ULTRA-FAST reprap, project development

Hi community. advice: wall of text, don't be scared, it will be interesting.

I'm an electric engineer, with proven mechanical experience, i have access to all kind of exotic materials and coatings, plus 5 axis cnc with precision down to the micron.
i can also print polycarbonate myself.

I wish to develop a reprap made to push the limits of speed and acceleration, and i need your help to put down a plan.
all suggestions will be taken into consideration, fact is: i have a deep understanding of physics but i built only prusas so i lack some specific experiences.

it doesn't have to be cheap, but the costs must be weighted with intelligence.
printer style: 200x200 bed, PLA as printing material to make life easier on the extruder, single extruder.
so let's start.

AXIS SYSTEM - i think the best choice here is like ultimakers, so XY moving on the same plane and Z for the plate. otherwise i'm going to shake the printed parts around and could detach from the bed. it can be improved by reducing the inertia further on X-Y. rods are part of the moving weight, alluminium holed rods (12mm external, 8mm hole) weight 1/3 of 6mm steel rods. anodized hard plating with iglidur bushings (igus). we can save at least 150 grams this way.
the extruder carrier could be printed in polycarbonate.
i know people had troubles with igus bushings, but it's due to the hole size they are inserted into. i have used them many times.

ELECTRONICS - i don't want to be limited by electronics, so arduino Due would be my best bet. (Marlin4Due + RAMPS4Due). do you think arduino Mega with 1/4 microstepping can do, for the first tests?

EXTRUDER - i think the volcano extruder can provide enough melting energy, i need to design an improved filament traction design (e.g multiple hobbed bolts, nema23 motor?) to reach needed extrusion speeds. i know this is a problem. it can melt the filament but you have to provide it. the bowden "teflon" tube could be exploited by using bike gearbox tubing, which has teflon inside but is not springy because has a steel lining outside. this adds mass of course. i'll take a weight measurement. if mass will be too much i have to think another solution.

MOTORS/BELTS - i need advice here. i suppose i can achieve 0.5kg total mass (seen by each X-Y motor) taking into account the bowden filament bending force, which is higher than normal from what i said before. wanting accelerations in the 15000 mm/s^2 accounts for 6N of force. for a "big" 30mm pulley diameter (needed for high speeds) accounts for 112 mN/mm torque (11 N/cm). i think a nema17 at high speed can not cope with this, the torque goes really down at high speed, so maybe a nema23 is a better choice, the lower speed to be compensated by the bigger pulley.
and if i want to go to 20000 mm/s^2...

CHASSIS- the external structure must be very stiff, openbuilds sells some nice stuff, i would stick with something easy to be found, a plus size T-slot beam should do. i mean, every vertical corner made by two 20x40 beams, 90 degrees each other. they could be triangulated on all sides except front side (to access the printing area). by triangulating i mean putting a diagonal beam to stiffen the structure further. a printer like this weights a lot. another choice would be to fix it to a corner in a wall.

share your thoughts

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2015 04:24PM by nasone32.

Sounds fun!

My advice would be to use steel wherever possible. Steel is strong, stiff and cheap.

Use steel guides (mgn12h or sbr12) for the sides (not moving), and maybe for the moving slides as well, since they're so precise and stiff.

For the frame, don't screw around with aluminum extrusions. Weld or bend yourself a steel frame. That'll be rigid enough not to flex at 20,000 mm/sec^2, hopefully.

I'd focus more on rigidity than on light weight. If it's too heavy, you can just use bigger motors. Making the machine stronger will give you the option of using multiple extruders, etc.

For the filament drive, here's an idea: Have an imprecise, powerful friction drive first, and then a more normal drive gear. This would give you both precision and pressure.

And overall, have you considered making a delta?

This would have to be a purely intellectual exercise. Repraps and filament based printers will only be around for a few years before high powered laser printers take over.
I would start with putting the base in a slab of concrete. For high speeds the printing base would have to be very stationary.
My bets would be on a delta design.
The Arduino Due would seem to provide the computing power. Arduino Mega would be too slow.
For very high speed I would think that there need to be 2 extruder steppers. One light motor goes on the moving platform with the extruder and the other larger motor provides the main feed via bowden.
Complex calculations would be needed.
The volcano looks good in theory- tests would be needed.

