Just make sure you’ve got good gloves/respiration and ventilation if you go MEK, as far as I recall it’s not nearly as aggressive with petg like acetone and abs so going to take some time. The solvent method is by far the one I use the most often, I wet a rag or paper towel and take my time. I recall vapour smoothing being a thing too but that’s going to need setup and the like.

I can’t comment on the other ones unfortunately, but there are a ton of mods available for Vorons that are still coming out. They’re solid platforms and great if you’re someone who likes to tinker, imo they’re also super solid as “just print” device. I’ve got mine with canbus and built a filament changer, but there’s tool changer mods I’ve seen as well.

If you do go for a voron, I’d suggest a trident. I have a 2.4 but I recently built a fixed gantry printer like how the trident is setup, it’s a lot easier to work with.

Yeah there’s absolutely a rating to look for and N95 is part of that, stateside, you have niosh ratings, you’ll see these wrt industrial ppe, but there are ratings for use with CN and CS gas. My experience with them is the chemical cartridges usually have a p100 filter combined with them for particulate too. Organic Vapour & Acids are easy to get a hold of (Used these when i worked in O&G), I don’t know how well they’d work against teargas unfortunately.

I will 100% recommend north full face, a half mask is probably better than nothing but the full face gives you eye protection too. I didn’t personally like the 3m style masks, but it’s all down to personal preference, just make sure it fits correctly.

Swap nozzles? I’ve had issues in the past with partial clogs with petg in particular, at the least it’ll remove a variable from your troubleshooting. Also echo what others have suggested and check out your filament path, make sure there’s not somewhere else causing an issue. I feel like dusty filament could potentially contribute to clogs, if you’re concerned with that there’s designs out there for in line wipers that pass the filament through some soft sponge.

Do you have any resistance feeding the filament? I’ve had a few cases where either the filament kinda tangled due to slack and would still be able to feed but needed more force, bad enough it can actually wear the filament in the extruder and won’t advance anymore. Extra friction from tight tubing, small radius bends, cardboard spools etc. can do that too.

I run a fan like this one on mine (9.9 cfm/0.277 m³/min), the ones that push more air get loud quick just as a heads up, this one I was also looking at, is 12.2 cfm/0.342 m³/min but is 39 vs 31.4 dB, I did a bunch of fan upgrades last year for both better performance and less fan noise, these will be noticeable. Don’t get heat blockages but do have some oozing I really need to get around to tuning.

The only times I’ve had that happen was when the sheet wasn’t clean enough (which yours definitely is if you’ve scrubbed it with dishsoap), bed temps too low or first layer being too close to the bed (though the textured sheet wants more squish)

The satin sheet is imo their best sheet, buildtak does some great surfaces in that size (pei sheet is great for even abs, their new surfaces are great too). I moved to using fr4/garolite sheets (I use this on my former mk3s, have a larger one for my voron too), not really found I needed adhesive for petg or pla on that.

Definitely cemented my thoughts about recommending a trident over a v2 though, I like the flying gantry (if only for the cool factor) but the fixed gantry and moving z of something like the trident is just far easier to work with imo.

For real, I already was calling it the mk3 of Theseus long before this, changed a lot of parts. Was trying to do somethings to pay homage to it though, colour choices for sure, big reason I wanted the middle frame from the original mk3s to be the front of the door, the mod I mostly used made it the front of the frame and I liked the look.

Have enough left over that I could mostly redo a bear mod mk3s, which I may totally do and give to my dad who’s been wanting to look at printing.

Mine live in my garage year round, I have a space heater for print days which has worked into into the -20c, lucky of I hit 5c ambient but enclosed printer helps. Have had no issues with the setup for years, it’s super dry in the winter so never had any issue with condensation, maybe a different story if I brought it in, but still idk if I’d be worried, you could use some dielectric grease if you’re really concerned but I personally think it’s overkill.

Cold enough things get brittle, but I wouldn’t be concerned for storage.

Bambu has what looks like a pinout in their troubleshooting docs. From your picture, that looks like a molex microfit connector to me so you could try making one if you’re comfortable doing so, good to have around imo regardless.

Other option there is to wait, confirm and document its pinout and then you have it if you ever need to repair that cable in the future.

You get a bag of haribo golden bears with the kit, manual has callouts after completing a section to treat them as a reward for completing a milestone, intro page talking about it

Building my v2.4 was spread out across multiple days, I didn’t rush anything. A lot of that time was spent making sure everything was square, tramming the gantry, cabling took a while. There’s a lot of small fiddly stuff, bearings that you’ll not want to damage, things you don’t want to accidentally pinch so while you could probably bang out a kit pretty quick once you’ve had some experience, I’d still really want to take my time with it, put time and care into the assembly and it’ll pay off with quality and reliability.

