Warping! Others have hit on a lot of this, so I’ll try to be brief.

• warping is due to the plastic shrinking as it cools. This builds tension in the lower layers of the print
• bigger prints are naturally more warp prone
• part shape and aspect ratio also plays a role. Parts with big aspect ratios (eg much wider or longer than the other axis) are more warp prone. Parts with sharp transitions are also more likely to warp
• different filaments are more warp prone than others. PLA is least prone, followed by PETG. ASA/ABD are the most warp prone I’ve printed so far
• fiddling with temps and speeds can help
• make sure you have good bed adhesion (clean bed, good first layer, etc)
• having good bed adhesion will only take you so far. I’ve had prints pull my magnetic bed plate up
• you can try printing a draft shield around your part (think a skirt as tall as your part)
• IMO eclosures are the way to go for warp prone parts. You’ll need to be somewhat careful about chamber temps getting too high (this can cause nozzle clogs for PLA/PETG) or not getting high enough (ASA/ABS will still warp in a cool chamber). My enclosure has a removable lid that I pop for PLA/PETG and has insulation/bedfans/a filter for ASA/ABS

Dish soap is better than alcohol, especially if you’re cleaning the bed in a sink with lots of water to rinse all the accumulated oils off.

There’s also all the mess of slicer and printer settings. It would be interesting to give someone a collection of parts with different nozzle sizes, extrusion widths, pressure advance settings, temp settings, print speeds/accelerations, etc

Interesting project! I will have to give it a look.

sourcing the materials can be a bit of a challenge

Any more details here? I’m guessing the necessary material for electrolytic and what not? Do you know about the boring adjacent stuff like measuring (eg how accurate do the measurements need to be, how precise, etc), disposal, etc?

Check the post title ;)

For ACM - like aluminium honeycomb?

ACM is more of a sandwich. Aluminum, plastic, aluminum.

I have a boring old klicky. It works very for me 🤷

Great read, with some amusing asides.

Shots fired!

We probably have the same model - the one with the big oval stand. Every once in a while I wish it was OLED and/or higher resolution, but it’s not worth the expensive or all the modern “features” such as these.

I personally am pretty happy with my 2.4, although I would suggest skipping the cable chains and going to an umbilical. I went the nitehawk route. If you’re going to be printing ASA or ABS add an under bed carbon filter and bedfans. I would also suggest skipping to ACM panels if you plan on big ASA/ABS prints.

If you dig through my comments you can see me talking about it. Mechanical bed leveling, that actually squares the gantary to the bed, and Z calibration make for very consistent first layers.

$1,200 is Voron and RatRig territory. Vorons cap out at 350 mm³ for build volume and 500mm³ rat rigs are $1,550. I agree that plenty of folks are probably over buy on printers, but if you want this kind of build volume the price seems reasonable - especially for a printer that ships assembled. Personally, I went the Voron route and if I wanted a larger printer I would probably either just make my 350mm taller or go the RatRig route.

That said, high velocity on a large format printer isn’t that useful for big prints IMO. You’re probably going be running a bigger nozzle and laying down wide/tall extrusions, which means you’re probably going to be limited by how fast your extruder can melt plastic. That’s the case on my Voron with a Rapido HF with “only” a 0.6mm nozzle, 0.8mm extrusion widths, and 0.3mm layer heights.

These units are somewhat silly IMO. It all comes down to volumetric flow. Big nozzle + thick extrusions + thick layers would probably mean needing to print slower than that speed due to the ability of a hot end to melt the filament.

/ someone who has been mm^3/s constrained for a while now

For quite some time now, Marlin has been the firmware of choice for any kind of custom 3D printer, with only Klipper offering some serious competition in the open-source world

Confused Voron noises

It does seem like an interesting concept, but I wonder how much benefit it will have, both in tuning effort and final outcome.

And I’ll be the first vendor!

1 and 5: Either should be fine, especially if the seller is reputable and has reviews. Many sells will have a store on multiple sites, but in some cases people will resell other people’s work. See if you can track down the original creator to support them 2: I suspect everyone will want STLs they won’t have to do any processing on. What do I mean? Well, I could give you a STL for a piece that’s massively too large and would need to be split into pieces or a different STL that will be impossible to print well. I suspect print services won’t want to deal with this, will charge for it, and/or you might not be happy with the final outcome 3: If you’re paying someone to print the parts, they will likely have larger format printers. However, this might cost some $$ 5: It depends how thick the designs are and how strong you want them to be (more perimeters = stronger), but keep in mind that you’re also paying for machine time and potentially processing (eg surface finishing, support removal, etc). To get a feel for a quote without buying this design, find some cosplay armor on something like printables and use that for quotes

I had no idea this was even going on, so that’s a potential plus.

Stratasys filed the two lawsuits against Bambu Lab in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, in August 2024. The company claims that Bambu Lab’s X1C, X1E, P1S, P1P, A1, and A1 mini 3D printers violate ten of its patents. These patents cover common 3D printing features, including purge towers, heated build plates, tool head force detection, and networking capabilities.

I had heard that Stratasys was a bit of a patent troll, but some of those claims are news to me.

Can confirm, klipper does this too. Sincerely, someone who had a few thermistor related wire breaks.

Adding encoders to your steppers, or buying stepper motors with built in encoders, can help a lot but it’s not a cheap solution. It can also be a bit bulky, so packaging them a printer not designed for them can be tricky.

I also free hand. Every once in a while I wish they were more perfectly square, but then I realize I don’t actually care enough to print a fixture and have to deal with attaching/detaching my Weller.

I am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work ‘computer’ time is on my phone these days :(

I suggest checking out this post. I have quite a few replies about the voron experience.

TL;DR - agree that a Voron can be a start and walk away printer. Building it will take some time, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but know what you’re getting into. It will take some configuration and tuning to get it printing, but the Voron initial setup guide and Ellis’s print tuning guide are very easy to follow.

From a 2.4 owner.