Are you sure the H pattern/Corexy design can handle the speed? There has to be something said for independent axis of motion...

EDIT: You also have theoretical extrusion limits..

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2015 06:17PM by thetazzbot.

I can't wait to see where you go with this - it should be fascinating (and possibly a little scary!). I was reminded of this video - can we add an extruder and call it good?

[www.youtube.com]

"I'm an electric engineer, with proven mechanical experience"
Got any common sense experience --- even Nikolai Tesla used that?

Why?
Fedex printing --- when you absolutely need it in 12 nanoseconds?

I believe squirting out your medium from some type of extruder may be the limiting factor!
Moving in the raw material, heating it to proper temperature
and getting it though a nozzle with a precision size is a real feat!
PLA granules may have to be heated in a large tank and pumped out
nozzle system with route heated all the way, and probably extreme pressures?
Then some type of extreme cooling system to fix the PLA.

Then again that may be simple and supersonic mechanism movement
and the noise created may be the limit?
Perhaps supersonic heating of the mechanics can melt the PLA?

You should at least go for 3mm Extruders. Your bikegear-tube won´t do it. Better look for classic motorbike tubes. They should be able to fit 3mm filament.

My concern is from a certain speed, your melted PLA will "fly away" in sharp bents and corners. And cooling down the material is another point.
Don´t expext high accuracy at high speed.
-Olaf

Actually, a few back of the envelope calculations will quickly make you realize that there are clear limits to how fast you can go with an FDM 3D printer.

Take a standard Prusa i3, or better yet, a very rigid P3Steel: the fastest I can make it go and still get reasonable quality prints is around 50~60mm/s. We can assume both the Y-axis heatbed assembly as well as the X-axis carriage/hotend assembly moving masses are around 500g each.

Now kinetic energy is as we all know e=mv². So if we want to double the speed, we have to cut the mass of the moving parts by a factor of four, i.e. we should use a print head with a mass of approximately 125g and also preferably a fixed heatbed. Ha! That's very similar to what we have with a Kossel Mini, and yes indeed, people report that they can reach around 80~100mm/s with reasonable print quality on a well-tuned, reasonably small and rigid Kossel Mini, without it falling apart after a few hours of use.

Where do we go from that? Well, there is no way to make a print head of any reasonable size with a mass of around 60g - or you could try and I would be most curious about what tungsten + unobtainium alloys you would use. You could also use granite epoxy for the base, titanium rods, etc to make your delta printer as rigid as possible, and mount it on a hydraulic platform, so it would better withstand and absorb kinetic energy, but you would still reach a speed limit within one iteration after the Kossel Mini printing speed ceiling.

So there you go:
1. Build yourself a P3Steel for around $350 and enjoy printing at 50~60mm/s.
2. Build yourself a Kossel Mini for around $350 and enjoy printing at 80~100mm/s tops (but it takes a little bit more work to get it calibrated, compared to the P3Steel).
3. Build yourself an ULTRA-FAST-AND-EXPENSIVE-ONE-OF-A-KIND RepRap for an unspecified amount of dollah and enjoy printing at 160~200mm/s - assuming you can build it and get it properly calibrated and get an extruder that works fine at that speed, etc...

Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2015 06:05AM by AndrewBCN.

Check this frame core xy that de wre designing.

Core xy
Its steel 3mm laser cut,
painted with powder coat.
2 extruders
Al Electronics hidden
Heated bed
200x200 print bed
Elctrnics ramps with big LCD
You can add an raspberry














. check the design am building process here, it is not in production yet

[forums.reprap.org]




.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2015 08:35AM by tatubias.

epicepee, Ralph.Hilton, thank you. i would prefer steel too, the T-beams choice would be to make it easier for people to replicate the idea. a heavy base would help too, concrete is easy to cast at home, i'll keep in mind as an option. for repeatability's sake i'd prefer a thick piece of easy, cheap sourceable material (any ideas here?)
your suggestions about the extruder made me think: a single nema23 could drive a series of dremel bits (like a multiple of this design, [www.thingiverse.com] ) it should have more grip and precision than a hobbed bolt. maybe two each side of the wire.

look at this print head design: [www.thingiverse.com]
i think it can be lighter than a delta effector. steel rods to be replaced by hollow aluminium rods.