And to be fair to the total time I spent, I spent time trying to understand how things all worked together while assembling it, active assembly time was only a fraction of it.

If you’re going the route of a stealthmax, the v2 version has a servo controlled vent, original version it’s manual. All filaments give off material you don’t want to breath, nevermore has good info on this in the micro repo. Personally, I’d always aim for enclosed no matter what, the most I have in my garage is a box fan w/ decent furnace filters taped to it (works for wildfire smoke), I’d be venting outside if I had to setup inside the house.

I only ever had filtered recirc and exhaust on my enclosures, I’d rather keep it slightly negative to ambient air to try keeping the atmosphere inside the printer.

While the tn issue is better, personally found I a lot better to not use external geometry at all and instead build my references wrt the base plane. At worst I have to change a sketch attachment, that and doing chamfers absolutely last has saved a ton of grief on some recent models. I hand sketch first, how I learned cad in the first place, that workflow seems to mesh well with it.

Still the odd crash here or there but I’m accepting of it.

It’s nice to have just in case but seriously, I find my 350x350 way oversized for what I print on the regular. The best use I have for that size is printed panels, but the z height us mostly useless for 99% of what I do.

Total anecdote, I had similar washboarding with my mk3s, I did a bed levelling mod that replaced some of the standoffs with silicone tubing spacers and that helped a lot. It was always in the same spot and it would mostly show up on prints that covered large areas and toward the edges of the bed.

I do echo others though that I do think extrusion multiplier and first layer offset do play a role with it, petg doesn’t like the same amount of squish that you can get away with using abs (not to say it doesn’t happen, just doesn’t look as rough, it doesn’t cause a failed print for me and I don’t mind a quick cleanup with a deburring tool depending what it’s for).

Does it show up if you flip the sheet just as a thought? I recall having a bit more of an issue with one side of my satin sheet for example. Last thought, could be worth giving things a long heat soak before doing meshing and homing, make sure everything is more or less stable expansion wise.

I’d totally suggest looking for used prusas personally, something like a mk3s is definitely slow by today’s standards but they’re super capable, very simple and easy to maintain. I’ve modded mine to the point that the rails and axis steppers are the only original components and planning another mod right now. If you could find one for a reasonable price it’s a great platform.

If you are willing to spend a bit and want a kit/something new, I really like Vorons and other open source printers, I’ve seen decent reviews of some of the formbot kits for something like a v0.2, includes a bunch of mods you’d probably look at eventually anyhow, I’m not sure if this is in USD or localised to CAD but with printed parts and a dragon hotend (highly recommend, v6 hotends are a pain imo, they work but having the block fixed is so much nicer) is $429 from china. It’s capable of printing every part for larger Voron models (and obviously stuff like abs) and is more importantly enclosed.

Add something like a nevermore micro to it (component kit) and you’re solid (recommend enclosed and filtered, ideally you don’t print in the same room you’re in without good fume handling, I’ve done unenclosed abs in my office back 12 years ago, abs these days doesn’t stink as bad but from experience it’s super unpleasant, 0/10 do not recommend, I did it exactly once)

There’s so many mods out there for them too because of their openness, I’ve got a v2.4, flying gantry is cool as heck but I’d consider doing a trident, the 350mm bed size is overkill for most of my prints.

I find mine produces some really nice parts, able to hit chamber temps into the 60s pretty reliably, warp isn’t really a huge concern for me with it.

Are you able to mess with the first layer offset on the bambu printers? May need to bring your nozzle a bit closer, especially with a textured surface. Temps seem comparable to the stuff I have on hand.

For cleaning, is soap and water compatible with your surface? Personally found that while IPA is fine for maintenance, a few drops of unscented dish soap in water works extremely well as a degreaser, I’ve literally washed stubborn surfaces in the sink. Petg is super picky with any residual oils and the small nozzle could totally make that worse.

Maybe try running slower? Just to eliminate variables, may be worth running a quick extrusion calibration? Petg can be an absolute pain for bed adhesion in my experience.

I posted this a while back, came across a post on hackaday on doing clear lens on a resin printer with lower effort, the article links an older one about doing clear resin prints that might be helpful. To me they look pretty decent, certainly a heck of a lot better than any transparent prints I’ve done with a filament printer.

As others said though, easiest would probably be doing something like laser cut acrylic and sandwiching the picture between them.

It’ll cause more zits and the like, more stringing, don’t know that’d 100% cause the issue but certainly won’t help.

I just did a round of nylon last week which is also super hygroscopic, bag’s like at most 8 months old but seal was intact. Even printing out of a drybox with fresh desiccant I noticed more stringing and occasional blobs + nozzle buildup over the few days (Was redoing my hotend so I inspected it, no sign of nozzle leaking), can definitely make overhangs worse.