Thanks! A VM is a totally viable option.

Yes, this approach is called parametric design. FreeCAD struggled with the topological naming problem for quite some time, which basically means that internally named things, and references to them, can break under certain situations. Exposure to this problem increased as the thing getting molded became more complicated, which seemed maddening from a user’s perspective. It seems like it may have been fixed in the main branch somewhat recently, which I was not aware of. That’s good news.

I’ve dabbled in Linux in the past and spend the majority of my time popping between windows and mac os. I also spend a decent amount of time in powershell/terminal, but largely in the context of work.

I’m not against investing the time learn new things, but time is very scarse these days with two younger kids.

My modeling workflow is often iterative and fusion’s timeline makes it very easy to edit a feature from way back when and then propagate that change through all subsequent steps that reference that feature. You can also add entirely new features and then update the next step in the timeline to reference them. The last time I looked at alternatives this either wasn’t supported or was fickle, but based on some comments in this post that may have changed. I’ll have to give FreeCAD a try.

Thanks, I’ll have to give it a try

Thanks for the information. I think I’ll give Linux a go on a spare SSD and can treat this as my fallback plan.

Oh, I know. I am familiar with the fusion workflow and it generally just works - even when you mess with a feature way earlier in your timeline.

I model some vaguely complex things and find that I often fiddle with things. From the last I looked into it, OSS CAD didn’t handle this very well.

The second link to this repo, thanks!

When you say it breaks every few months does that mean that fusion does its usual update thing as-per-normal and then just nopes out one day?

I haven’t looked into this at all, but wasn’t Microsoft threatening to block updates if your system doesn’t meet the requirements?

Sweet, thanks!

At this point I want to give Linux an earnest go on this box. I bought a second SSD and will just unplug the windows drive for a while.

I am curious if fusion will support LTSC and/of whatever version of 11 they call out.

Fusion said it will stop working. It’s normally a licensed product, although home users can get it for free. I suspect they have some kind of authentication mechanism built in and could prevent it from working if desired.

I built a cardboard enclosure around my poor old i3 clone to get my Voron parts printed. It was a bit janky, but it worked and I can now say that my i3 clone can totally print ASA.

But agree that not having an existing printer at all does make for a potentially harder build, especially as figuring out all the parts you’ll actually need ahead of time can be somewhat challenging.

I have a 350mm 2.4 and chose it specifically because I tend to make bigger things. The flying gantary is super cool looking, but it does come with a downside: all your tool head cables, if you switch to an umbilical instead of the cable chain, and your filament run have to accommodate the gantary getting ever higher if you have a tall print. It’s not an unsolvable problem, but it’s also a problem that doesn’t exist if the bed is the thing that moves.

One of the pluses of a Voron is that it’s enclosed, which means that you can print ASA/ABS for pretty rugged prints. This means needing to preheat the chamber - especially for larger prints. On a big printer this can take quite some time, and also requires some insulation, but there really isn’t a way around it without doing something silly like putting a heater other than the bed in the printer. Fortunately, if you’re printing a smaller part you don’t have to worry about preheating.

A three final thought on a big prints:

• when prints get big enough basically everything will warp without a heated chamber. This is especially true for ASA and ABS but is also true for PETG. I haven’t tried a big PLA print, but I imagine once they pass a certain size they’ll warp too
• if you want fast prints you should look at wide extrusions and thicker layers. I run a 0.6mm nozzle basically all the time with 0.8mm or 0.9mm extrusion widths and 0.3mm layers. It’s all about how quickly you can lay down plastic in mm^3. This will make your bottleneck your hot end
• even with chunkier layers big prints can take a long time. I printed a speaker and it took something like 20 hours for the biggest body and it was “only” around 280mm in circumference and 270mm or so tall. Granted, if I could have fit this on my i3 clone it would have probably taken 5x longer due to a much weaker hot end.

There are bigger printers out there, but between warping and print time I don’t know that I would personally want one. For the rare times when 350mm isn’t enough I can always split parts, but that hasn’t been an issue so far.

Most Voron folks will usually suggest building as close to stock as you can initially and going from there. LDO’s kits modify the stock BOM quite a bit, which can make for a more challenging build. Buying from someone like West 3D. Formbot kits use to stick to the stock BOM fairly well too.

As for support, there’s an active discord server and forum you can use to get help. They also have a print it forward program where you’re matched with a Voron owner who will print your functional parts for the cost of material.

3 hours in and no one’s brought up VoronDesign? You can’t buy their priners or parts directly, you either have to self source or buy some variant or “BOM in a box” from a third party. I’ve had mine for two (three?) years and although the build was long it was very well documented, via a 240+ page lego-like build manual. It’s a great printer and community.

Sorry for the delayed reply. No, too warm won’t cause warping. However, the hold side of your hot end will at best be ambient temperature. If it gets too warm you can clog your nozzle.

My view is “if the chamber doesn’t need to be hotter why make it hotter?”.

If you were printing ASA/ABS you want your chamber to go basically as hot as you can get it though - especially if you’re printing something big.

This is the deepest I’ve ever seen Jerboa render comments.

Lifting on the corners, especially if this was a bed sized print, was probably due to warping. It stinks that it took out your bed, but warping probably wasn’t the cause there.

My main printer these days is enclosed. When I print PETG on it I’ll pop the lid open because PETG doesn’t like to be too warm.

That looks like somewhat similar to an ultrabase bed. I have had one of those on my i3 clone for years and years. I’ve also printed a reasonable amount of PETG on it. Was the print and/or bed warm when you tried to pull it off? Prints detach much better when cool.

The ender 5 isn’t a bed slinger so it should be relatively compact for its print volume. You can certainly get a smaller printer. You can do this by getting a more compact printer and/or sacrificing build volume. If you want compact you’re probably going to want a coreXY

For example:

• your ender 5 pro is 552mm x 485mm x 510mm and has a build volume of 220mm x 220mm x 300
• a Prusa i3 mk3 is 500mm x 550mm x 400mm and has a build volume of 210mm³ (the bedslinger is indeed bigger)
• a 300mm³ Voron 2.4 is 460mm x 460mm x 480mm and has, well, a 300mm³ build volume. They also have a 250mm version that will probably save another 50mm in every dimension
• a Prusa mini is 380mm × 330mm × 380mm and has a build volume of 180mm ³
• a Voron 0.2 is 230mm x 230mm x 250mm and has a build volume of 120mm³
• I gave up on finding dimensions on the salad fork, but it’s probably going to be even smaller than the v0 due to using 15x15 extrusions instead of 20x20