looking for a good 3d printer

[Zeeflyboy]

While there are guys that push speeds to crazy levels with volcano nozzles and the like, typical print speeds for me are around 70mm/s or 4200mm/min, non print moves are 180mm/s or 10800mm/min... of course given the light weight it's fairly easy to have very high acceleration figures too. There can be a surprising amount of non-print moves (both long and short) so don't discount their acceleration and speed as a factor in overall print time.

I would also suggest that first of all, most of the bog standard routers out there are not capable of reliably doing anything near your 9000mm/s and secondly since yours is fixed gantry you also have an advantage in acceleration over typical routers with a much heavier gantry to throw around. There is also the factor of z-lift to consider - a lot of people, myself included, will have a printer set to lift before each non print move by a small amount (I usually set it to 0.25mm) which help stop scraping the nozzle on already printed regions. That is normally a pretty rapid move so if you are having a weighty spindle still attached to avoid alignment issues each time you replace it, the acceleration of the Z could be another factor slowing down a longer print.

Even still, I think that multiple 20+ hour sessions of your machine continuously throwing itself around at 9000mm/s with acceleration to match a typical much lighter 3d printer is going to wear out your kit much more quickly than normal use of a router/mill due to the weight/speed/acceleration demands, and it's going to be using quite a lot more power (and as your said a lot more noise) than a typical 3D printer.


I just think while it's an interesting side project, you are just better off in almost all respects building or buying a dedicated machine. Not least because tying your Router up with long prints means you can't use it for anything else at the same time!