Antonius Dirriwachter wrote:
Great discussion. Almost makes me want to divert my maintenance funds to a printer
Agreed, I started looking at them again a few months ago, but ended up having to invest in more software. 
Interestingly, monoprice & newegg even sell PLA filament now.
The one I ran back in the day had 2 heads, a material head and a support head and it was some work to clean up the parts after you made them. Stratasys came out with the water soluable support after that (so you just threw the parts in a bucket of water after printing) and I am not sure if that is even in use today.