I totally get printing and/or sourcing parts as another barrier on entry. I was able to print my own parts with my wanhao i3 plus under a very large cardboard box. Vorons are popular enough that you can buy pre-printed and/or CNC parts now, but their print it forward program has been around for years. But all of those come with some form of cost.

Can confirm. I’m still rocking a 1070 Ti on a 1440 monitor and it more than meets my needs, granted I’m playing somewhat older AAA games. Looks like a 4060 is even better.

Build a Voron!

• rabbid Voron owner

Dig through my comment history and you’ll see pros and cons of choosing to do so. If you like building and modding it’s hard to beat. The build is pretty long, but you’ll learn a lot.

It’s a 19 minute / 2.4 mile trip. But your point still stands - you’re not covering wear and tear.

You’re going to have a hard time beating $2/mo unless you roll it into something else like blackblaze ($100/year for unlimited storage), Microsoft office 365 ($100/year with 1 TB of OneDrive), etc. If your space is going to photos, the speed and responsiveness of Google photos far outpaces some of the alternatives (cough cough OneDrive).

Self hosting is a viable alternative if you’re interested in having more control/local storage or if you are interested in this kind of thing and want to do it/dabble in it as a hobby.

I personally built a NAS, which will take far too long to amortize vs just paying $2/mo. I chose this route because I value a local backup and because a NAS can a bit of a lifestyle product. “It can double as a server!”. Sounds fun, but I would want to build the thing I host which will also take time so… You could potentially build a NAS that will average out to $2 or less a month if you have spare parts or score some used parts cheap. Odds are that route could also be used for self hosting.

How big? Potentially huge if you can get people to abandon car ownership by having a super convenient offering. Owning/leasing/maintaining a car is already expensive. We seem to be running at a situation where lower priced new cars become the thing of the past.

Not likely under Trump sadly

it’s not that unusual for regular skilled jobs to achieve 6-figure yearly salaries.

This is a… very messy and complicated area to talk about and there are plenty of stats and data setsyou can cherry pick to make things sound better than they are. Consider things like median vs average, whether or not you excluded retired folks, etc.

This graphic is a decent toe in the water:

I can’t speak for other printers, but my X-Max 3 has an absurdly thick aluminum plate

The stock 350mm Voron bed is 5/16" (8mm) thick. It’s quite hefty lol

What OP meant was volumetric flow, not the extrusion multiplier. Volumetric flow caps the volume of plastic the slicer will ask your extruder to deliver per second. Fiddling with this value can help prevent under extrusion.

What you did by reducing speed is similar, but you could run into issues if you were to modify extrusion width or layer height.

Apologies for the delayed reply, it’s been a week.

Vorons are capable because the base design is pretty good out of the box and because the design is open source. As other companies come up with cool ideas you’ll usually see a mod to adopt them to a Voron. It wouldn’t surprise me if this idea is adopted. Until very recently, things like hot ends were commodity parts made by third parties and not the printer OEMs. This made part availability fairly guaranteed and also feels more open. The good news is that it looks like Bambu will sell these parts at some point.

As for existing options in Voron land, there three popular mods out there for multi-toolhead: StealthChanger, TapChanger, and Mad Max.

I recently had a drive fail in my 4 bay nas. Amusingly, synology branded drives seem like they’re pretty close to p ice parity with OE drives these days.

Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.

It’s normal

This is disappointing. Not because it’s normal, but because so many photos of prints you see on the web extolling print quality are in ideal lighting. It’s misleading at best. I will say surface quality is oodles ahead of my old I3 clone, but this has always miffed me.

I think it’s more visible the thicker your layers are

I do tend to print in chunkier layers. Also thicker extrusions and nozzles…

If you’re printing with ASA, perhaps you could use some light acetone smoothing

It doesn’t really bother me as my prints are functional, but there’s always been this nagging thing in the back of my head regarding surface quality relative to what folks on the internet present they achieve. The photo in this post is guilty of this TBH. The print looks way worse on the bed thanks to a taller printer with top mounted lights resulting in a steep lighting angle relative to vertical surfaces. It’s like going on a picturesque trip only to find out that all the photos you’ve seen online take a lot of liberty with timing (ie super early/late in the day) and/or framing.

Eh. The days of DIY printers both costing less and out performing are a thing of the past. I would argue that Vorons are more capable than say a Baubu, but I digress.

2.4 R2 owner chiming in. I built mine about 3 years ago after window shopping for a year.

Why Voron in 2026?

• They’re fully open source. This has a couple of benefits such as (basically) guaranteed repairability in the future and super easy modability. Basically all the parts are standard, so you should have no problem sourcing replacements. Want to change something? Download the official CAD and remix
• Being open source means there’s a huge quantity of official and unofficial mods available, as well as tons and tons and tons (and tons and tons, but I’m getting tired of digging up links) of commercial hard parts if you want to tinker. Yes, commercial printers also have mods available, and even some hard part swaps, but Voron is next level if you like to tinker. Even if you don’t like to tinker, some mods are fantastic from a quality of life perspective and of course there are many many vendors that will sell you kitted parts
• The printer itself is highly capable in ways that go beyond just being CoreXY. Both the 2.4 and Trident can mechanically get their bed and gantry in plane because they use multiple z-steppers to move the bed (trident) or gantry (2.4) up/down. Bambu’s printers use a single stepper and a belt to connect things
• Even if you buy a BOM in the box you’ll learn a ton building the printer

Why not Voron?

