Submitted 2 days ago by Coopr8@kbin.earth to 3dprinting@lemmy.world
Resin and filament, bonus points for laser sintering or anything else.
Voron is a fairly popular set of designs and geometries, but they’re harder to source and build. There’s also RatRig, which sells a kit and I think just started selling fully-assembled machines under another brand name.
Check out reAM250 powder bed fusion 3d printer
Looks like a step towards true industrial metal printing.
Excellent!
3 hours in and no one’s brought up VoronDesign? You can’t buy their priners or parts directly, you either have to self source or buy some variant or “BOM in a box” from a third party. I’ve had mine for two (three?) years and although the build was long it was very well documented, via a 240+ page lego-like build manual. It’s a great printer and community.
As someone who got the “Kit” version, I must add something that drove me nuts.
The Voron Documentation is extremely good, while I had some instances in which I would have liked more detail, the instructions are easy to follow.
However, the LDO documentation is abysmal and missing quite a bit of stuff. They do have a wiki that lists things to skip but the replacement instructions are very short and barely understandable. They don’t even mention things that you might need to print in addition to what the Voron needs. A specific example of this is the exhaust, the “Voron way” would be to print a cap that goes on the top at the back of the printer with a fan and a HEPA filter but the LDO kit doesn’t have that because it should come with the Nevermore filter. But this isn’t really mentioned there in the documentation and you need to dig through the wiki and the github project to find the right files for what needs to be printed.
I also had some trouble with the cables on the stepper motor that controls the X axis, they seem to be loose inside or don’t make full contact which means that, depending on the wires position, could make the stepper motor not work that well.
Lastly, I am currently building the Box Turtle AFC (automatic filament changer) System also from LDO and, from what I can find, there is absolutely NO documentation about it. I was in the beginning of ordering some TPU spools because the build instructions of the Box Turtle say that you need some before I saw that they provide those in the Kit.
With that being said, would I source the stuff all by myself? Hell no.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do hesitate on projects like this for this rreason, it's always the small stuff that seems to get in the way of a streamlined experience. That said, I feel like building one rather than buying off the shelf would give me a lot more know-how about how to troubleshoot and maintain the system I am using, plus I prefer to support Open Source initiatives when I can over walled gardens.
You know, as an aside, this kind of part kitting is one of those things that I think LLMs might actually make a meaningful change in very shortly. No one wants to individually order all the parts on a BOM right now because it is a bunch of labor, but do it once with an activity log of your purchasing behavior and the sites/vendors used and there is no reason it cant be fully automated and shareable as simply as the BOM itself. Add in a function to check pricing and inventory against other related vendors and it could get quite good.
Nice, there was one other mention but good to see a full vouch for Voron, definitely the kind of projected I had in mind.
There’s so many mods out there for them too because of their openness, I’ve got a v2.4, flying gantry is cool as heck but I’d consider doing a trident, the 350mm bed size is overkill for most of my prints.
I find mine produces some really nice parts, able to hit chamber temps into the 60s pretty reliably, warp isn’t really a huge concern for me with it.
I’ve built a 0.2 and a 2.4 from kits and they’re great printers with loads of mods available, but I find them had to recommend unless you have the ability to print your own parts. You can buy a kit that comes with the printed parts or get them through the print it forward program, but if you break any of the parts during the build, it can be challenging to source a replacement. If you do build one and don’t have access to another printer, I would recommend printing replacements for the most critical components once you get it running (especially the hot end parts). Otherwise, they’re super fun projects and I can’t recommend them enough.
Voron
OS is pretty hard, Prusa is moving away from OS and I wouldn’t consider them fully OS anymore. There are a lot of good projects around Voron community and I think RatRig is OS, but apart from that I don’t think there is a big OS project alive anymore. Saying that, there is a shitton of smaller projects, not full 3d printers, but motion solutions, extruders, electronic solutions, filament swappers and such, everything you need to build a 3d printer yourself.
the only one I’ve used is my MakerBot Rep2 and honestly it holds up for being over a decade old
If it counts, One of my friends in college had a bedslinger mish mash of like 4 different printers cobbled together to make a sort of bastard child prusa i3 equivalent. It actually made decent quality prints although it was pretty slow. That’s about as open source as you can get.
If he didnt publish a build guide it's not open source hardware.
Documentation and open source are two orthogonal concepts. I’ve seen plenty of well-documented closed-source projects and just as many open-source projects with no documentation at all.
Other than prusa, I’m not sure of any you can purchase. Of the build yourself ones, they are variants of prusa. Or corexy. For a bedslinger, I built a bear upgraded prusa Mk something. But custom, so not exactly. For my next, it will be a variation of a corexy. Smash together a voron and the other popular one. Because I don’t like the bed design.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
RatRig. The build process was tedious, but it was easy enough I figured it out… I hadn’t built a printer before, not like that, and I’d say it took about a week or two of spare time?
Coopr8@kbin.earth 2 hours ago
Nice! That's not bad at all. Any trouble with print consistency or maintenance?