Projects / hardware / printers
printers
Printing since 2017, and building machines from scratch for most of that. The fleet, the rebuilds, and what each one taught me.
I've been printing since 2017 and have had some version of a printer on the bench ever since. Machines have come and gone; the habit hasn't. This page is the fleet's home: repairs, mods, rebuilds and failures land here rather than disappearing into a notes file.
Building from scratch, on purpose
Most of these machines I assembled myself, and that's the point rather than a cost-saving measure. A printer you built is a printer you can fix. When something starts going wrong at layer 400 there is no substitute for having had every part in your hands once already. You know what's behind the panel, you know which fastener backs out, and you know what the machine sounded like when it was right.
It's also the fastest way I know to actually understand a mechanism. Reading about belt tension teaches you very little. Tensioning a gantry twice, badly, teaches you a lot.
The current fleet
The Prusa Core One with the INDX add-on is the workhorse. Eight nozzles has changed what I bother to attempt: multi-material stops being an event you plan a whole evening around and becomes something you just do, which turns out to matter far more than any individual print it enables.
The Voron 2.4 is in pieces. Once the Core One took over as the machine I reach for, the Voron's problems stopped getting fixed, so it came apart while I still remember how it goes together. Whether it returns as a 2.4 or the frame becomes something else is genuinely undecided.
A CocoaPress is currently being specced, because apparently the fleet now needs a printer that extrudes chocolate. Different material constraints entirely: temperature control matters in a way plastic never demanded.
What's gone
A Prusa Mini and a smaller Voron, both of which earned their keep as teachers. The Mini was the machine that made printing routine rather than an event. The small Voron was where I learned that a machine you tuned yourself fails in ways you can predict.
What I want to print next
An airless basketball in a flexible filament. A lattice structure that has to survive being bounced is a hard print for reasons that have nothing to do with resolution: layer adhesion under repeated deformation, and a geometry where every compromise shows up as a failure rather than a blemish. It either bounces or it doesn't, which is a far better test than looking at a surface finish.