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cozmicray
"I'm an electric engineer, with proven mechanical experience"
Got any common sense experience --- even Nikolai Tesla used that?

Why?
Fedex printing --- when you absolutely need it in 12 nanoseconds?

I believe squirting out your medium from some type of extruder may be the limiting factor!
[...]
supersonic[...]

no need to be aggressive.
i work in a factory where my job is development of racing CVT transmissions and engines. an i test them too, so yes, in these years i have developed a tiny bit of common sense. i solved more strange engineering problems than many will ever face in their life.
why do this? for science.
the extruder/printhead poses a serious problem, i know that. but nobody developed something that fast because nobody cared/needed. i do.
nothing supersonic. even 1000 mm/s is just 1 m/s or 3.6 kmh. slower than you walk.

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o_lampe
You should at least go for 3mm Extruders. Your bikegear-tube won´t do it. Better look for classic motorbike tubes. They should be able to fit 3mm filament.

My concern is from a certain speed, your melted PLA will "fly away" in sharp bents and corners. And cooling down the material is another point.
Don´t expext high accuracy at high speed.
-Olaf

Thank you Olaf. i was already thinking about 3mm wire, and gearbox cable tubing. accelerator throttle tubing is heavier and resist only compression, while gearbox tubing is made for traction.
your concern is a key point. cornering speed can not be increased much, the head will have to slow down before corners. But usually if it can accelerate very fast, can slow down (almost) as fast too.
cooling is an issue. any ideas?

@AndrewBCN
about kinetic energy: if it is high, just make a structure that can cope with that. a prusa i3 is not a good example, heavy plate and heavy print head moving around. the print head assembly weighs a kilogram, i'm talkin about a tenth of that.
also, e=1/2 mv² :p
about your suggestions: sorry, i have a different mentality. someone designed the deltas because was not satisfied with current designs.
buy and use what others make. what a boring life. don't you think someone invented what you are using today?

@tatubias
thank you very much, looks promising, i'll dig into your design further

i'll make up a preliminary BOM list, so i can also take a look at the costs, and start drawing some parts when i have spare time.
oh, and i should think how to cool the printed part. it is a problem when printing small objects, but it is not a problem when printing large parts, where each layer takes more time (where this printer has more reason to exist, by the way).
slicer allows slowing down on the smaller features, so this is only a partial-issue

Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2015 10:42AM by nasone32.

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nasone32
@AndrewBCN
about kinetic energy: if it is high, just make a structure that can cope with that. a prusa i3 is not a good example, heavy plate and heavy print head moving around. the print head assembly weighs a kilogram, i'm talkin about a tenth of that.
...

Just to correct a few figures that you got wrong: the weight of the print head in the Prusa i3 depends obviously on whether you have the stepper on it or if you are using a Bowden arrangement, but when using a common Greg's Wade`s geared extruder with a NEMA 17 stepper (which itself weighs around 285g), the weight of the complete print head is around 500g, not one kilogram.

If you are aiming for a print head that weighs 100g (assuming you can reach that maximum weight target), you are still in the kinetic energy/acceleration/speed range of what is achievable on the Kossel Mini, in other words, around 100mm/s, let's say 120mm/s tops.

You can call that SUPER-FAST or ULTRA-FAST as much as you want, it will still be a very small improvement on the usual print speeds one can achieve on a "NORMAL-FAST" RepRap, like the Prusa i3 or the Kossel Mini (which are both great designs where their designers were not aiming for anything ULTRA to begin with).

BTW there aren't many variations on the basic mechanism you can use for an FDM RepRap, it usually boils down to a Cartesian mechanism (and that includes CoreXY and H-Bot) or a polar one (linear deltas), simply because these are proven to work.

i think you do not unserstand, an ultimaker already prints at 300 mm/s if you want.
also, with 5000 mm/s^2, that speed is reached in 9mm.
i want to do better than this. what the hell has a kossel mini to do with this?

