Comment on What are your favorite open source 3D printers?

• IMALlama@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I have a 350mm 2.4 and chose it specifically because I tend to make bigger things. The flying gantary is super cool looking, but it does come with a downside: all your tool head cables, if you switch to an umbilical instead of the cable chain, and your filament run have to accommodate the gantary getting ever higher if you have a tall print. It’s not an unsolvable problem, but it’s also a problem that doesn’t exist if the bed is the thing that moves.

  One of the pluses of a Voron is that it’s enclosed, which means that you can print ASA/ABS for pretty rugged prints. This means needing to preheat the chamber - especially for larger prints. On a big printer this can take quite some time, and also requires some insulation, but there really isn’t a way around it without doing something silly like putting a heater other than the bed in the printer. Fortunately, if you’re printing a smaller part you don’t have to worry about preheating.

  A three final thought on a big prints:

  • when prints get big enough basically everything will warp without a heated chamber. This is especially true for ASA and ABS but is also true for PETG. I haven’t tried a big PLA print, but I imagine once they pass a certain size they’ll warp too
  • if you want fast prints you should look at wide extrusions and thicker layers. I run a 0.6mm nozzle basically all the time with 0.8mm or 0.9mm extrusion widths and 0.3mm layers. It’s all about how quickly you can lay down plastic in mm^3. This will make your bottleneck your hot end
  • even with chunkier layers big prints can take a long time. I printed a speaker and it took something like 20 hours for the biggest body and it was “only” around 280mm in circumference and 270mm or so tall. Granted, if I could have fit this on my i3 clone it would have probably taken 5x longer due to a much weaker hot end.

  There are bigger printers out there, but between warping and print time I don’t know that I would personally want one. For the rare times when 350mm isn’t enough I can always split parts, but that hasn’t been an issue so far.

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