I don’t know about this particular model, but the brand is well liked for their higher end printers. At budget price points there’s only so far you can stretch the BOM cost so I don’t know how much more I would expect of this printer vs other budget entries.
If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.
As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you’re probably going to need to fiddle with them. You’ll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn’t mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn’t need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.
There’s nothing wrong with an “old” printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it’s not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and “auto leveling”, but it’s worth saying that most budget printers can’t adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.
Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you’ll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.
Another commenter in here suggested filling the gap with concrete. I don’t think it’s worth it at this power level, cheapish BOM, etc. The enclosure is also ASA (the middle) and PETG (the top and bottom), so it’s a bit more dead than PLA already.
That looks like an interesting design. If you’re linking to something like that, you’ve heard of Hoffman’s Iron Law already. I chose size and low end response over efficiency. I did model some higher order enclosures, but they either didn’t get low enough (size, efficiency) or were too big (efficiency, low end response).
It would totally be a step up, the question is which step ups are worth it given the BOM components and their cost (around $200 for all the electronics and drivers excluding plastic). At the end of the day it’s a $20 tweeter and a $45 (used) car door woofer connected to a fairly cheap class D amp using Bluetooth. It has a slight turn off pop (no turn on pop though), it hisses some at idle, you can hear the noise floor decrease (eg more noise) when a Bluetooth device pairs, Bluetooth itself isn’t a super awesome media for audio (it is a lot better than it used to be, but your actual quality will depend a lot on device to device configurations), etc etc.
I’m not sure what I would prioritize first for the next step up in SQ, but I don’t think it would be the enclosure itself.
I had prints doing exactly what you described on my CoreXY because ABS and ASA are very warp prone. For me it all came down to chamber temperature and a solid first layer. I think you should be good to go on the latter thanks to your MK3.
You’ll need active chamber heating at a minimum to pull off larger prints. This doesn’t necessarily mean an aux heater, but it does mean bedfans. I’m not sure how easy those are to implement on a MK3, but I would be amazed if no one hasn’t figured out something, especially given the size of the community. In my case, I’m using 4x bed fans with two doing double duty in a filter.
My printer is a 350mm^3 Voron, which means its acrylic panels are fairly large. More surface area means more heat loss, so I need panels that do a better job of retaining heat than simple acrylic. This might also be the case for you thanks to having to move your bed back and forth. I’m hoping that ACM+radiant insulation will get me there. This print happened in a 60 °C chamber.
Thanks! Hexibase’s builds are super cool.
If by characterize them you mean measure the driver’s t/s parameters you can do it with a multimeter, a resistor, and basically any amplifier using a computer to generate the frequency. Elliot can be a bit verbose, which makes his instructions somewhat hard to follow at times, but here’s a guide: https://sound-au.com/tsp.htm
The top and bottom are PETG. The middle section is ASA. 0.6mm nozzle, 0.3mm layer height, 150% extrusion width, two perimeters and 30% infill. I was cruising, but did limit my max flow rate to 25 mm^3. I could have gone even faster, but I was in the rate of diminishing returns for print time. I printed it in my Voron, but it did need some extra insulation to get the chamber temp high enough to avoid warping. The print completing completely successfully told me it’s possible to do big ASA prints with a 60 degree chamber temp, so I’ll be spending the time to make some nice insulated ACM panels.
Ha, thanks!
Laziness and easy BMS board compatibly, but I totally understand the sentiment. It’s not like I can’t print a new top if/when I discover an easy/drop in solution that deals with negotiating power and voltage.
Go for it! 3D printing unlocks the opportunity to easily fabricate things that would be pretty difficult to make out of only wood. I’m mulling over making a baby array of BMR drivers https://www.tectonicaudiolabs.com/audio-components/bmr-speakers/
I’ve seen that approach taken to make the enclosure more “dead”, but at these power levels it doesn’t really matter a lot. The walls are 1.8mm thick with 30% infill. The top and bottom are PETG and the middle section is ASA. These materials are more ductile than say PLA, so they’re inherently slightly deader.
