I’m looking into getting a new printer, and I’m interested in building my own. I know Voron 2.4 and Trident are the obvious ones to look at. But I can’t help but notice they are both 3+ year old printers. Considering how much the industry has grown in the last few years, it got second guessing if Voron is still the way to go.
How do Voron printers compare to the current state of the art (Prusa CoreOne+, Bambu P2 series, Qidi Plus 4, etc.)? Are there mods that are essential to improving them? Are there other DIY printers I should look at?
Thanks!
So the conundrum with the Voron world is that the Trident and 2.4 are basically as good as you are going to get for the constraints. You can add the Monolith gantry but that’s an involved mod. You can add a toolchanger or a filament changer, that’s another involved mod. And there’s a bunch of really great mods but each of them adds complexity to the build, makes the BOM larger, etc.
The one thing with the Voron is that if you want the highest accels, you probably need to ditch the extrusions. But then you can’t make it as an open source printer because you’d need to do a lot to get a rigid metal frame and there would be minimum orders, etc.
And, overall, if you look at Qidi, they’ve been making Klipper-based cube printers with active chamber heaters for quite a few years now, so the more recent Qidis are really just mods atop the ur-Qidi, kinda. So a lot of the new hotness, outside of a few Bambu things, exists as mods for the Voron. We’ll ignore that Prusa had problems delivering new printer designs for a while.
Allegedly the INDX that looks actually pretty neat that’s going to be on the Prusa is also going to be available as a kit for the Voron.
Neither of my Vorons are stock. The Trident came from Formbot so it already was a CAN-bus design with some Formbot tweaks. You definitely want a filament motion sensor, there’s a bunch of options there. I swapped to the DragonBurner toolhead, I’d probably try the A4T instead if both of them were full-sized printers. My Trident has the inverted electronics mod, that felt pretty handy. My 0.2 has the electronics compartment rearranged.
Hot take: open-source top-tier printers are a thing of the past.
We are so far by now that companies can make out-of-the-box amazing printers for far cheaper and more high-quality than any DIY solution.
You can still DIY and get freedom, customizability and repairability for it, but you can’t DIY to get the best and/or cheapest solution anymore.
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.