Summary / What Is It?

There are two projects that make the Voron line interesting to me.

Firstly, I'm making my own printer that I designed every piece of (https://hackaday.io/project/184212-alice-3d-printer). I have a lot of respect for the Voron Design group, and I assume that they made all of their decisions sensibly. While I still want to make my own for experience, and because my goals might not line up with theirs in 100% of cases, it still seems smart to see what choices they did make and to try and understand why.

Secondly, I am making a custom circuit board for a carriage-mounted controller (https://hackaday.io/project/184838-hot-end-board), and if I ever complete that/sell it, the Voron crowd is likely the single largest market. Creality owners would likely dwarf them, but most Creality owners likely stick with stock things. The Voron group have proven that they are at least open to tinkering.

This end result of this project should be a stock Voron v0.1. If you're after the end result, you can get the equivalent of this by watching a YouTube video or reading the directions yourself.

Where I can potentially add value, and the reason I decided to pull the trigger on writing this, is in my commentary. There are likely going to be things that I disagree with. There are going to be times that I discover non-obvious bits that aren't in the manual and I will endeavor to comment on them here. I will likely opine about things that might be able to be improved upon (side note: I probably won't improve on them, at least initially -- I need a mostly-stock v0.1 for testing with my hot end board. I don't want to sully that.).

Initial Update

There's going to be a lot for a first post, because I didn't originally plan on even making this a project.

Firstly, I am buying the pieces in ... pieces. This is both for money reasons (I'm spending a LOT on other projects, have kids, etc.), but also to "savor" the choices as it were.

The first thing I bought was the aluminum extrusions. I went with Misumi as I find their prices extremely fair, and I don't want to deal with Chinese QC issues and/or shipping delays any more than strictly necessary. I could write a huge post about the complexities of Chinese manufacturing, but that doesn't belong here. Suffice it to say that most of the time I will be choosing a source that's not AliBaba or Amazon. Yes, that's going to be difficult sometimes.

The extrusions arrived quickly, packaged well, and with nothing obviously wrong with them. I do need to thread the holes (I did not choose to have Misumi do that for me as the price for that add-on isn't great, and I need to get the tooling to do that eventually anyway) and drill the access holes for blind joints. That isn't a huge priority for me yet because that is not what's blocking me yet.

I have also gotten on the PIF waiting list. At the rate it has been going, it should be a week or maybe two until I'm at the top of the list. I have asked for black and yellow. The PIF process is interesting. Knowing that it's just a bunch of volunteers and those volunteers basically break even on filament costs, I'm surprised at how polished it is. But if I were to compare it to what I'd want out of a commercial offering, it's pretty lacking. I'm not about to complain too loudly though, given I do know that it's volunteers who aren't even properly compensated.

(Side note: I am strongly considering joining PIF once I get things further along to give back, solidify myself in the community, and also stress test the boards I'm designing.)

I found the estimate surprisingly accurate. We were at about 80 requests/month when I joined, I was around #80 at first, and we're on track for being about a month after I signed up.

Just the other day I did another big batch of purchases. In preparation for getting to the front of the PIF line, I decided to really lock in my hot end choice. I originally wanted the Mosquito, then I see that there's some beef between Voron and Slice. Mosquito isn't an option for PIF (it's possible I could ask for it once I get to the front of the line and they might even let me do that, but the main form ONLY lists Slice's direct competitor). I'm personally torn about the whole drama thing. I legit see both sides to the issue, and I'm a bit annoyed that Voron through PIF is strongly taking sides. They claim that they are relatively neutral, and they let Slice-focused third party mods on their mods page, but it's clear that they have their opinion. That's fair, I'm just not sure I care nearly as much as they do.

But I did put in an order for the Dragon hot end. As I said, I see both sides, so it's not like I'm 100% opposed to the Dragon existing, and using the same logic as before, my test bed needs to be as close to "stock" as possible if I'm going to market to the Voron crowd. That means Dragon.

I ordered the linear rails from China. This is what I'm most nervous about. I see people saying the cheap Chinese rails are just as good, and some saying they're garbage. I'm sure, like is often the case, it comes down to a lack of QC and luck of the draw. They're taking a MONTH to get here, and they could delay the build quite a bit if they aren't good. ... But the rails from a trustworthy manufacturer are something like eight times as much. I find it difficult to swallow that much price difference. Often the shipping from China eats any savings, but not when it's that big.

I got my heated inserts. Nothing really to report there. I doubt there's going to be much opportunity for spectacular failure in that part.

I still need to order the massive quantity of screws.

Let's talk about the screws, actually. I really like that they standardized, almost entirely, on M3 screws. I HATE how my Ender 3 v2 has five different hex sizes. M3 is a pretty decent middle ground, too. It's big enough to handle a decent amount of load, but small enough that I can probably integrate them into a lot of my designs going forward. When I do order the screws (which will probably be the next big purchase), I will probably order 3-4 times as many as I need in each size to theoretically be able to build more printers, but also to stock up on a good variety of screws for my own designs.