I’m looking into getting a new printer, and I’m interested in building my own. I know Voron 2.4 and Trident are the obvious ones to look at. But I can’t help but notice they are both 3+ year old printers. Considering how much the industry has grown in the last few years, it got second guessing if Voron is still the way to go.

How do Voron printers compare to the current state of the art (Prusa CoreOne+, Bambu P2 series, Qidi Plus 4, etc.)? Are there mods that are essential to improving them? Are there other DIY printers I should look at?

Thanks!

  • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    I can’t comment on the other ones unfortunately, but there are a ton of mods available for Vorons that are still coming out. They’re solid platforms and great if you’re someone who likes to tinker, imo they’re also super solid as “just print” device. I’ve got mine with canbus and built a filament changer, but there’s tool changer mods I’ve seen as well.

    If you do go for a voron, I’d suggest a trident. I have a 2.4 but I recently built a fixed gantry printer like how the trident is setup, it’s a lot easier to work with.

  • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    2.4 R2 owner chiming in. I built mine about 3 years ago after window shopping for a year.

    Why Voron in 2026?

    • They’re fully open source. This has a couple of benefits such as (basically) guaranteed repairability in the future and super easy modability. Basically all the parts are standard, so you should have no problem sourcing replacements. Want to change something? Download the official CAD and remix
    • Being open source means there’s a huge quantity of official and unofficial mods available, as well as tons and tons and tons (and tons and tons, but I’m getting tired of digging up links) of commercial hard parts if you want to tinker. Yes, commercial printers also have mods available, and even some hard part swaps, but Voron is next level if you like to tinker. Even if you don’t like to tinker, some mods are fantastic from a quality of life perspective and of course there are many many vendors that will sell you kitted parts
    • The printer itself is highly capable in ways that go beyond just being CoreXY. Both the 2.4 and Trident can mechanically get their bed and gantry in plane because they use multiple z-steppers to move the bed (trident) or gantry (2.4) up/down. Bambu’s printers use a single stepper and a belt to connect things
    • Even if you buy a BOM in the box you’ll learn a ton building the printer

    Why not Voron?

    • No official store or kit means you’re going to either rabbit hole who to buy a BOM-in-a-box from or spend a lot of time self sourcing. I personally went with West3D’s configurator
    • You’re building a printer from literal nuts, bolts, linear rails, and extrusions. It’s not a hard build, but it is a long build. If you can put together IKEA furniture you can build a Voron, but it’s going to take 20-40 hours
    • They’re not the budget proposition they once were
    • You’ll spend more time thinking through the build up front (who to buy from, what components to swap, what out of the gate mods, etc). Easy example: want to tune for resonance compensation? Gotta mount/wire up an accelerometer on the toolhead, unless you use one of the many tool-head PCBs that include one
    • Cable chains look dope, but wire breaks are real. They’re easy to repair, but they’re annoying. Granted, you can just go umbilical out the gate. LDO’s Nitehawk SB is dope
    • You want to go even bigger. You can stretch a Voron taller, but Rat Rigs go quite a bit bigger

    Edit: final thought. IMO I do not find myself wanting for “tech” and there’s really not much missing from a Voron out of the gate. Nearly anything a Bambu can do is easily adopted to a Voron if you want to.

  • wirehead@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    So the conundrum with the Voron world is that the Trident and 2.4 are basically as good as you are going to get for the constraints. You can add the Monolith gantry but that’s an involved mod. You can add a toolchanger or a filament changer, that’s another involved mod. And there’s a bunch of really great mods but each of them adds complexity to the build, makes the BOM larger, etc.

    The one thing with the Voron is that if you want the highest accels, you probably need to ditch the extrusions. But then you can’t make it as an open source printer because you’d need to do a lot to get a rigid metal frame and there would be minimum orders, etc.

    And, overall, if you look at Qidi, they’ve been making Klipper-based cube printers with active chamber heaters for quite a few years now, so the more recent Qidis are really just mods atop the ur-Qidi, kinda. So a lot of the new hotness, outside of a few Bambu things, exists as mods for the Voron. We’ll ignore that Prusa had problems delivering new printer designs for a while.

    Allegedly the INDX that looks actually pretty neat that’s going to be on the Prusa is also going to be available as a kit for the Voron.

    Neither of my Vorons are stock. The Trident came from Formbot so it already was a CAN-bus design with some Formbot tweaks. You definitely want a filament motion sensor, there’s a bunch of options there. I swapped to the DragonBurner toolhead, I’d probably try the A4T instead if both of them were full-sized printers. My Trident has the inverted electronics mod, that felt pretty handy. My 0.2 has the electronics compartment rearranged.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Hot take: open-source top-tier printers are a thing of the past.

      We are so far by now that companies can make out-of-the-box amazing printers for far cheaper and more high-quality than any DIY solution.

      You can still DIY and get freedom, customizability and repairability for it, but you can’t DIY to get the best and/or cheapest solution anymore.

      • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Eh. The days of DIY printers both costing less and out performing are a thing of the past. I would argue that Vorons are more capable than say a Baubu, but I digress.

        • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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          2 months ago

          I would argue that Vorons are more capable than say a Baubu, but I digress.

          Depends on the Bambu and what capability you’re after, doesn’t it?

          I know Bambu is evil, but I have to admit the H2C with its nozzle-changer is sexy. Give it a couple of AMSs and you get 7 materials with no purging. That’s a capability I don’t think a Voron has (though please, correct me if I’m wrong).

          • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Apologies for the delayed reply, it’s been a week.

            Vorons are capable because the base design is pretty good out of the box and because the design is open source. As other companies come up with cool ideas you’ll usually see a mod to adopt them to a Voron. It wouldn’t surprise me if this idea is adopted. Until very recently, things like hot ends were commodity parts made by third parties and not the printer OEMs. This made part availability fairly guaranteed and also feels more open. The good news is that it looks like Bambu will sell these parts at some point.

            As for existing options in Voron land, there three popular mods out there for multi-toolhead: StealthChanger, TapChanger, and Mad Max.

            • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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              2 months ago

              Thanks for the reply! I hope something similar gets developed. As much as I like multi-toolhead solutions, the nozzle-changer seems so much more compact.