Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?  

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

For those to whom the Creality wristwatch comparison was too obscure:

So.... anyone have any recommendations?

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

I am looking at the Vivedino Troodon. Haven't made up my mind yet but it looks like a decent printer. It's based on the Voron, so CoreXY plus its made with good components.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Posted by: @nighthawk

I am looking at the Vivedino Troodon. Haven't made up my mind yet but it looks like a decent printer. It's based on the Voron, so CoreXY plus its made with good components.

Yes, that does look like a nice one.

After reflecting on my recent experience, I think that I probably have to procure a larger build surface than what I actually need, because getting the edges of the heatbed to be near the same temperature as the center seems quite difficult.  That may be overgeneralizing from my Ender 5 Plus experience, but that's all I have to go on.  It is a brute force solution, but using a larger heatbed will obviously enable moving the print away from the edges and thereby workaround the problem in a straightforward way.  Perhaps a suitable heated enclosure would work as an alternative, but I haven't tried that before and don't want to risk it not being adequate.  Anyway, for that reason, I've decided to get the CR-10 S5, which is nominally 500x500mm build surface, and I'll use software such as Klipper to remove the ringing on the y-axis that would probably otherwise occur because of the the mass of such a large heated bed.  I'd prefer a more compact arrangement, but at least theoretically this should work.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

A 0.4mm nozzle on such a big print area is just wrong. The moment you start _using_ the build area you start waiting. Such a printer should come with a 0.6mm (or even larger) nozzle by default. Otherwise you will measure your prints in weeks rather than hours 🙁

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Posted by: @hli

A 0.4mm nozzle on such a big print area is just wrong. The moment you start _using_ the build area you start waiting. Such a printer should come with a 0.6mm (or even larger) nozzle by default. Otherwise you will measure your prints in weeks rather than hours 🙁

Almost blew coffee out my nose. Absolutely agreed. I looked over the Vivedino Trodoon page and didn't see much on the hotend. A high-capacity hotend is a necessity for anything that big. 

I took note of their use of Keenovo bed heaters and found a nice 300x300 750W AC heater that I might add to my aluminum bed upgrade on my Sidewinder.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Voron is probably you best options but you will have to build it yourself.  I looked at Hypercube, Voron, and a printer based on yhr 400x400x500 frame - http://www.zyltech.com/hypercube-evolution-frame-kit-400x400x500/

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

I'm reconsidering: I was reading that the CR-10 S5 takes a full 30 minutes to raise its glass plate up to 80C, which according to the review is the maximum temperature it can ever get to.  (source:  https://the3dprinterbee.com/cr-10-s5-vs-cr-10-max/) What's even more galling, the review states that  "The bed heater is designed too weakly and only manages to evenly heat an area of 300 x 300 mm. The temperature drops rapidly in the peripheral areas."

Unfortunately, the author didn't qualify exactly what he meant by "evenly heated," but however he defined it, that would mean that only 36% of the build area is evenly heated. 

Assuming that PETG is the filament used, and that long narrow parts are to be printed, what should the "evenly heated" target be?  Is it +/- 2.5C?  Anyone here happen to know?  

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

If creality is shipping printers with only 36% heatbed uniformity, and yet very few people who do reviews even take note of such a seemingly glaring defect, then what hope is there for doing adequate pre-sale due diligence on even lesser known printers?  No matter what the specs say, I don't know how one could buy a relatively unknown printer like, say, a  Vivedino Troodon, unless the money were held in escrow during a review period. 

For a large format printer, maybe going the open source  kit route really is no worse in terms of wasted time and money.  As long as the user community is big enough, and smart enough, it seems like there's less chance for encountering ugly surprises or having to waste money on frustrating rip-out-and-replace of stupidly designed components and assemblies.  Sigh, I'd rather buy something off the shelf that "just works," but I'm not sure that's even possible at this particular juncture in time.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

You'll probably need an AC heated bed, which introduces other concerns. It does reduce your DC power supply requirements. The Artillery Sidewinder ships with an AC heated bed, but one that needs a lot of attention to make safe. Even so, they're also guilty of only heating part of the bed. I've ordered a Keenovo 300x300mm AC heater, but I really don't have the time or inclination to futz with it.

Most of the better-known printers out there are chasing the mass market specs, with little care put into good design, engineering, safety, or usability. You're either going to buy one with limitations and spend time fixing it, or build your own and spend time assembling it. I wouldn't expect a good printer of that size to be cheap.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Anyone here own a printer like that which they can recommend? 

I recently picked up an Ultimaker S5.  It's not 400x400, but significantly larger than the I3.  It's a very solid machine and performs very well.  I converted one of the extruders to the 1.75mm filament and it works quite well with that.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that it's not cheap, even on the used market.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

@jsw

Premium may not do that price justice.  I could buy nearly 17 minis for that price.  