You’re absolutely correct that the approach you suggested would result in a slightly better outcome for a bit more weight to lug around and a little more design effort. It just didn’t seem worth it to me for this portable and fairly low power application.
Thanks! There are two “big” details that I did think about to some extent.
The first big choice was what kind of enclosure type I wanted. This winds up running into Hoffman’s Iron Law, which means choosing two: low end bass, efficiency, and size. I chose size and low end bass, which means that I went with a traditional ported enclosure. I did consider, and spent some time modeling, a more exotic double bass reflex enclosure, but it just wound up being too large. Modeling in this sense involves acoustic modeling, which I did in WinISD for the ported enclosure and Hornresp for the double bass reflex, and physical modeling, which I did in Fusion360. I also selected drivers that would play fairly well with one another.
The second was geared more toward printing. Curved surfaces resist flexing more than flat surfaces, so most everything is curved or has a reinforced (eg the top and bottom). I wanted to minimize the need for supports, so the ports have “built in” supports. There’s also the tongue and groove thing for the top and bottom to minimize air leakage.
As far as the drivers without the enclosure, an enclosure adds two things:
Thanks!
You should check out: https://github.com/MSzturc/the100
Ultimately, if the printer is going to go up in flames the source of those flames won’t originate at the cloth draped over the acrylic enclosure. The chamber barely cracked 60 °C, which is well below what smaller Vorons, especially V0s, will hit with only acrylic panels. Yay lots of surface area I guess.
It will be very interesting to see how everyone reacts (or doesn’t) to some “better looking” insulation. The sources of ignition won’t be any different, but I bet that people will be much more comfortable looking at insulated ACM panels that were built for purpose.
Yes, I’ve done skirts. At a certain print size/aspect ratio it doesn’t really matter though - the parts are going to want to warp without a warm enclosure. If you have great first layer adhesion it will just take your build plate with it. You’ll find a picture of that happening on this printer if you look through my post history.
Smaller parts in x/y and round corners will help prevent warping.
I printed all the parts for my Voron using an i3 clone under a cardboard box. I doubt that “chamber” got very warm, but it was enough for success.
The electronics are housed in a (reasonably) sealed airspace below the print bed and have two fans blowing across them. Here’s a link to CAD/STLs/some pictures: https://vorondesign.com/voron2.4. If you want to poke around GitHub, you can do so here: https://github.com/VoronDesign/Voron-2. No printer is perfect, but Vorons are fairly well thought out and I didn’t skimp out on components when I was sourcing parts. All wiring inside the enclosure is either PTFE or silicone insulated.
Here’s what it looks like underneath:
I always recommend keeping a cheap lil smoke alarm directly overhead any 3d printer, seriously
Totally covered.
I guess I’m not clear what the source of ignition would be? The chamber is fairly well temperature controlled, so it’s not likely that something inside will overheat. The cloth that’s draped over outside of the printer can’t come into contact with any hot bits thanks to acrylic panels. The chamber itself is currently sitting at 59 C after the print has been going for 10 hours (plus 1.5 hours of preheat before that).
Agree on venting, I need to duct my exhaust fan to the outside.
A space blanket is a good idea. I have a few lying around and will add one. Bonus points for being a radiant barrier (eg should help get things warmer again). I’m surprised that mylar will help prevent the spread of fires.
No adhesion helpers either, I was pretty pleased! This macro seems a bit daunting to set up and get running, but it should solve most of your challenges: https://github.com/protoloft/klipper_z_calibration
I’ve had a number of bigger prints warp with just acrylic panels :( now that I’ve finally figured out how to consistently nail my first layer the last print lifted the build plate. I was impressed, lol.
I need to figure out what I’m going to do for my door. Thinking about going clicky-clack so I can still eyeball the first layer out of habit.
You’re four forks deep now Slic3r to Prusa Slicer to Bamboo’s slicer to Orca. It also borrowed a lot of ideas from Super Slicer. Since it’s open source, and has been gaining some momentum, it seems to have a decent amount of contributors
Why Orca?