You’re four forks deep now Slic3r to Prusa Slicer to Bamboo’s slicer to Orca. It also borrowed a lot of ideas from Super Slicer. Since it’s open source, and has been gaining some momentum, it seems to have a decent amount of contributors

Why Orca?

• all the features you know and love from things up the tree
• a revamped UI
• built in tuning tests (temp tower, extrusion multiplier, volumetric flow, pressure advance, etc)
• great Klipper integration if that’s your jam

Thanks for the follow up!

I don’t know about this particular model, but the brand is well liked for their higher end printers. At budget price points there’s only so far you can stretch the BOM cost so I don’t know how much more I would expect of this printer vs other budget entries.

If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.

As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you’re probably going to need to fiddle with them. You’ll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn’t mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn’t need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.

There’s nothing wrong with an “old” printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it’s not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and “auto leveling”, but it’s worth saying that most budget printers can’t adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.

Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you’ll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.

Another commenter in here suggested filling the gap with concrete. I don’t think it’s worth it at this power level, cheapish BOM, etc. The enclosure is also ASA (the middle) and PETG (the top and bottom), so it’s a bit more dead than PLA already.

That looks like an interesting design. If you’re linking to something like that, you’ve heard of Hoffman’s Iron Law already. I chose size and low end response over efficiency. I did model some higher order enclosures, but they either didn’t get low enough (size, efficiency) or were too big (efficiency, low end response).

I’ve seen that approach taken to make the enclosure more “dead”, but at these power levels it doesn’t really matter a lot. The walls are 1.8mm thick with 30% infill. The top and bottom are PETG and the middle section is ASA. These materials are more ductile than say PLA, so they’re inherently slightly deader.

You’re absolutely correct that the approach you suggested would result in a slightly better outcome for a bit more weight to lug around and a little more design effort. It just didn’t seem worth it to me for this portable and fairly low power application.

Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.

Thanks for following up! I played the OG halflife when it came out, so I will be sure to check this out.

Let us know what you think of it! It certainly looks like it could be entertaining.

Ultimately, if the printer is going to go up in flames the source of those flames won’t originate at the cloth draped over the acrylic enclosure. The chamber barely cracked 60 °C, which is well below what smaller Vorons, especially V0s, will hit with only acrylic panels. Yay lots of surface area I guess.

It will be very interesting to see how everyone reacts (or doesn’t) to some “better looking” insulation. The sources of ignition won’t be any different, but I bet that people will be much more comfortable looking at insulated ACM panels that were built for purpose.

Yes, I’ve done skirts. At a certain print size/aspect ratio it doesn’t really matter though - the parts are going to want to warp without a warm enclosure. If you have great first layer adhesion it will just take your build plate with it. You’ll find a picture of that happening on this printer if you look through my post history.

Smaller parts in x/y and round corners will help prevent warping.

I printed all the parts for my Voron using an i3 clone under a cardboard box. I doubt that “chamber” got very warm, but it was enough for success.

The electronics are housed in a (reasonably) sealed airspace below the print bed and have two fans blowing across them. Here’s a link to CAD/STLs/some pictures: https://vorondesign.com/voron2.4. If you want to poke around GitHub, you can do so here: https://github.com/VoronDesign/Voron-2. No printer is perfect, but Vorons are fairly well thought out and I didn’t skimp out on components when I was sourcing parts. All wiring inside the enclosure is either PTFE or silicone insulated.

Here’s what it looks like underneath:

I always recommend keeping a cheap lil smoke alarm directly overhead any 3d printer, seriously

Totally covered.

I guess I’m not clear what the source of ignition would be? The chamber is fairly well temperature controlled, so it’s not likely that something inside will overheat. The cloth that’s draped over outside of the printer can’t come into contact with any hot bits thanks to acrylic panels. The chamber itself is currently sitting at 59 C after the print has been going for 10 hours (plus 1.5 hours of preheat before that).

Agree on venting, I need to duct my exhaust fan to the outside.

A space blanket is a good idea. I have a few lying around and will add one. Bonus points for being a radiant barrier (eg should help get things warmer again). I’m surprised that mylar will help prevent the spread of fires.

No adhesion helpers either, I was pretty pleased! This macro seems a bit daunting to set up and get running, but it should solve most of your challenges: https://github.com/protoloft/klipper_z_calibration

I’ve had a number of bigger prints warp with just acrylic panels :( now that I’ve finally figured out how to consistently nail my first layer the last print lifted the build plate. I was impressed, lol.

I need to figure out what I’m going to do for my door. Thinking about going clicky-clack so I can still eyeball the first layer out of habit.

I loled. This should be pretty safe though, check my other replies in the tread.

I struggled to hit 60 °C after an hour and a half of heat soak using the filter and two extra bedfans on full blast. This was measured from the toolhead over the center of bed and the nozzle 75mm off the bed. Without the insulation I was in the low 40s.

I don’t have enough cardboard to make a cardboard sleeve, but I do have ACM panels I’ve been meaning to install, along with some of that foil bubble radiant insulation.

Yup! The bedfans are also in a control loop.

This is basically what I’m planning on doing to make this look a bir nicer in the future. Do you change your bedfan speed via macro or do you only rely on your exhaust fan to regulate the temp?

The printer is a a Voron 2.4 running klipper with a chamber thermistor, controlled bed fans, and an exhaust fan so it will do a decent job regulating it’s temperature. The electronics are outside the chamber and there are acrylic panels under the blanket and hoodies. Should it come to it, klipper has thermal runaway protection. There’s also a smoke alarm right next to the printer. I suspect this will be a pretty uneventful print.

I let the printer heat soak for an hour and a half before giving it a go and barely cracked 60 °C, so all should be well. This is a Voron, so the electronics are out of the chamber, have a cooling fan, etc.

Other than looking somewhat janky, this isn’t that different than the insulated panels I’ll be swapping on to replace the current acrylic panels.