There was a time when I relied on more inexpensive solutions to 3D printing.
And I am not trying to imply this as a bad thing. The payback in experience and understanding received throughout the years when working with 3D printers has played a massive part in my (rather small) engineering journey.
But, maybe I should expand a bit more of my idea of solutions. In short, solutions are printers themselves, as 3D printing services has always been a bit of a hassle, at least based on the projects I get myself into. With that being said, there is a million and one options out there in terms of FDM 3D printers. The systems that most people see are non-open source, prebuilt or assembly required kits with similar and different attributes all together. All of this seemed very interesting, but I am a college student. I don’t necessarily have the room for a full-scale 250mm+ bed size plastic slinger of death (as much as I wish I could).
I hear the crowd: “Just buy an Ender… It’s cheap and it works well”. And I liked this idea for a long time, hence why I still have one. But I wanted something a bit different. For starters, I wanted to move away from the classic bedslinger i3 motion system. Something maybe quicker would be an awesome plus as well. Floating or flying gantry was fine either way (I didn’t even realize that the Micron was a thing until after building).
The result?
This is Boxxy, my Voron 0.1. Fitted with belted Z, canbus for the toolhead, and everything needed to run this thing quick. Although this system is almost exclusive for ABS and ASA, it’s awesome for prototyping. Coming from an ender, the layer stepping is incredibly as well (no more magic numbers). I love this printer like a son.
Now, although the kits seemed very intriguing, I wanted to source the parts myself. I figured that if I was going to spend the money for something nice, I should really take a deeper look into the BOM. Below you can find the excel sheet that I placed together during the sourcing time.
This printer has been an incredible experience. Seriously, I love this machine. There are problems, the biggest one being me. It was a big learning curve, but I was determined. But the biggest plus that came out of this experience was the people from the Voron community and beyond.
I am on a couple different online communities, all striking from different interests throughout the years. The DIY printer community (Voron, Annex, Mercury One, etc.) is, if not one of the, most helpful group of people I have ever met online. When I initially joined the Voron discord, I was immediately pointed to a ton of resources for me to research. Lots of experienced input and discussions placed my heart on a V0.1 system.
But then I thought, “Now what?”. I had no previous experience with these machines, let alone building them. All of the sudden, I was invited to a much smaller discord owned by a user named Boxxy. We immediately hit it off, showing me where, what, and how to buy parts for my system. All of this while listening to some very experienced members: Dripping, Blink, speedy, Brother Daniel, the other Daniel, Kyle, Ham, Adam, lore, tdsychov, Tony, ohpvp, clee, the list goes on and on. So many awesome people that gave me their time, expertise, and input throughout the entire of my building process.
And the rest is history: the name, the process, the end result. And I couldn’t be more happy to be apart of something special.
