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In case anyone is curious, the printer in the picture is 1100x1100x820 mm and costs $50k USD.
https://builder3dprinters.com/us/product/builder-extreme-3000-pro/
curious machine. I'm surprised to see such mediocre specs with that price tag.
claims to be industrial yet uses 1.75mm hot end and can't print any industrial grade materials
There's a reason you don't often see machines over 300x300x400. At that point it gets hard to keep tolerances tight, requiring manufacturing changes or else you end up with printing artifacts.
This thing prints at 300mm/s at 1100x1100x820 and it's manufactured in a first world nation at low volumes.
It's hard to see, but I think they made the gantry (the whole Z platform, I mean) out of two plates of aluminum. They didn't bolt i beams together, it's just two massive plates with holes cut into them. That's the sort of engineering they did to get this thing to work at that size, with that speed.
Doing that is expensive.
The support is awesome.
The mixing nozzle/extruder is one of the better ones.
What you call medicore specs are decent parts. They use ball bearings fan, Misumi stepper, etc. paired with decent workmanship like strain relieving the cables.
What could be cheaper are the nozzle replacements at 70€ each.Still not the worst out there in terms of nozzle pricing (e.g.150€ for a brass nozzle + heater ... [different company]).Edit: It was 70€ for 2 builder nozzles or 175€ for 6.
don't get me wrong, getting a printer this big to run at those speeds must be quite a feat of precise engineering and craftsmanship. but in my opinion this machine is no more than a novelty; a machine no more capable than an off-the-shelf ender 3.
can you imagine producing a prototype from this machine? I have half a notion to build a profile for it in my slicer just to see how long I'd be waiting for a part 1m in any dimension.
is it cool? without a doubt. but FDM at this scale using 0.4mm to 1.0mm nozzles and 1.75mm filament is pointless. I think they missed the beat here by not engineering a hot end with greater extrusion capabilities. if it were fitted with, say, a 2mm nozzle it would be much more capable of producing large parts in a reasonable time frame.
Regarding the hotend you are right. 10-15 years ago they shipped their first printer (consumer around $1.5k). The only visible difference is the longer heating zone similar to what E3D did when they made the V6 a vulcano. The the current style is was probably introduced around 2014.
It's time for them to step up the game.
I mean, my first large printer, I just took an old prusa i3 (not the mark 3, this was from years ago) and built a new frame around the hardware. had about the same performance.
I'm surprised they didn't make it a bed slinger to save on costs. That'd be hilarious to watch print something.
I built a 36" x 18" x 18" by welding a Prusa style aluminum frame up from scrap aluminum plate, and running the bed on 8mm rods and bearings. Dual Volcano 1.2mm hotend, it prints nearly as fast as that. It has about a dozen 110V heater pods mounted to the aluminum/glass bed. I've printed some big things on that since I built it about 8 years ago.
I might be $500 into it.