Is now the time to upgrade?
Is now the time to upgrade?
With the k1, Bambu labs, and prusa xl all coming out I’m really starting to look at my 3 year old SK-GO as “slow”. Do you think it’s worth waiting for awhile and seeing if the competition heats up more or should I just pull the trigger on one of the current high speed machines
It Depends - is a higher speed printer going to solve a problem you have?
4Why not rebuild your sk go as a Voron?
1You have 3 very different things listed there.
The K1: Creality printer with many issues. Yeah it is fast corexy, but they keep having to pull it from sale and people still have it falling apart or trying to rip the hotend out of itself. Personally, I would avoid it.
Bambu Labs: 3d printer company. They have 2 different printers to choose from. The X1 carbon being the flagship, fully enclosed corexy printer. I have one and while I like it, I don't like the reliance on cloud and how locked into Bambu labs parts you are with it. As an example, a company designed and manufactured a small batch of hotend for the X1 that would boast higher flow rate and used a more normal round ceramic heater. When they asked Bambu if they could provide information on how to pid tune the new heater, bambu said "you don't. We do that at the factory". They have even stated they won't be opening that ability up so you will almost certainly never see an aftermarket heater for the bambu printers. The other option is the P1P. It is the same basic printer as the X1, but it is not enclosed and some of the features are not present such as the lidar and chamber carbon filter. If going bambu, I would probably suggest the P1P as is it cheaper (They just reduced the price $100) and works really well.
Prusa XL: Larger format Prusa printer. It also has the option for multiple print heads so you can use different filaments on a print (I think it will allow for different nozzle sizes too) without needing them to be the same temp, and without the need for purging, saving time and materials. Unless you need the additional material support, I personally consider other options. The Prusa MK4 makes more sense for most people and even then, with Prusa having higher pricing for their printers, you might find something for roughly the same price that is larger and has more serviceable parts (with the MK4 you are pretty much locked into Prusa for replacement parts, and not real upgrades or after market exist). The downside to similarly priced alternatives being much assembly is required and you may not feel comfortable doing that.
In the end you have to consider what you are looking for, and compare the features of the available options. Of the things you listed I would feel perfectly happy with either the Bambu options, or the Prusa options, but for the home user I think the Bambu options work out better. For me, I went Voron 2.4. I bought my Bambu x1 carbon so i could print ABS parts more easily. Once the 2.4 is built I suspect the Bambu will spend most of its time in the closet until I find a multi color print I want to do.
With that said, waiting doesn't make sense. Most of what you are looking at are recently released and not really do for a revision. You also have to consider things in the 3d printing world happen all the time. There isn't a cycle of new stuff like with computer hardware. If you are in the market for something new, look at what is available and see if anything fits your needs. As long as you are making a decision based on what is the latest at the time of purchase, you are probably not going to miss anything.
1I hadn’t really considered building out a Voron but looking into it, it seems like converting the so go into a voron is probably the way to go. Thanks so much for the info!
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I might be just sorta a dummy in this regard, but if you're getting prints you're happy with, why upgrade?
Most people probably don't spent all day every day printing anyway, and even if you triple the speed of a print you are still talking about a very long time to do a substantial print, so it isn't like you're going to get more out of the printer because you can print faster because the printer isn't the bottleneck
1I’m not really unhappy with my SK-GO it’s a very good machine especially for the price I got it at but I’ve had some reliability issues and it has some imo fundamental design problems (many of which have been fixed with the newer versions of the go) and it feels like if I’m going to spend the money to fix the things I’m sick of dealing with I.E. warped bed, weak/flexy x axis, bad carriage design, not built with enclosures in mind. I might as well save up some extra cash and either rebuild the machine into another design like a rat rod or Voron, or just buy a new printer many of which people seem to be raving about and don’t have the problems my GO has. Also I put roughly 10-20 hours on my machine per week so even just a 10% time savings would add up to saving me a lot of time/money over the life time of the machine.
0That all makes sense.
I've got a heavily modified tevo tornado, and I think the big thing I'd replace it for would be a heated enclosure so I could print ABS and the like without warping to oblivion. I might still get a second Z screw and motor, given that I seem to have some problems with taller prints.
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Watching this thread; this might be slightly off topic, but I’m interested in finding a good “starter printer” for someone with limited working knowledge, but something with a pretty good size print bed and higher print quality. Maybe one of the three OP mentioned is it?
1If I were starting printing today, I'd probably get an Ender 3 S1. You also can't go wrong with Prusa printers, but you'll pay a bit (a lot) more for them.
Really anything from those "best beginner printer" lists will work, as long as it has ABL (auto bed leveling).
Regardless of what anyone else says, you'll want ABL at some point, so just get it right off the bat. Because adding an ABL sensor afterwards can sometimes be super annoying.
But I wouldn't recommend anything from Bambulabs. Lots of gear on those printers is proprietary, and you will need to buy parts at some point.
With other printers you can get cheap parts everywhere. With Bambulabs printers though, enjoy waiting months for a $180 part that's $20 on every other printer.
3These new generation printers seem to be a lot more user friendly. My starter (and current) printer is the Sidewinder X2 which I got for the larger build volume, 32bit board, TMC2209 stepper drivers, direct drive extruder, etc. It's been pretty good but I've also replaced/upgraded a ton of stuff including swapping out the stock glass bed for an aluminum bed due to major warping.
If I was to buy a new printer today I'd 100% go with a CoreXY machine to eliminate the bed swinging back and forth and causing so many issues. Other neat features would be multi color/filament extruders but that's also something I could live without.
You can either go cheap up front and upgrade parts/tinker later or spend a lot up front and have a more user friendly experience. Most printers are capable of the same quality so you're really just paying for reliability and features.
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