Came across an article: New research project by MIT and Binghamton could make FDM 3D printing a whole lot faster

Yes, it tells everyone what they already knew. The upper limit of speed with FFF with existing designs is being approached.

Let me pull something from the mothballs; a project log from the M1.

Speed kills.

Summing up, we had just discovered we could go really fast if we raised the mixer speed. Of course that experiment eventually destroyed itself, but this was from before we moved away from trying to get PTFE blends to bend to our will, and went to an all metal design.

I've made some compromises with the M2 for the sake of convenience. One of the worst such compromises, was when my 24v supply ate itself, I threw in a 12v one. Driving Nema 23 steppers with 12v with any expectation of speed, is kinda silly. Mass of the system, beyond rotor mass, was not a significant constraint yet. We had nearly the same top speed with just the bare steppers.

The fact that most of the M2 design favors accuracy over speed is another issue, but we will come back to that if we have to.

Initial tests of the Berdair Max pump with our delivery system are awesome. Cooling shouldn't be a problem anymore.

So last night we decided to bite the bullet and flip the whole thing over to 24v. We had since acquired a couple suitable 24v supplies, but they are all spoken for in the long term for other awesomeness. Through the dark magic of Amazon Prime, the majority of the required parts for the switch to 24v will be here tomorrow.

I'm hoping Colin will approve of the results.