• No official store or kit means you’re going to either rabbit hole who to buy a BOM-in-a-box from or spend a lot of time self sourcing. I personally went with West3D’s configurator
• You’re building a printer from literal nuts, bolts, linear rails, and extrusions. It’s not a hard build, but it is a long build. If you can put together IKEA furniture you can build a Voron, but it’s going to take 20-40 hours
• They’re not the budget proposition they once were
• You’ll spend more time thinking through the build up front (who to buy from, what components to swap, what out of the gate mods, etc). Easy example: want to tune for resonance compensation? Gotta mount/wire up an accelerometer on the toolhead, unless you use one of the many tool-head PCBs that include one
• Cable chains look dope, but wire breaks are real. They’re easy to repair, but they’re annoying. Granted, you can just go umbilical out the gate. LDO’s Nitehawk SB is dope
• You want to go even bigger. You can stretch a Voron taller, but Rat Rigs go quite a bit bigger

Edit: final thought. IMO I do not find myself wanting for “tech” and there’s really not much missing from a Voron out of the gate. Nearly anything a Bambu can do is easily adopted to a Voron if you want to.

Self designed very specific objects are where it’s at regarding 3D Printing IMO. Once you get into the habit of realizing that you can print a part for <x> you’ll find yourself doing it again and again.

Examples I’ve designed and printed include:

• two bluetooth speakers. I’m getting ready to print my first subwoofer
• tons of replacement parts (parts for kids toys, replacement knobs for our stove as the oem ones are $50/pop, etc)
• wheels with TPU tread and pockets for bearings for a fold up wagon. We’ve used that to cart our two kids around for 3 years now

You also find yourself being more adventurous with modifying other things knowing you can print interface parts. For example, our outdoor table had a 1.5" hole for umbrellas. We wanted a larger umbrella, which requires a bigger hole, so I cut a portion of the metal center of the table out and made a plastic adapter. I’ve also done lampshades and a bunch of other odds/ends around the house.

lol, I see. Printer tuning is a very real struggle for some and it happens that tree supports are one of the things that you can run into.

In my experience, broken tree branches come from:

• Crazy angles on the supports. This happens when a support needs to ‘grow’ over the print in order reach the thing it needs to support. This ultimately comes down to part geometry, so there’s not a ton you can do here if you can’t change the geometry or orientation of the part
• Poor bed adhesion causing the trunk to separate from the bed. Clean your bed with dish soap and dry it with paper towels. Make sure you have a good first layer by getting your your bed and gantry in parallel planes and double check your z-offset. Bonus points if you can do a bed mesh between prints
• The extruder catching on a branch and breaking it off. This is usually due warping or over-extrusion. Warping can be its own rabbit hole. Over-extrusion is easy to tune for, especially if your slicer has built in calibration aids (eg OrcaSlicer, SuperSlicer, etc)
• An ambitious slicer not making the supports themselves very strong. Slicers these days seem to avoid thin/tall trees, but they’re still usually single perimeter. I’ve configured my slicer to use 0.6mm thick walls on supports
• If you have a bed slinger, tall supports can wobble. Slowing down acceleration/jerk is really the only way to combat this

Obviously, these can all be a bit interrelated.

The support in this print is basically vertical (no crazy angles), I generally have great bed adhesion/my printer can mechanically make its gantry in plane with the bed/I run a bed mesh every print/I use klipper_z_calibration to get a consistent first layer, nothing’s warping and I’ve tuned my extrusion multiplier for this spool of filament, the support itself is strong due to its girth at the base and wall thickness, and CoreXY means that the support doesn’t really move unless the extruder is dragging some.

I agree. In fact, that’s what I tend to do - slice up a design by splitting the body/bodies and printing test pieces where tolerances matter. Things like latches, hinges, pieces that have to fit with one another, etc. I’m not sure how practical this approach would have been for this print due to its final orientation, but it’s a really good practice.

I think I got a bit too comfortable with things going per plan over my last batch of designs :( I’ll also admit to being in a bit of a time crunch. No deadline, but I have younger kids so time to model and print is somewhat limited. This is a good reminder that rushing can actually make things take longer in the end.

Massaging this print to fit wasn’t practical. Despite being off by 1% that’s still 2mm of material to remove over some pretty big spans. I did take a chisel to the cutout, but man is ASA tough. PETG is much easier to do that with lol.

Thanks re: print looks great. It’s super solid, so I’m very happy in that regard. I don’t know about you, but lighting greatly impacts how the surface quality of my prints look. Hard/direct light at a steep vertical angle makes the faces look pretty rough, but more diffuse light coming from the side makes the parts look great. I am not sure if this is normal, especially for a larger CoreXY with long 6mm wide a/b belts, or if this is something I can dig into and improve.