Back in 2018 I bought a heavily modified Anet A8 3D-Printer off my friend, and it broke after 2 prints. Up until March 2021, it had been sitting in my closet waiting for attention, which finally came after I graduated high school and had some time between competitions. Unfortunately I did not take a ton of pictures of the process, but I think it's worth noting because it was extensive. I had to replace the base control board, and decided to use a completely different one, meaning this was more of a build than a re-build. I had to re-wire every stepper motor (and replace one), modify the end stop sensors, and re-configure the new (generic) board completely from scratch to work with this type of printer.
The heated bed was also not working and had to be re-soldered.
After almost 3 straight days of only working on this printer, I was able to do my first print.
The quality was pretty terrible and it seemed like something was wrong, other than just my print settings. From the issues with the print, it seemed like it was not extruding filament consistently. The extruder was using a very small pancake stepper, so I decided to upgrade it.
After upgrading the stepper on the extruder and dialing in my print settings...
quality was looking great! It was very satisfying to revive something that had been sitting for years and learn a lot about the minutia of 3D-Printers in the process.