Cable Management
I just finished assembling and testing my MK3, and so far I'm really pleased. No issues -- yet -- and the print quality has been excellent. Props to Prusa for making a great kit with easy-to-follow assembly instructions.
One thing bugs me, though: I dread the possibility of having to replace any of the extruder components because that will mean having to disassemble the cable bundle.
On my other printers (not kits), the extruder connects to the motherboard using a single wide ribbon cable. There's a breakout board on the extruder assembly, and short cables to connect each component to the breakout board.
The advantages of this approach are that you don't need to build a fat cable bundle; replacing components on the extruder is really easy (replacing the hot end, for example, takes less than ten minutes); and the ribbon cable is actually designed as a flex cable so it's less likely to break because of repeated motion. Plus you avoid the rat's nest of wires in the motherboard enclosure.
Honestly, I don't see any downside to building the printer this way other than the need to have a breakout board. It would be a huge improvement in assembly, and more important, maintainability of the Prusa. I would love to see Prusa do this for the MK3S or MK4.
Josef Prusa, if you're listening, think about how much more efficiently your printer farm can run if replacing extruder components takes just a few minutes instead of having to disassemble and reassemble that cable bundle every time.
Re: Cable Management
Upvote! I have the same concern.
Re: Cable Management
A thousand times upvote !!!
Its the cable wrangling that causes such a time suck/headache whenever you have to work on something in the extruder.
Re: Cable Management
This is such an obvious move that I wonder why cable management (and the mess you see when you open the controller box and see everything just stuffed in there) has been relegated to "lets just stuff everything into a spiral coil wrap or a fabric slit wrap to make it look clean and move on department
it is as if no thought has been given to maintenance or future upgrades Prusa must be big enough now to assign one of his hardware engineeres on this as a priority project.