With the k1, Bambu labs, and prusa xl all coming out I’m really starting to look at my 3 year old SK-GO as “slow”. Do you think it’s worth waiting for awhile and seeing if the competition heats up more or should I just pull the trigger on one of the current high speed machines
I’m not really unhappy with my SK-GO it’s a very good machine especially for the price I got it at but I’ve had some reliability issues and it has some imo fundamental design problems (many of which have been fixed with the newer versions of the go) and it feels like if I’m going to spend the money to fix the things I’m sick of dealing with I.E. warped bed, weak/flexy x axis, bad carriage design, not built with enclosures in mind. I might as well save up some extra cash and either rebuild the machine into another design like a rat rod or Voron, or just buy a new printer many of which people seem to be raving about and don’t have the problems my GO has. Also I put roughly 10-20 hours on my machine per week so even just a 10% time savings would add up to saving me a lot of time/money over the life time of the machine.
That all makes sense.
I’ve got a heavily modified tevo tornado, and I think the big thing I’d replace it for would be a heated enclosure so I could print ABS and the like without warping to oblivion. I might still get a second Z screw and motor, given that I seem to have some problems with taller prints.
The tornado was my first printer back when it first came out in 2017! The second z screw made a HUGE difference on my machine, same with adding braces to the z and switching to kilpper so I could run input shaping (no matter what though I was always limited by the heavy glass bed). I ended up buying the SK-GO because I tightened the bed leveling knob too much and shattered the bed lol.
There’s a lot of info on moving to a duet3d board, I did that, and I found a tiny direct drive extruder. Printing the braces was the very first thing I did, since my joke is the first thing you 3d print is more parts for your 3d printer. :P
I assume you mean Rat Rig :) Their printers do look good on paper, especially from a value-for-money perspective, but I’ve heard so much negative stuff about that company that I’d be very wary of doing business with them. Usually the complaints fall into one of the categories; no quality control, no support, delays, and/or poorly printed parts (i.e. the parts of the Rat Rig printer that are 3d printed). IIRC the worst design flaws of the VCore 3 have been addressed in 3.1 by incorporating fixes by the community, but allegedly the company still denies that those problems existed in the first place. You can ofc. be lucky and have no issues at all with Rat Rig, but I would recommend asking around among people who have bought printers from them to see what their experience has been like. This is just things I’ve heard, so don’t take my word for it :)
Also if you do go for Rat Rig, you probably want to avoid the larger models they offer. The coreXY design doesn’t scale indefinitely, and when the belts get too long you might run into print quality issues, and be forced to print slower. The largest Voron Design offers is 350x350, probably for a good reason.
If you’re into DIY, Annex Engineering printers are pretty cool. Slightly more expensive than Vorons since they have 2 stepper motors per axis, but I think with the benefit that their designs scale all the way up to 500x500 build volume. Annex also focus their designs 100% on speed and quality, while Voron has stated that they are willing to sacrifice some for aesthetics, so it depends on what you value.