@shauki
Nobody said that it’ll be cheaper. But it’s still relatively cheap and the quality of the printed parts are impressive.
Haven’t seen this parts quality on cheaper printers in this size.
Plus, you have the option to run a dual head, you can use a closed housing and the noise level is relatively low.
And by the way, the rods are far away from expensive today. I just bought 4 550mm 8mm rods that are perfectly straight for less that 7€.
But I guess @Eclsnowman could make more precise statements regarding the actual price level of the herculien.
Also id go with aluminum extrusion from @OpenBuilds_LLC
From what I have heard people have spent around $1800 building HercuLien. If you shopped well I think $1500 is attainable depending on your location and cost of shipping. I of course spent more than that because I was figuring things out as I designed it, so there was some 2-steps forward, 1-step back going on.
The problem you will see as you scale up HercuLien is the limitations of a Ultimaker style cross rod gantry design. Larger spans require larger diameter cross rods to maintain similar stiffness. As you go up in size something like the @shauki and his PantherQR or similar printers has great benefits. The stiffness of an extrusion compared to it’s weight is preferable compared to steel rods as things scale up.
I am not a big fan CoreXY, that was actually the first printer I built and you can see it out on my github. Not that they cannot be good, in fact they can be very good if the system is designed robust enough. But I have found maintenance can be tricky. Maintaining balanced tension between the two belts is very very important. Otherwise dissimilar backlash will occur as the two tied motors interact causing artifacts in the prints (oval circles for example).
I have found the limitations of FDM on very very big parts means segmenting parts into smaller printable objects for reassembly later is a better idea…if the part allows for it. You will never feel as bad as you do when a 3 day print fails on the last day… Trust me.
But if I were to design an even larger printer I would go with something like what @Tim_Rastall started working on before he took a break (it was called the Procerus). But, instead of rods on the sides I would use ground linear rails (which are now very cheap from china) or openbuilds wheels on extrusion to guide the axis. Then I would use slave rods on the sides to run one motor to pulleys on both ends of the axis to provide the motion along the previously mentioned side guides. across the center I would use open builds 20x20 extrusions and wheels to make a cross style gantry. This has a disadvantage that the wheels and extrusion takes up a fair amount of space. But as you get bigger and bigger printers this becomes less of an issue because as a percentage of build volume it becomes lower and lower.
Sorry for the long ramble.
I appreciate the info @Eclsnowman , very informative.
I settled on building a smartrapcore. I can build it for under $50 using the parts from an old prusa i3