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

The most important ask is - What is your budget?

Personally I am avoiding any i3 style large format printers simply due to mass. If I have a print that can take 1 or more rolls of filament that means upwards of 2kg of mass or more whipping back and forth. Just not my idea of a stable system.

Any Sub $1K Large Format Printer is just going to have deficiencies somewhere. It's going to be interesting to see at what price point the XL will be released at and how it might affect the prices of large format printers moving forward.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

@dragon1291

The price mentioned was around 1500 but that was before the tool changer.  

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Posted by: @bobstro

 they're also guilty of only heating part of the bed.

I wonder why?  If it's AC based, I wouldn't think it would cost them much, if anything, to simply do it right.  If it had been DC, on the other hand, one could speculate that they were trying to get by with cheaper power supply and were just hoping that no one would notice.  Other than stupidity, laziness, or being cheap, is there maybe some good reason why these companies don't want to heat the whole bed uniformly?  On my ender 5 plus, for example, Creality only bothered to put insulation in the center underneath.  I'd estimate that Creality had insulated maybe only 50% of the the total heatbed surface underneath.  I can understand the need to keep costs low, but insulation isn't expensive, especially to a manufacturer buying in bulk. 

As an experiment, I did try covering the uncovered part with insulation of a similar type and thickness.  It did improve uniformity, but not as much as I would have thought or hoped.  In particular, the quadrant where the power cables were soldered to the PCB traces was both consistently and considerably cooler than the rest of the board.  Up to now I had figured that either Creality botched the design of the PCB heat  traces in that location, or else possibly the power cables, being made of copper, were bleeding off heat from that region.  If that was in fact the cause, then Creality's engineering of the heat traces failed to adequately account for that effect or mitigate it from happening.  Either way, it still wouldn't explain why Creality would hold back insulation to the extent that Creality did.  At least from my point of view, the few pennies or nickels or dimes saved by omitting insulation hardly seems enough to justify the sabotage of leaving it off, and so I do wonder whether there might have been some other reason?  Perhaps less extreme bed warping?  That's just a wild guess on my part, but I can't seem to think of any other possible motive to explain it, aside from the other possible motives that I've already mentioned  in this post.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Posted by: @dragon1291

The most important ask is - What is your budget?

Personally I am avoiding any i3 style large format printers simply due to mass. If I have a print that can take 1 or more rolls of filament that means upwards of 2kg of mass or more whipping back and forth. Just not my idea of a stable system.

Any Sub $1K Large Format Printer is just going to have deficiencies somewhere. It's going to be interesting to see at what price point the XL will be released at and how it might affect the prices of large format printers moving forward.

 

Regarding the mass issue, I agree that what you said seems like common sense.  Nonetheless, if youtube videos are to be believed, it seems like some people are able to get good results even on pretty huge prints using an i3 style design.  For instance, TeachingTech and PrintingNerd seem able to do it, at least some of the time.  I'm sure there probably are limits, but so far it seems as though empirical results are trumping theory.

In terms of budget, I could possibly justify the $2,000 it would take to get a Vivedino Troodon with a 500x500mm build area if I could be confident that it is a great printer and not a steaming pile.  That said, if I could spend a lot less, I'd rather do so.  By that here's what I mean:  I think the Prusa i3 MK3 does a great job of printing at its particular build volume, and so I wouldn't be happy if I had bought some other printer that cost a whole lot more, even if I had the budget.  

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

@dimprov

Personally the only "high cost" printer I am even remotely considering is the Daedalus. It's only 310 X 300 X 345 But I feel that covers about 99% of any possible use case I would ever have with it and it just looks so dang solid of a printer.  From what I have seen and heard the cost is very much worth it. 

Anything else, excluding machines geared more towards industry, just doesn't tickle my fancy at all. 

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

ratrig vcore 3 pro, they are awesome core xy machines running 9mm belts and the 3rd iteration switched to 3030 extrusions, I got a 500x500x500 of the v core pro with 3 axes before the new one came out .... I will buy the bed conversion kit at least.

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

I would love to have a 500x500 x 1000 printer.  That would print everything I need printed.  With 1000mm of Z, it would have to be a core XY.  

RE: Recommendations for a 3D printer with build area of 400x400mm or greater?

Posted by: @dimprov

In terms of budget, I could possibly justify the $2,000 it would take to get a Vivedino Troodon with a 500x500mm build area if I could be confident that it is a great printer and not a steaming pile.  That said, if I could spend a lot less, I'd rather do so.  By that here's what I mean:  I think the Prusa i3 MK3 does a great job of printing at its particular build volume, and so I wouldn't be happy if I had bought some other printer that cost a whole lot more, even if I had the budget.  

Whoops, re-checking I found that the largest size Vivedino Troodon is only 400x400mm, not 500x00mm.  Also, the biggest vodon is just 350x350mm.