3DPrinting
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What did you end up buying? I'm leaning towards Prusa again, was looking at Creality but I'm not wanting to tinker around much with that stuff anymore.
Take a week and build a Voron. The kits are super easy to piece together and you end up with an insanely great, reliable printer for a fraction what it should cost. Yes, the build time and initial calibration might take a bit, but mine's been without issue, printing 24h long prints perfectly for over a year now. You don't need to settle for a mediocre built printer if you have the patience to piece together one. Not to mention, since you built the kit, you know how to troubleshoot any issues that pop up much faster than something you pulled out of a box and plugged into the wall.
2x on the recommendation. I've been slowly modding mine for about two years now. I printed the filter and magnetic panels right out of the gate.
Things I wish I did sooner:
Other than wiring breaks, and me goobering my hod end while goofing with it, it's been dead reliable. The printer has 906 hours on it with the longest print clicking in at 25.5 hours.
As someone who is currently building an LDO Voron (Voron 2.4 LDO Rev. D) most of those things are already included (like the Z-end-stop, the NiteHawk and panels)
Unless something has changed, it looks like the LDO kits still come with acrylic panels? ACM panels are an aluminum, plastic, aluminum sandwich. You cant see through them. I also didn't see the sex bolt or door.
Enjoy the build! The LDO kits are a solid base to start from.
Thanks, yeah following the voron guide was straight forward but the LDO documentation was a bit getting used to. Some things were poorly explained while others were not mentioned at all (like the LED light assembly) but by far better than having to source everything on my own.
Build a klicky and ditch the z-endstop if it's a 2.4
I installed Cartographer and it's nice, but not super reliable so far.
It is a 2.4 and I do have a klicky. I run a Z Caliberation macro that makes it a lot less fiddily to deal with getting offset just so. I could see using klicky to be the z end stop, but I'm done tweaking things for the time being. Maybe in the next go.
I have 5mm acrylic panels on my V2.4 250 and I get 65°C no problem
Very nice!
Mine is a 350, so yay lots of panel surface area :(
Where do you have your chamber thermistor mounted? Mine is mounted to the top of my stealthburner.
I have one I the stealthburner, one poking out of the z-chain and one in the top extrusion under the cover ("frame" thermistor). Then there's the one in the cartographer, but that's only for its own compensation, pretty useless as an indicator.
Do they show reasonably consistent temperatures? I've often wondered if I should have my thermistor at a fixed z height.
absolutely consistent, the stealthburner probe is usually at least 5°C higher than the z-chain one, but I think it's a viable option, after all when you start the print, your toolhead should be low, and if the temperature is ok at that height, it should be even hotter up top
Thank you for the information! I've been wondering if I should put the print head in a consistent location while waiting for the printer to heat soak. Sounds like it won't matter a ton.
Well, I have two macros for heatsoak, the one I use 90% of the time sets the tool head low at the center of the plate and turns on the part cooling fans to help heat the chamber up faster
Thanks for this insight! Thanks to everyone that replied really. I'm good with building, just hate endless tweaking and tuning. Will research Voron.
There's no need to tweak and tune. I am in the camp of having a printer to print things, vs endlessly tune the printer, and my Voron is set it and forget it at this point. There are some mods worth going after for quality of life, but none are really necessary. I put a list into another reply to the person you just replied to.
I went from a Creality printer to a Prusa Mk4s on the last black friday sale. What sold me was that as they make new machines, you can just buy a kit to upgrade to the next version, instead of needing to buy a whole new printer. They're also based in the EU, so even if they wanted to, they couldn't do anything too bad in regards to privacy.
Doesn't matter tho, cause I won't turn on the cloud printing stuff, since I don't see any benefit. Everything can be done exactly the same way without requiring external services.
Hard to make a good recommendation right now. Prusa really didn't impress with the core one because they are still using their old bed size (z height isn't important at all for me) and the MMU just isn't as good as the AMS. Creality still has OQC issues that enough people encounter even on their high end printers.
Is the Anycubic Kobra with the ACE any decent? Its on sale for what looks like a good price but I dont know anything about quality and out of the box ability
Solvo is looking pretty solid too. Proudly open source, inexpensive, feature rich.
owning, and dealing with the regular issues of, a Sovol SV07 is what made me buy a P1S + AMS combo in the first place
Sovol is building on top of open source but their software sharing is questionable. I do own their SV07 and if I wanted to reflash klipper, I would have to reverse engineer the printer as they ship only binaries for firmware...
I wouldn't lean too much on their open source sales point. Yes, it's open source, but there isn't much more to that than a custom config for Klipper. The engineering diagrams on their GitHub are mainly just standard measurements for fans and such. They do include their own custom parts measurements, so that is nice.
Cheap printers come with cheap parts and sub-par QA. I have heard great things about Sovol, but also very bad things about Sovol.
The SV08 has been around long enough now so maybe most of the bugs are worked out. If Sovol didn't solve some problems, the community likely did. It's the nature of 3D printing communities, after all.
If you want a cheap printer to be a workhorse, it needs to be disassembled completely and rebuilt after inspecting and replacing any critical parts with quality ones.
These kinds of printers are just what they are. They work great until they don't.
I got a Qudi q1 pro and I've been really happy with it. I didn't have to do any tuning or anything, just ran the the built-in bed leveling and input shaping and it ran great out of the box. I've had to do very minimal tuning to get amazing quality prints. I'm coming from an OG ender 3 though so my bar was pretty low.
I had a geeetech i3 pro b so the bar is realllllly low for me haha! The nozzle calibrated itself into the bed so hard I think it bent the goddamn rails.
I have any Anycubic and I've been pretty happy with it.
The Kobra with the ACE? How was it out of the box?
Nope, one of the Photon ones. Still worked great out of the box. I cant comment on their FDM printer unfortunately.