I am looking to get a new 3d printer. I’ve had an ender 3 V2 for a few years. While I’ve been able to get many excellent prints out of it, I’m looking for a printer for my new apartment that will require a little less tinkering and troubleshooting. I’m pretty experienced with the nuances of 3d printing, and don’t mind taking things apart and fixing things(but not every time I wanna use the thing). Realistically I’ll be printing mostly PLA and PETG, but it would be nice to have the option of trying out other higher strength filaments, and I’d like to have an enclosure to play with ABS eventually.
I prefer to spend around $500. I’ve been eying up the Bambu P1S with the AMS but I really don’t think I can afford almost $1000 right now. If it’s really worth it, I can pull it off. The Bambu a1 is also interesting, but id prefer to have a core-xy with an enclosure.
I’ve been looking at the flashforge 5m or 5m pro, as well as creality k1c. Those prices are way more attractive. Or perhaps qidi?
All the choices and different technologies on the market now are a little bit overwhelming, and I don’t want to be disappointed in my purchase. I’ll mostly be using it to print random things for around the house and for electronics projects.
Any thoughts or recommendations are welcome, thank you!
phrogpilot73@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have an Ender 3V2 that I converted to direct drive with linear rails and CR Touch, and was pretty happy with the reliability of it. I’ve been wanting to build a Voron forever, but the amount of hours to build/cost of a kit (I can’t print ABS) was a barrier to entry.
I just picked up a Sovol SV08, which is a derivative of the Voron 2.4 (there are some proprietary parts on it, but $579 vs. $1000-1200 for a kit, I’m OK with that). I’m pretty happy with it thus far, although it did require some initial tinkering. Here are the highlights:
Time will tell if it’s a long term printer, or more of a tinkerer. However, they open sourced it all - and there’s already a ton of mods. Printing the housing for the BTT 5" touchscreen, saving me $50 over buying a touchscreen from Sovol. It might be worth a look.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 2 months ago
2.4 owner here. Happy to hear some feedback on the SV08, it looks like a pretty good deal.
I’m surprised you saw that much of a speed improvement, but I guess I ran my old i3 clone somewhat fast. My print times were a bit faster on my Voron, thanks to cranking speed and acceleration, but the biggest time savings came from taking advantage of the much better hot end and using a 0.6mm nozzle with thicker line widths (I can cover nearly 2.0mm with two perimeters) and thicker layers (0.3 on most prints these days).
Were you homing z with the bed cold? If homing z involves touching the build plate, I could see this. You could probably just adjust your start g-code to accommodate this. One of the nice things about the 2.4 is that the z end stop is bolted to the frame, so as long as your print routine is consistent you can dial it pretty easily.
That said, just wait until you enclose your printer. The frame will grow in z fairly significantly as it heats up. I’ve not let my printer heat soak, printed a number of sequential parts in one print, and watched the first layer squish getting worse and worse with each sequential part. Eventually filament won’t even stick to the build plate, so you need to tweak z-offset.
phrogpilot73@lemmy.world 2 months ago
papalonian@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Jesus, is that what’s going on… I enclosed my Franken-printer (well it was already enclosed but now it’s less shitty) and my first layer kept growing, I figured it was an inconsistent BLTouch…