I have enjoyed my Ender 3v2 but my extruder and hot end are acting up and I am ready for a more reliable printer. I like the simplicity of Bambu but it seems to come at the cost of customization. Prusa seems to be more open and extendable, but at the cost of increased complexity. What would you recommend?
What do you mean by complexity? An i3 style cartesian peinter will have fewer motors, shorter belt paths, fewer bearings and what have you, etc.
A CoreXY printer will be able to move faster than a cartesian peinter and will accelerate a ton faster too. That said, if you really want to cut print times you need a larger nozzle and thicker extrusion widths.
Prusas are generally reliable workhorses. Bambu is newer on the screen, but fairly well liked. Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about some of the cloud infrastructure and closed source components.
I’m not sure if you’ve considered Vorons. If not, take a quick look at the trident and/or the 2.4. The build will be fairly involved, but you will have a super solid base that has a lot of community support.
Except that voron 2.4s are close to double the price. Not everyone has that budget.
Kits on 3djake which has decent prices normally are 1650€ for a 300mm voron
A 250mm V2.4 is about 1200€. A trident is less than that and is more comparable to the Bambu.
Where? I can’t find one in continental Europe.
Voron doesn’t sell anything, you either have to source all the materials yourself or buy a kit. I bought a kit from formbot when I built my V0 and have been pretty happy with it. They also sell V2.4 kits and have a warehouse in Czech
Go ahead and mansplain voron to me lol…
Of course voron is just a standard design, but in order to be comparable at all, and I mean even to be in the same discussion, to prusa/bambu it has to be a full kit including every single part, only needing assembly.
Sure you can build a voron for cheaper if you spends months searching for deals, suppliers, aliexpress parts, and printing everything yourself.
I will admit, I haven’t heard of formbot, but that is quite possibly the best deal on a voron kit I have ever seen! Even paying an extra 200-300 for the printed parts, depending on supplier, that comes out to <1k€. That is a too good to be true deal. I will maybe have to buy one myself!
Get the functional parts over PIF.voron.dev for 110$.
I can only speak from the perspective of US available parts. The trident is a much closer ‘competetor’ to Bambu’s offerings, so I will use that as the comparison. Since Bambu’s offerings are 256mm^3 I’ll compare against the 250mm^3 trident.
Note that there are some sales going on for the various offerings below, but the trident is only somewhat more expensive once you factor in things like ASA/ABS for the printed parts.
Bambu’s X1c is $1,200
Bambu’s B1B is $600
A LDO bom-in-a-box trident is $1,200
A Formbot bom-in-a-box trident is $650
I was able to print functional prints on my old i3 clone with two spools of ASA, so add $70 there. All I did to my i3 clone was tape together a couple of cardboard boxes to make a quick/dirty enclosure.
Check out magic phoenix for voron kits. Good price with included upgrades/mods out of the box.
By complexity I mean plug-and-play. But, I guess it’s not a valid assumption I made.