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2015 07:53PM by nasone32.

some ballpark figures.

in comparison a kossel mini can accelerate at 3000 mm/s^2 to 100mm/s and you can't go much faster, also because the arduino can not cope with the calculations. this is an issue of delta designs, the coordinate conversion is extremely heavy on the electronics. at that acceleration the ATmega is doing something like 600 square roots per second.
this is another reason why i don't want a delta.

on an ultimaker, acceleration could be pushed to 10000 mm/s^2, electronics and motors can cope with that, but the wooden structure start shaking like a monster.
there is A LOT of room for improvements. the rods are not bending more than a couple of microns. so the problem isn't there.
the joints on the perimetral axes do bend, they are made of wood! and the structure.

tear away all this shakiness, and 20k mm/s^2 are within reach. in 9mm it could reach 600mm/s.
on a cartesian printer, print speed is limited only by friction, acceleration/deceleration and motor max rpm, so on a longer travel it could go far beyond that.

do you want a better quality? do the perimeters a bit slower, keep max speed on the infill.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2015 07:58PM by nasone32.

You are possibly quoting figures you saw on YouTube or elsewhere on a Website: an Ultimaker does not print anything with reasonable quality at 300mm/s. If you have access to one, try it and see what happens.

And indeed you can make travel moves faster on most 3D printers, however, as anyone who has any experience with 3D printing will tell you, this changes very little in actual print times and does increase vibration levels... which is why most people keep travel moves speeds only marginally faster than printing speeds in their slicer settings. Again, try changing these settings on one of the 3D printers you have access to and see for yourself.

I am guessing reality will make a better job at demonstrating the hard print speed limits of current FDM technology than any argument I could put forward here in this thread, so I'll stop right here. There was an invitation for sharing one's thoughts in your first post and I did, but you already seem to have a number of preconceived notions that you want to hang on to.

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nasone32
some ballpark figures.

in comparison a kossel mini can accelerate at 3000 mm/s^2 to 100mm/s and you can't go much faster, also because the arduino can not cope with the calculations. this is an issue of delta designs, the coordinate conversion is extremely heavy on the electronics. at that acceleration the ATmega is doing something like 600 square roots per second.
this is another reason .

People building high performance deltas don't use Arduino Megas to control them. My Kossel can achieve 500mm/sec travel speed on long moves. The problem with printing fast isn't how fast you can move the head, it's how fast you can melt and extrude plastic and then have it solidify exactly where you want it.

---

Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

dc42's right, here. My expanded Kossel Mini can move, precisely, at 300mm/s, and that's with minimal tuning and calibration, as well as a relatively heavy E3D-v6 and an extra fan. Between the carbon rods and powerful steppers, speed isn't really the main issue. The faster you push plastic, the more back-pressure you get, so the power required is going to go up with the square (or more) of speed. On top of that, more pressure causes more filament compression, which requires more and faster retraction to avoid ooze and stringing, adding to the issue. Yes, this is possible, but expect it to work very differently from your average Prusa or Kossel.

"I wish to develop a reprap made to push the limits of speed and acceleration"

That seems to me to be a perfectly valid and interesting thing to want to explore, just for it's own sake. It seems like we have identified two main categories of problems - dealing with the physical forces resulting from rapid acceleration and getting enough filament through the extruder. Dealing with the forces involved seems largely a $$$ issue of building it strong enough and using sufficiently powerful motors and drivers to deal with the resulting weight. I'd be interested to see which design approach yields the lowest moving mass - delta looks hard to beat on that front.

High speed extruding could be investigated independently of having a completed printer. The force required is going to be the total of two components - overcoming the friction of moving the solid filament through the bowden and first part of the hotend, and the pressure required to achieve a given viscous flow rate through the nozzle. I suspect the second is much more of a problem than the first. I'm not that hot on liquid flow, but a quick google suggests that the resistance to flow of a viscous fluid is inversely proportional to the 4th power of the nozzle diameter, so increasing nozzle size will very rapidly increase flow rate. Next problem to be solved is obtaining sufficient melt rate. There's already been some discussion on this. I'd imagine starting with a single path, dual heater cartridge with an increased melt zone. There have been some interesting designs for multi-filament mixing nozzles recently - if a single path doesn't provide enough melt rate, then adapting a multipath design ought to give more headroom, at the cost of more moving mass.

James

Also define speed… if you want to print more copies faster of one or two small pieces, then two printers are faster than one fast printer, or you could have one printer printing with two heads to make two copies of the same item. FDM has inherent limitations on top speed, but it has very interesting features compared to other printing technologies, like the ability to combine multiple materials in one print, or colors, the future ability to integrate it with pick-and-place systems, the ability to make functional parts at very low cost, the possibility to use conductive filament to make integrated electic paths, etc… I would concentrate on these inherent advantages of FDM over SLA, SLS, etc.

