Ok
@Brigham_Valdez that question is purposefully misleading. Corexy printers are very solid, I’ll give you that, but every printer ever has compromises in the design. I get at least those tolerances when printing. Also both my taz and mini were printing within 5 minutes, including software download time. Granted I’m an experienced user so it might be longer but I didn’t have to ‘fiddle’ at all. If you ever get a printer from lulzbot directly, they have an amazing unboxing experience. I’m totally fine with you showing off your printer, but stop talking crap about another printer you’re very much wrong about.
@Brigham_Valdez Where is this $300 TZ killer?
@Brigham_Valdez if it was only after 1 print then it would be straight from the factory. Which version of taz was it? If your friend didn’t get a good print from it, lulzbot is usually pretty good about replacing the printer or helping to fix the issue.
They never advertise 12x12x12. They advertise 290x275x250.
I maintain over 100 of these printers in my company. @LulzBot has been hands down the best company I’ve ever worked with. Any issue I’ve had, fixed immediately and even some were versioned off issues we brought to their attention. Do that with another company.
If you want to build your own machines that’s great. My hobby is building machines too. But Lulzbot is a great company, with a great product. They give excellent service and franky charge a reasonable price for what they give and the overhead they maintain. No ones getting rich at Aleph.
@Brigham_Valdez Well, the dual hot end is a little touchy for sure, but most of them are. I believe they’re coming out with a new one that’s better relatively soon. There’s 5 different versions of the taz, and they each get better and better. Also the taz product page lists 298mm x 275mm x 250mm (11.7in x 10.8in x 9.8in) as the build area so you’re not being shorted. Also, they don’t come with that dual hot end. I usually get better prints from my single extruder than the dual extruder.
It’s obvious you have a vendetta against this company, but please stop bashing their products, especially when you can’t even tell what taz version you have or what it’s actual specifications are.
I built 10 TAZ 4’s out of the box. All printed perfectly within 15-20 minutes of cutting the tape one the box (we timed it). Maybe you got a lemon? Idk. I feel like maybe you hate everything that’s not your design? The CoreXY has many issues too, hence you never see it as a machine design in industry. Moving bed and fixed gantry? Almost every large format Boring mill or industrial CNC router in existence.
@Brigham_Valdez keep it civilized please. There’s absolutely no reason for getting personal in any way (“you love to get down on both knees for this company”) here.
Reading through your comments it’s obvious you are convinced you can do better, for less money - then please do, concentrate on that, but stop that personal crusade against and down talking of everything that is not (your) CoreXY design and rather use the energy for creating something outstanding - if it’s as good as you say, people will kick in your door to get it, no need for what feels like aggressive advertising that I see here. Keep it objective.
And remember this part of the Community Guidelines: Be friendly. Try not to offend or provoke members.
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT - ok gentlemen - shake hands and make up .
@JOHN_YN I’m not fighting. I’m defending a company (not the only one I’d defend btw) from someone who’s being a jerk to them and to myself. I’m trying to be as civil as possible about it, and some of the previous comments are completely uncalled for.
Not sure how this thread turned into a large advertisement for a supposedly “better” product some dude made. If it’s better, make it, sell it… we’ll probably all buy it.
Anybody who needs to try THIS hard to convince everybody that everything that isn’t their design is horrible is going to get a lot of skepticism thrown their way.
Like serious?
@Brigham_Valdez That’s it. I told you to keep it civilized, you continued your bashing, advertising of you superiority and condescending attitude towards everyone challenging your arguments. We don’t want that here for the exact reason of what this thread has turned into. You’ll need to continue that elsewhere.
To get back in the original subject of this thread: yes, it might be possible to do it for less but you’d be cutting corners and you won’t get the same build quality.
Lulzbot is fully open source in everything they do, so you can just look up their own BOM cost here :
http://devel.lulzbot.com/TAZ/KITTAZ/production_docs/TAZ-BOM-KITTAZ-Guava.ods
You can see total BOM cost for the KITTAZ is 927.45$ and that’s with the bulk prices that lulzbot is getting.
The same applies for the latest TAZ itself : http://devel.lulzbot.com/TAZ/Juniperbush/production_docs/TAZ-BOM-juniperbush_3000order.ods
Total BOM cost is $1,033.60 and this one specifies that it’s for a bulk order of 3000 units. You’ll notice for example the price of the electronics, the RAMBo 1.3L at 78$ which sells for 170$ from Ultimachine when you buy a single unit (https://ultimachine.com/content/rambo-13), you can probably make a similar math for every other item on the BOM, doubling their cost if you buy it retail.
You can of course save a few bucks by not including in your BOM the cost of the box and foams used in shipping, or the stickers/labels or by using cheaper motors or something like that, but don’t forget that sourcing everything yourself means you need to (potentially) pay shipping from all of the vendors you’d be buying parts from, while lulzbot provides free shipping for the printer and it comes pre-assembled and calibrated and comes with one of the best tech support, etc…
So to answer the original question: yes, it would be possible to get it for less, but not by a lot, and it’s not even guaranteed (depends on how much of a reduction the bulk price is vs. a retail price) and it would definitely not be worth it in my opinion.
(FYI: I have bought 3 cheap printers over the years, and I have a lulzbot TAZ 4 and a lulzbot Mini and the difference between the lulzbot machines and the cheap printers is so huge that they can’t be compared. After spending a year with a cheap printer and trying my TAZ for the first time, my first thought was “now I understand why it was so expensive”.)
I hope this helps!
Thank you so much for the detailed reply