Are there any large volume printers?

Are there any large volume 3D printer designs out there? And by large volume, I mean 1m3 or more. If there are, are any of them capable of getting down to 0.1mm in layer height?

A m3 at 0.1mm layer height will take many days to weeks to print. It is a completely unrealistic endeavor. That said, you could build one if you wanted but there are no commercial printers that I know of on the market with these specs.

Yes nozzle size . I run .25 or .1 mm nozzles and for faster prints I run .8 -.4mm 100 density parts thick and big really big parts are 1.5 -2 mm useing 3mm filament works good ! I useing ramps-FD with ardiuno due 5×stepper controllers dual head with z-hop . Key is to set in your slicer settings to print slower for very fine stuff .....it will come out perfect I know it will take hours sometimes, days

Do they exist? Yes. SeeMeCNC has one they call the PartDaddy with a build volume of over three cubic meters. Are they readily available as kits to the general population or cost-effective or practical for the average hobbyist? Not to my knowledge. Numerous design challenges that drive cost and complexity scale non-linearly with build volume.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2015 10:24PM by IMBoring25.

@zerokool.: youre using ramps FD? Are you part of the development team or have I missed a non beta version coming out?

There's not a lot of existing large volume FDM printers, for many reasons. Some trys exists, most of them for demo purpose, but you can surely count the fully functionnal ones on one hand fingers. I only know one FDM printer wich has real production abilities, and its build volume don't reach 1m3. If you plan to build a 1m3 printer, some warnings. To get the expectation of 0.1mm layer, you will need a very stiff structure to maintain the required precison along that print volume. The build plate (bed) must be a dead flat surface that don't flex under its own weight, plus maybe 1m3 of plastic on it (at last 100kg-220lbs at 10% infill). Obviously, it can't be cheap (I mean this will be realy expensive), and will need high engineering skills to succeed. From design to setup, you will need high precision.

If you succeed, you will be able print 1m3 parts, wich will take about a week to be printed for a 1 extruder machine. Of course, if everything goes well during that print time. You will need to change many 20kg (44lbs) filament rolls to complete. You are surely a rich man and/or have rich clients able to pay a lot to get an unperfect prototype. Obviously, you will be overwhelmed by the speed and the print quality of powder machines, wich can print without support.

To me, large volume printing and reprap technology does not match. If your skilled with FDM printing, it looks like a bad idea at first sight. It will cost you less and takes less time if you print pieces of a large part on several cheap small printers, then assemble that pieces. You'd rather have a wall of small printers than one huge machine. You'll be able to print different jobs at a time, or only use few of your printers for smaller parts.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2015 05:06AM by Zavashier.

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Collective intelligence emerges when a group of people work together effectively. Prusa i3 Folger (A lot of the parts are wrong, boring !)

Ramps FD is available from:

[www.geeetech.com]

Yes, this was the only source I found, but it seems that at least the marlin 32bit isnt released and that there are still some issues to be corrected. Are you using it normally out of the box? I was under the impression that it was still "super beta"

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/27/2015 05:26PM by sungod3k.