The First Layer#
It was Chinese New Year in 2022. I was visiting my cousin’s house for the day with my family and relatives. And upon entering his house, we saw Yuan Baos decorating all around his house! I thought little of it at first, but after having my fair share of potluck and mahjong, my other relatives and I gathered in his room where he showed us how he was able to make so many of them. There, in the middle of his desk, sat a 3D printer slinging hot melted plastic viciously into a perfectly symmetrical and golden Yuan Bao.
Following this event and getting re-introduced to 3D printing in SUTD’s 10.014 Computational Thinking for Design module, followed again by some more weeks of research and consultations with my cousin, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase my first 3D printer: a Creality Ender 3 Pro!
Creality Ender 3 Pro#
I got it off Carousell for $100 and spent another $100 on upgrades such as a BMG extruder, bi-metal heatbreak, PEI bedsheet and a new mainboard with silent TMC22xx motor drivers. These upgrades gave me the option to print PETG which is stronger and more thermally resistant than PLA which I used to print mods with.
With every upgrade, I learnt more and more about the mechanics of 3D printing and the inner workings of a 3D printer.
In these first few months, I printed tools such as a laptop stand to save space on my desk and parts of a variable capacitor for my 10.017 Technological World project.
Overall, I spent a good amount of my first two terms in SUTD playing around with this printer and learnt so much about 3D printing and mechanical design with it.
Out-growing the Bedslingers#
By the middle of Term 2, I absolutely fell in love with 3D printing and 3D printers. I would spend hours searching for new mods for my Ender 3 Pro on thingiverse and tweaking my slicer settings to get perfectly consistent surfaces on my prints or to make my printer print faster. However, the returns on the future improvements I had planned for were deminishing over time. The bedslinger platform that all Ender 3s are based on had speed limits as the printer has to “sling” the entire print and print bed to print along the y-axis.
Maybe I had out-grown my humble Ender 3 Pro? 😢
It was then I remembered about my cousin’s personal 3D printer. It was smaller but it moved so much faster than my Ender 3 Pro. What model was it again?
More specifically it was the VORON 0.1, a small CoreXY printer designed by the folks at VORON Design.
An interesting fact is that VORON Design actually doesn’t sell any printers. They create open-source designs that users can build themselves. The project began in 2015 with the goal of creating a no-compromise 3D printer that was fun to assemble and could operate 24 hours a day without constant adjustments. What started as a one-person operation has grown into a tight-knit group of engineers united under a common design philosophy, dedicated to creating production-quality printers that anyone can assemble at home.
One of the main benefits of a CoreXY system is allowing the printhead to move in both the x and y axes. This means that the print and the printbed do not need to much around much during printing while the lighter printhead moves instead. Thus, solving the speed limiting issues of bedslingers.
Going All In#
After spending hours watching build guides, sourcing for pre-sourced build kits and interacting with the VORON community, I figured out what printer in the VORON line-up I wanted and how I would go about building it. Ultimately, I settled on a FORMBOT VORON 2.4R2 kit purchased it along with other mods for $1200.
That’s a lot of money for a broke university student, but I felt that it was an investment in myself and for a quality tool that can be heavily utilised for future projects to come.
As of writing this in Feb 2025, I would say that this bet has really paid off. I have learnt so much from building 3D printers and made so many friends from it! What started as a personal project for myself has now become a community of VORON builders in SUTD!
I hope this blog post inspires you to join too! 😊
