H1.1 kit vs Roxtock Max V3 kit?

[dmpalmer]

In the past few years, 3d printing has moved from people who wanted to fiddle with a 3d printer to people who want to 3d print things.

About 4 years ago, I built a SeeMeCNC H1.1 kit. It took me about 50 hours. The build log is at
http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php ... mer#p11401

The kit didn't really have good instructions, and many places I was forced to innovate. e.g. There were no places to mount the endstop switches and I had to build mounts out of shapelock. The open frame was unstable until I added a crossbar at the top, etc. (Hence the build log, which people seemed to find helpful.)

It never really worked reliably. The extruder always oozes and strings. Bed levelling is finicky and there are adhesion problems. More recently, the carriages have started binding and so I include an X&Y homing at each layer to recover from lost steps. I still can't build anything above a few cubic inches before catastrophic build failure of one sort or another.

Basically it was state-of-the-art for 2012. Right now, I would sell it to someone who has the mechanical skills to maintain it, or who wanted to re-kit it to get the motors, power supply, RAMBO, mechanicals, etc.

It is about time for a new printer. I am trying to decide whether to go high (Rostock Max V3 kit, $1k) or low (Monoprice $200). So any advice in the following or other areas:

1) After putting together the kit, do I have a good, reliable, high quality printer, suitable for people who want to 3d print things?

2) There doesn't seem to be an official assembly guide. There is a community support guide partially written at
http://seemecnc.dozuki.com/c/Rostock_Max_v3
but dumping a pile of parts on the table and telling the community 'you figure it out' doesn't seem to be optimal--I went through that with he H1.1. Should I wait a year until full instructions are available?

3) Is the Rostock kit complete? For the H1.1 I was always going to the hardware store to get components that weren't included, or even mentioned in the instructions. Is everything in the RTP version included in the kit? (The product page says you need solder, OK. How about RTV, shrink wrap, crimps, cable wraps, zip ties...?)

4) How long would it take somebody who spent 50 hours on the H1.1 to put together the Rostock V3?

5) Are there any modifications (carbon fiber arms, teflon rail inserts...) that I should make during the build process?

6) Should I wait for the 32b controller?

7) Any other thoughts (including 'No, buy this other printer instead')?

[IMBoring25]

That Monoprice unit has a really impressive price point, particularly for a ready-built machine. I am, however, dubious about some of the materials they say they can use (ABS on a 60C build plate is likely to be limited to small parts with smooth footprint shapes) and a 120x120x120 build volume would probably wind up more limiting than you'd think. Their replacement parts also appear to come pretty dearly and it doesn't look like they have a hardened nozzle available.

[Qdeathstar]

well, I bought the v2 in April and I can say that I had everything I needed to build the printer and was able to get good prints without any upgrades. The only gripe I had was with the heating resistors, but in the v3 they have been replaced with a heating cartridge so that's not an issue.

think3dprint3d has released a delta xl... it comes with duet electronics.... that might be the only other printer I could consider...

[Xenocrates]

The V3 is brand new. Started shipping all of 4 days ago. As far as the manual goes, it seems to be a WIP as you noted, and was written by Geneb and JJ (Geneb is responsible for the excellent and very complete V2 manuals, and JJ works at SeemeCNC for support). Geneb has had a V3 to work on the manual for for a while, but suffered an attack of real life.

1) I would say yes, much more so than the Monoprice select Mini. Mind you, I have a V2, which is it's predecessor, and still available with a long, detailed and well debugged instruction manual.

2) That is a mixture of Geneb and JJ's work, with JJ working for Seeme, and Geneb being the perennial documentation volunteer and the author of the V2 manual. I think it will be at worst two months before the manual is done. Many of the steps which have "insert wisdom here" in the text field have a rather slick video showing the assembly process as a CAD render.

3) I have so far spotted Kapton tape and solder as missing materials. RTV has been eliminated from the design, some shrink wrap and insulation as well as cable ties are supplied. Some people like me would provably want more. As far as I can tell, the only crimp connectors that are required are supplied, with those being the ones for the endstops and steppers (Supplied by Ultimachine with the Rambo in my version), and the ring/spade terminals for the power supply and heated bed connections.