Paucus

@JamesK
exactly my thought. I'll take your suggestion, I think i'll build an experimental extruder first. i am not worried about the mechanics at all.
The best and simplest design i can think is two double pinch wheels in series. the driver is made of a worm screw keyed to a bigger motor (nema23?), with the worm axis parallel to the filament axis. this worm screw drives the four shafts, two each side. This is to achieve a high pressure.
the friction inside the nozzle could be reduced by a dry lubricant coating.
the heat provided by more (two?)heating elements instead of one, and are valid the other assumptions you correctly provided.
also the heating block could be one-piece with the heated tip. If i use a coating, the tip could be made of aluminium which is light and good heat conductor.

I don't find anything about the debate on high VS low thermal conduction of the heated tip, but i speculate the result might have been influenced by the friction coefficient of various materials. i.e. a high conducting material could be better but usually those also like to stick to molten plastic.
what do you people think?

@paucus
you are absolutely right, but i mean speed in the strict sense of quickly building layers by the print head.

Acceleration is actually far more important than velocity for print speed. You need a long straight movement to reach a printers top speed, and that will almost never happen during infill and typical slicer paths. Sure, you can type 700mm/s into the config file but that doesn't mean your printer is ever going to reach that speed. See this guy for an example: [www.youtube.com]

Positioning at these speeds is a solved problem but still easy to underestimate. It might not sound like much, but even 0.2mm of positional error will ruin your surface finish if it isn't consistent between layers. At 1G of acceleration you can expect 250-500g of force going through the frame - aluminium extrusion and steel rods will absolutely bend on that scale.

I'm actually doing something similar since I found a cheap Ebay auction on some linear stages.

The X and Y stages have a maximum velocity of 2,000mm/s and a maximum acceleration of 50,000mm/s^2 with <0.5um bidirectional repeatability and 10nm resolution. These aren't made up numbers either, there is extensive documentation showing the exact positional accuracy of the stage under varying loads and temperatures.

Obviously the frame has to be rigid or the linear stages go to waste. I am currently considering bolting the stages to a granite surface plate. My build is likely to occupy 10x the space and weigh 50-200x as much as existing printers of similar print volume. I don't actually care that much about speed and will be using a stock E3D hotend. I just need a project for the linear stages.


The extruder is challenging since it is mostly unexplored territory. I think working in a heated chamber and perhaps even preheating the filament to 30-50c might help with layer adhesion and melt time.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2015 04:56PM by 691175002.

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nasone32
what do you people think?

I think you're going to be in for a big surprise. People have dedicated their (RepRap) lives to building a better extruder|hot end|printer|heat bed|whatever. Not saying that you can't make improvements. Just that your giant step ideas/goals are a lot harder to make rather than many baby step incremental improvements. Start making prototypes and I think you'll find out that dreaming of improvements is a lot easier than putting them into practice.

cdru may be right, but ignore him :-)
Do it, experiment.
If we knew beforehand always how hard things will be we'd never start anything complex.

Paucus

@paucus

Actually what cdru writes is always good advice, so I would not ignore him.

His point, like mine, is about something that we encounter quite frequently in this forum: you get *avatar* posting that he wants to build a better/faster/larger/revolutionary 3D printer and exposes a few ideas, then either of the following happens:

1. *avatar* immediately disappears and is never heard from again.
2. *avatar* posts a few more posts in the "General" subforum, and then is never heard from again.
3. *avatar* posts a few more posts in the "General" subforum, showing he has bought a few pieces of aluminum profile and possibly some 32-bit controller and a 24V LED strip PSU, and then is never heard from again.
4. *avatar* posts a few more posts in the "General" subforum, showing he has assembled twelve pieces of aluminum profile into a cube, and then is never heard from again.

People who really build a working 3D printer never get started in the "General" forum with out-of-this-world grandiose plans, they usually get started in the Prusa i3 forum with a standard kit build and very gradually move on from there. There are some rare exceptions of course but after some time one can easily tell the difference between the real builders and the vaporware designers...

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2015 08:37AM by AndrewBCN.

