looking for a good 3d printer

[magicniner]

I've just upgraded to a Mk3 bed on a 12v printer and although it's not quick it's not as slow as some have experienced.
The Mk3 bed has two 12v heater circuits, connect them in parallel and it runs on 12v, connect them in series and it runs on 24v but in either case each circuit only gets 12v, for heating the problem is not the voltage it's the voltage drop experienced with inadequate power supplies often shipped with basic 12v machines.
I am planning to upgrade a separate bed heater PSU with a torroidal transformer, a rectifier, a bit of smoothing and a DC-DC solid state relay.
I have a larger format 3D printer build in the pipeline for which I've decided to use 240v Silicone heater pads using a solid state relay to interface with the control board's standard heater output.

[Desertboy]

The higher voltage on the steppers is mainly for speed not the torque. I think it makes a difference there.

I run my printer at 24v I never noticed a difference in print speed when I upgraded from 12v but I did notice the heated bed, maybe it makes more a difference with a 32bit controller (I modded a ramps board to 24v)

The nema's do seem a little quieter at 24v.

[Zeeflyboy]

Best is probably debatable.

Personally I just have heater/alu plate/print bite. Its nice and light (my printer moves the bed for Y axis so lighter the better really), good heat transfer and quick to warm up.

If you want a removable bed then of course you need another layer using something flat. Personally I'd probably use a thin steel plate and use high temperature magnets to retain it.

[Desertboy]

I print onto Kapton tape or straight on to a mirror with ABS juice (Acetone and ABS dissolved together). Since I rebuilt my printer and now it's level I rarely have one that doesn't stick to the bed. At least for me 99% of sticking to bed problems were to do with the nozzle being too high or too low.

If I got another one whatever I bought/built I would make sure the Z axis has a contactless solution for setting the Z height. Inductive probe works well as long as you have an aluminium heated bed I use an 8mm probe and it will sense the aluminium bed through the mirror glass which is nice. Optical end stops are good too and hall effect switches. I found microswitchs unreliable for the Z axis.

Never ever use stainless for a print bed stainless has very poor heat conductivity. Tooling aluminium is the best choice for a bed because it's light and has excellent heat conductivity that's why they make heat sinks out of it. The super flat is just a bonus.

[A_Camera]

Desertboy, so you mean that the inductive sensor will sense the aluminium table? I thought it only senses magnetic material. Also, how thick is your table?

[Clive S]

Desertboy, so you mean that the inductive sensor will sense the aluminium table? I thought it only senses magnetic material. Also, how thick is your table?

Yes they will but you need the 8mm one

[cropwell]

I am always wary about axial sensing with inductive sensors, after crushing one. The coil at the end is quite delicate, even though it has a plastic shield.

[Desertboy]

Yes they will but you need the 8mm one

Yes the 4mm doesn't sense through the mirror and you also need to feed it 12v so if you have ramps you will need to wire 2 resistors to drop the output to 5v otherwise you fry the Arduino.

[AlexDoran]

The firmware for this can be found here
https://github.com/St3dPrinter/Marlin4ST

Can't view that very well on my phone, I didn't think Marlin had been ported to 32bit yet.

Alex

[Fred]

I jumped in and contributed a little bit of code on Smoothie and thought they were very helpful, especially as I was a C++ newbie.

I think V2 has been on the cards for quite a while so I wouldn't hold your breath.