Did you hear the news? @MAKE1 magazine published the sneak peak of their annual 3D printer shootout! The LulzBot TAZ performed very well and was awarded “Most Maker Machine”. Here’s what they wrote:
“(The LulzBot TAZ has) everything a maker wants. Open-source underpinnings, big heated-glass build volume, high-temperature and multi-material capable with the custom Flexystruder. Plus, the excellent print quality and the detailed documentation needed to level up.”
I would argue with the assertion that the TAZ’s extruder is a high-temperature one. Are they not still using an aluminum barrel screwed into a PEEK insulator and butting-up against a PTFE tube? That’s a design that should never be used above 240C.
@Tim_Elmore Where did you find that? I don’t see it on the page for the flexistruder. What I do see are pictures that clearly show the same PEEK insulator that the Budaschnozzle has had since before version 1.0 (copied from the old, pre-v4 Arcol designs).
@Whosa_whatsis I saw it in the comments section on SparkFun. Not a very reliable source, but like you said Lulzbot’s site doesn’t have much info. You’re probably right, it probably has a PTFE tube.
Buda was an early, widely available hot end under an open source license that actually worked. Newer all metal hot ends (some coming from companies that cloned budas) are the next generation. The Buda is faster, with the materials it can print, versus a RepRapDiscount Hex and the E3D v6 in our testing. The Buda is a well known design so there is a lot of good info about profiles for various materials, all sorts of mods, clones, etc. We have designed with RRD a new all metal hot end based on their Hex that has a larger heater block and a plate that secures the heat cartridge and thermistor (think: safer). This will debut with our LulzBot Mini and also be available for the TAZ. There are some files/threads in our forum, iirc, but it is still a ways off before we release the TAZ toolhead (it doesn’t even have a development name–it is quite early in the process). The hot end itself will also be available.
To find development files, you can go to http://devel.lulzbot.com Under that is the product name, then under that the version (typically). This is also available via rsync. This is the directory we use internally, sync’d every 30 minutes.
We’re not a big fans of Make Magazine, since we read their endorsement of the Type A Machines Series 1 as “Best in Class” for 2013 and dove right in. Those things have been nothing but trouble and the build quality has always been the lowest out of all the different printers we have in the store. On the other hand, our TAZs are very high quality, just a a bit slower than our Z-Morphs and Rep 2s. We’ve built maximum sized builds (250mm Z) with no enclosure with no problem with PLA. We did have some issues with some huge builds in ABS where an enclosure would have helped. We’re definitely looking forward to upgrading the hot ends in our TAZs to all-metal when they become available.