RatRig. The build process was tedious, but it was easy enough I figured it out... I hadn't built a printer before, not like that, and I'd say it took about a week or two of spare time?
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Nice! That's not bad at all. Any trouble with print consistency or maintenance?
Not so far. The initial calibration was a bit of work to get right, but their discord was a lot of help. I went there with a bed mesh issue and found someone had already asked about the exact same issue and their solution fixed my problem perfectly. I also had to do a fair bit of testing to get a PLA profile that worked well (the already built ones I could find were for ABS and PETG).
Reformatting this as a list for readability.
FDM:
- Voron
- RatRig V-core
- the 100
- Micron by Printers for Ants
- Powerbelt3D
Resin:
- Prometheus MSLA
- Lite3DP
SLS:
- SLS4ALL
Check out reAM250 powder bed fusion 3d printer
Looks like a step towards true industrial metal printing.
Excellent!
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.
As someone who got the "Kit" version, I must add something that drove me nuts.
The Voron Documentation is extremely good, while I had some instances in which I would have liked more detail, the instructions are easy to follow.
However, the LDO documentation is abysmal and missing quite a bit of stuff. They do have a wiki that lists things to skip but the replacement instructions are very short and barely understandable. They don't even mention things that you might need to print in addition to what the Voron needs. A specific example of this is the exhaust, the "Voron way" would be to print a cap that goes on the top at the back of the printer with a fan and a HEPA filter but the LDO kit doesn't have that because it should come with the Nevermore filter. But this isn't really mentioned there in the documentation and you need to dig through the wiki and the github project to find the right files for what needs to be printed.
I also had some trouble with the cables on the stepper motor that controls the X axis, they seem to be loose inside or don't make full contact which means that, depending on the wires position, could make the stepper motor not work that well.
Lastly, I am currently building the Box Turtle AFC (automatic filament changer) System also from LDO and, from what I can find, there is absolutely NO documentation about it. I was in the beginning of ordering some TPU spools because the build instructions of the Box Turtle say that you need some before I saw that they provide those in the Kit.
With that being said, would I source the stuff all by myself? Hell no.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do hesitate on projects like this for this rreason, it's always the small stuff that seems to get in the way of a streamlined experience. That said, I feel like building one rather than buying off the shelf would give me a lot more know-how about how to troubleshoot and maintain the system I am using, plus I prefer to support Open Source initiatives when I can over walled gardens.
You know, as an aside, this kind of part kitting is one of those things that I think LLMs might actually make a meaningful change in very shortly. No one wants to individually order all the parts on a BOM right now because it is a bunch of labor, but do it once with an activity log of your purchasing behavior and the sites/vendors used and there is no reason it cant be fully automated and shareable as simply as the BOM itself. Add in a function to check pricing and inventory against other related vendors and it could get quite good.
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.
Nice, thanks!
Nice, there was one other mention but good to see a full vouch for Voron, definitely the kind of projected I had in mind.
I've built a 0.2 and a 2.4 from kits and they're great printers with loads of mods available, but I find them had to recommend unless you have the ability to print your own parts. You can buy a kit that comes with the printed parts or get them through the print it forward program, but if you break any of the parts during the build, it can be challenging to source a replacement.
If you do build one and don't have access to another printer, I would recommend printing replacements for the most critical components once you get it running (especially the hot end parts).
Otherwise, they're super fun projects and I can't recommend them enough.
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.
There's so many mods out there for them too because of their openness, I've got a v2.4, flying gantry is cool as heck but I'd consider doing a trident, the 350mm bed size is overkill for most of my prints.
I find mine produces some really nice parts, able to hit chamber temps into the 60s pretty reliably, warp isn't really a huge concern for me with it.
Nice. Larger bed size definitely fits my needs better.
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.
OS is pretty hard, Prusa is moving away from OS and I wouldn't consider them fully OS anymore. There are a lot of good projects around Voron community and I think RatRig is OS, but apart from that I don't think there is a big OS project alive anymore. Saying that, there is a shitton of smaller projects, not full 3d printers, but motion solutions, extruders, electronic solutions, filament swappers and such, everything you need to build a 3d printer yourself.
Voron
the only one I've used is my MakerBot Rep2 and honestly it holds up for being over a decade old
If it counts, One of my friends in college had a bedslinger mish mash of like 4 different printers cobbled together to make a sort of bastard child prusa i3 equivalent. It actually made decent quality prints although it was pretty slow. That's about as open source as you can get.
Other than prusa, I'm not sure of any you can purchase. Of the build yourself ones, they are variants of prusa. Or corexy. For a bedslinger, I built a bear upgraded prusa Mk something. But custom, so not exactly. For my next, it will be a variation of a corexy. Smash together a voron and the other popular one. Because I don't like the bed design.
Plenty of open source projects out there, not sure why you would claim otherwise. The biggest is probably Voron, but it's far from the only one- Others that I'm familiar with are RatRig, Positron, the 100, the Micron, and Powerbelt3D, but that's far from an exhaustive list. There's even an SLS project called SLS4ALL.
My claim was I didn't know of any others. I've seen rat rig and voron. I'm not sure if they are really open source. I tried to contact them last year, but the documentation was locked. I'll favorite your list flow when I get some time. I'd love to build something like my first reprap.
Nice! Great list, do you run any of them?