That gave me a good laugh, it has the undeniable ring of truth to it. Still, if we meet every new member with a wall of negativity we risk missing out on the enthusiasm, experience and new viewpoints that they might bring. In my case that would be mostly the 'enthusiasm' category, but nasone did indicate in his first post that he has relevant experience and access to facilities that most of us only dream of. I'd be giving him a chance to show us what he's capable of myself. In the meantime, I have some pieces of aluminum to assemble. Damn, why didn't I think of a cube before?

James

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JamesK
That gave me a good laugh, it has the undeniable ring of truth to it. Still, if we meet every new member with a wall of negativity we risk missing out on the enthusiasm, experience and new viewpoints that they might bring. In my case that would be mostly the 'enthusiasm' category, but nasone did indicate in his first post that he has relevant experience and access to facilities that most of us only dream of. I'd be giving him a chance to show us what he's capable of myself. In the meantime, I have some pieces of aluminum to assemble. Damn, why didn't I think of a cube before?

James

Hehe!

Truth be said, nobody has put up a wall of negativity, cdru's advice was to create a prototype and evolve a design from that, and my usual advice is to start with a Prusa i3 and try to improve on it (something I have discovered is incredibly difficult in practice, although at first look rather easy in theory...).

Very nice description, and you are correct on all counts...
It's a delicate balance between giving encourament and internally thinking "that's it, we'll never hear from him again..."
He should walk before he runs... but you never know. Hope we hear the results in the future.
To me the key for speed may be more on the extruder/hotend than on the mechanical part of the printer... for instance heating fast, squirting plastic through multiple-diameter hotends, much better algorithms for doing the infill quickly, or maybe printing just the outer perimeters and injecting (literally) the infill very quickly with a different method, like with a liquid resin. A way to avoid supports, which take time to print, maybe by quickly encasing the current layer with a substance that can later be removed, but permits printing on. Or using pre-build "bricks" to quickly fill in interior spaces. What other ideas can we propose?

Paucus

@ Paucus,

Regarding the extrusion issues which I agree are critical determinants of current FDM 3D printing speeds:

In theory, everything you have proposed above sounds good, the problem is going from theory to practice. But in practice we all start with a single normal extruder, for example an E3D V6, and when we reach its limits, we have to think of a possible improvement, and then the ideas which seemed good in theory start to sound extremely complicated, unrealistic or impossible in practice.

To get that more critical view and better judgment, imo it is essential to actually build a first 3D printer from an existing design, then if possible design your own and built it with some small theoretical improvements and prove that these theoretical improvements actually translate into real improvements in practice. This takes time, but it gives you a proper valuable background and experience in the subject, to venture further in 3D printer development.

Just posting in a forum and gathering comments from others doesn't get anyone very far, I am afraid. Specially in the "General" section...

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AndrewBCN
To get that more critical view and better judgment, imo it is essential to actually build a first 3D printer from an existing design, then if possible design your own and built it with some small theoretical improvements and prove that these theoretical improvements actually translate into real improvements in practice. This takes time, but it gives you a proper valuable background and experience in the subject, to venture further in 3D printer development.

Just posting in a forum and gathering comments from others doesn't get anyone very far, I am afraid. Specially in the "General" section...

At the risk of seeming pedantic, in his original post he says "but i built only prusas" from which it would seem that he has already walked the path that you suggest. We may be in danger of underestimating Nasone32s level of experience simply because he has a short history on this particular forum.

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JamesK

Quote
AndrewBCN
To get that more critical view and better judgment, imo it is essential to actually build a first 3D printer from an existing design, then if possible design your own and built it with some small theoretical improvements and prove that these theoretical improvements actually translate into real improvements in practice. This takes time, but it gives you a proper valuable background and experience in the subject, to venture further in 3D printer development.

Just posting in a forum and gathering comments from others doesn't get anyone very far, I am afraid. Specially in the "General" section...

At the risk of seeming pedantic, in his original post he says "but i built only prusas" from which it would seem that he has already walked the path that you suggest. We may be in danger of underestimating Nasone32s level of experience simply because he has a short history on this particular forum.

My bad, I confess I missed that "but i built only prusas"!

And James, I watched the YouTube video you linked to above: amazing!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2015 12:46PM by AndrewBCN.

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I watched the YouTube video you linked to above: amazing!

Isn't it! I can't imagine the forces that are acting on that thing, or the cost of the motors & drivers that are operating it.