What print volume do think will cover most of practical 3D printing job?
I’m going to build a new printer soon, it will be work horse for my tinkering and stuff. I’m not print figures or big tower things from thingiverse that much. My old delta kit is working fine but print volume is too small(about 180mm diameter x 280mm height) for some work now. Upgrade it for bigger volume isn’t really worth it since I need to change almost every part so new printer is going to be better choice(I can keep delta as secondary too)
I’m looking at D-bot by spauda01 with 300mm x 200mm x 325mm should be enough for most thing.
At least a 10 X 10 X 10 (254 X 254 X 254) minimum build volume. You can orient most pieces pretty much any direction you want. I really like a 12 X 16 X 14 (305 X 406 X 356)
Most people do just fine with “shoebox” size in the neighborhood of 150x250 build plate and around 200 for Z. Most large prints only require one long axis. A 200mm cube is also popular since you get a ~275mm usable diagonal out of that.
Bigger is obviously better, but the mechanism design effort and cost required for good quality gets exponentially higher as the printer is scaled up. A 300mm cube printer is a different animal from a 200mm cube printer.
I have 250mm in each direction and have only really used the full area to print large quantities at a time. If you do go with a bigger print area, use a design that only has the bed moving on the Z axis. Having that mass move around it not gonna be good for your prints. I’m moving over to a 200x300 bed with CoreXY. You might want to look into doing the same and keep that moving mass down
I built a huge printer first, and have gotten smaller with each conservative printer. The tuning required for a 350^3 printer is an order of magnitude harder than 200^3 printers I have built recently. In hindsight, I should have started smaller, and built up as my size demands increased. Splitting a print into smaller components that can fit on smaller build volume has many benefits. Most importantly the cost of failure is far lower. I can’t tell you how bad it feels to have a print fail on the second day of continuous printing after having to wake up in the middle of the night to do a spool swap because the print uses more than 2kg.
i get 220X220X240 and i its improve my life
my 2th printer is 120X120X120 ( monoprice select mini) and im doing 80% of the prints in the BIG one about 40% of them wont fit in the select
so look at 250 and up 300 can be really cool
I would have initially answered: 100mm cubed since I have seen the majority of users only require very small prints. But you have qualified yourself as A) not a newbie and B) requiring a much larger build platform than the majority. Printrbot’s best seller is the Simple at 150 cubed and while the bed upgrade is popular, it seldom is needed. I think the value of the upgrade is enticing but not b/c of a real need… more of a felt need.
Our Plus is 254mm cubed and I can count the vocal people asking for larger on two hands. You are in a small club.
All that said, folks like yourself often own more than one printer. When owning more than one, one usually gets the majority of work. Knowing you are really asking for a very large build platform, I’d say anything 200 cubed of larger would work. I agree w the shoebox comment w limited Z, since a diagonal orientation covers outliers nicely in most cases. We are adopting a rectangular x/y standard for this reason.
@Jon_Gritton at the time I was printing prototype greensand foundry pattern impressions. They were large and required high infill for strength due to the compression forces of the molding process.
I went pretty low tech. I just watched and waited and when the previous spool ran out I would chase it with the end of the new spool. To be honest I only realized on a few that it would run out because the spool was getting dangerously low before I went to bed. So I set and alarm and woke up in the middle of the night and waited for it to run out.