4) I don't know what the typical assembly time for the H1.1 was, as I wasn't into printing then. I do know that the V2 took 20-30 hours to assembly on average, and that the V3 has a much smaller parts count and a lot less mellamine to remove masking from (Which in all honesty, was a major time sink for me when I assembled mine). With the wiring going up and down the printer much simplified, I don't think 20 hours or less is an overly optimistic estimate (In fact, I may be being very pessimistic)

5) I will make three recommendations. The first would be to put a solid state relay in the bottom to switch the heated bed. That way you can have just little signal wires dropped down one tower, and have the main power leads take one each of the others. The second, is to place some heavy duty tinfoil between the glass and the heated bed for heatspreading, or if you have access to a machine shop type thing, replace the glass with a PEI covered aluminum plate. Thirdly, beyond that, leave it stock.

6) I wouldn't hold my breath on that score. The Archim (Ultimachine's Rambo replacement in 32b), has been in the works for a good chunk of time and as yet we have little more than a handful of pictures and a year old email with the processor family it uses. I doubt SeemeCNC would go to the Smoothieboard or Duet as good as they are, and I think it very unlikely that they would chose any solution outside of those three to support.

7) If you want really, really complete instructions, I might suggest you get a V2, HE280 hotend, and the Wire-whip for it. It will be slightly more, cost wise, but the V2 is a very mature design and has a lot of the little improvements over what it originally came with packed in now, like ball cup arms, the EZR-struder, and has a extensive set of modifications and enhancements available for it, and a large community to support it. If the Monoprice Mini will do all you need, and you're not looking forward to the assembly, I would also look at machines like the Orion which has a bit smaller of a print area, costs 50 more, but comes fully assembled and with factory calibration. Also, 1K isn't that high for printers, especially with the print volume of the Max. For instance, the Taz mini costs 1250$, and the Taz 6 clocks in at 2500$, or the Cube (which you can apparently buy at staples and best buy) at 1K for a much less capable machine with closed source. The Dremel™ Ideabuilder (Which by the way, is PLA only), is half off at 499$ at my local home despot. It's a bunch of money. For a printer, it's actually a very good price for what you get.

[Eaglezsoar]

Xenocrates , thank you for your detail answer and I completely agree with everything you said. You have been a great help on this Forum
and it is appreciated. Hopefully Gene's attack of real life will be over soon and he can get back to creating the assembly manual for the V3
as he has done for the V1 and V2. I like JJ's docs for the V3 but I see no way to download it and I think that is important to let us download
and print out the manual that JJ has written.

[geneb]

The dozuki IS the manual.

JJ did a lot of work doing the SolidWorks animations and I'm doing a number of videos and small photo groups to show the end results of the animations. Andy did an insanely awesome job with the H280 assembly section, although I think he needs to work on "zoom" a bit more.

I'm filling out sections as time permits - there's not much for me to add to the H280 section, although I did make a video on putting the whip together.

The animations for each sub-section task (he280, bottom section, top section, final assy.) are done and there's enough there to build the machine if you pay close attention. The extra photos and videos for the bottom section is complete and I'll have the extra pics & vid for the top section completed this week.
My day job has been an absolute grind, and that started right about the time the v3 kit showed up, plus misc. other things have conspired to make my part of the process later than I find acceptable, and I apologize for that.

To the OP: The Rostock MAX v3 is probably the simplest and easiest to build 3D printer kit on the market right now. If you can identify a screwdriver at least 7 out of 10 tries, you'll be a rock star with this machine. You don't even have to screw around with calibrating it - you run the calibration scripts when you're done building and it works it out on its own.

g.

[Polygonhell]

I can't talk to the V3 I'm sure it's much better than the V1 I have was to build.
But there is no comparison between even the RMax V1 Kit and the H1 Kit.
The H1 was really just a collection of parts based on the Huxley design, with no real thought for how you would turn them into a functional printer.
Even the original crowd funding Max kits were extremely close to complete, I think you still need to provide some kapton tape.
Over the years the printer has evolved, and is certainly easier to assemble than it was when first released, many of the places where a user could "screw up" in assembly have been eliminated from the design.
I built my V1 in about 15 hrs with no instructions, V3's have a lot fewer parts and from what I can see very good instructions, so they should go together a lot faster.

They can produce great prints, but a lot depends on the quality of the build.
Personally I'd build the printer as is, and upgrade later.

[dmpalmer]

Thanks for all the advice! I just placed my order.

The Rostock has everything I want.

Except for a dual extruder. And feedback on the extruder and the carriages. And computer-vision based monitoring. And non-planar slicing. And optical-type resolution over a meter-class build volume. And biological organ replication. I guess I'll be buying another printer one of these days.

[Eric]

Just wait til someone makes a Julian Fries attachment!