suggestions?

2

Hi
I design and build wooden garden furniture and use a4 exclusively as our office printer is that size only. I know a3 is better but it works fine for my purposes.
It sounds like you can’t really justify spending money on the printer at the moment.
Could you set layout to span your design over two a4 pages print and fix them together? Maybe a bit complicated but I think it could be done with a bit of fiddling. Or you could convert the file to PDF and take it to a print shop for a fee, if you have one in your area?

That’s a few ideas anyway:
Hope it helps-Ian

3

I have a brother MFC-2510, very cheap and compact but can print a3, inks of course are costly as with most inkjets… so use colour carefully…

4

Yes I agree, would stick to black/white for shop purposes and only use colour to showcase to customers if needed

5

I’ve had the older version of this printer for about 5 years and never had a single problem with it, even though I’ve always used cheap ink cartridges ordered through Amazon. All our shop drawings are printed on 11x17 card stock. For client presentation I use 13 x 19 photo paper.
CANON PIXMA iX6820 Wireless Business Printer with AirPrint and Cloud Compatible, Black ($149 from Amazon)

6

Yes, I would myself (and have in the past) just used a B&W wide carriage inkjet or pen plotter for internal shop use, and then export to color PDF file, and take the file to SpeedyPrints or some other print shop with a large format color printer.

These days I’m sure such shops will take jobs via email attachment, and deliver the prints right to your door. (They always used to deliver to commercial accounts in the old days. Ie, the sooner they deliver the sooner they can get paid.)