2.4 owner chiming in. It's a long build and you should probably skip the drag chains due to wire breaks. I am very happy with the printer and the community. Mods are readily available, the stock models are all open source so if you want to make your own mods it's easy, etc. My printer is also extremely reliable - click print, walk away, come back to a completed print. You'll need to do some klipper setup to get here, but it's very achievable with some basic macros like Z Caliberation.
As for print volume, larger prints result in more warpage if you want to print in anything other than PLA. It's all about chamber temps, but larger prints = larger printer = more surface area for your enclosure to lose heat. Big PETG prints needs an enclosure, but it doesn't need to be that intense - I was fine with acrylic panels and even popped the top. Big ASA/ABS prints need an insulated enclosure, but I can now print large ASA things successfully. To go with your enclosure you'll also need a method of actively hearing it. Bedfans, and under bed filtration, is how I dealt with this on my Voron. Since Vorons are designed for an enclosure, all the electronics are not inside the enclosure. I do not know if that's the case for the Prusa.
OP already replied, but the answer was super brief: they invest in their future. I don't know what that looks like for them, but for us it means funding an emergency fund plus 401ks, IRAs, and college funds for our kids. Even if you're not able to set aside a ton, the more money you can invest when you're young the better off you'll be thanks to the power of compounding.
If you're lucky enough to advance your career put the extra money into your emergency fund and/or investments - you won't miss it.
If you're in debt, try to target one loan to pay off. Once you pay off that single loan keep paying that amount towards your next loan. Repeat until necessary. For example, after we paid off our car we put what used to be our old payment as extra $$ for our mortgage.
Good thing Tesla follows a direct sales model and their dealerships are really just company owned store rooms as opposed to some massive corporate go-between that's "only there to protect customers" while inflating financing pricing to skim $$, bolting on overpriced accessories, etc. Those massive corporate interests that spent $80.8 million lobying for their existence in 2022 are surely here to help the little guy/gal.
Very few residences have proper ventilation. In the US, a microwave above the stove is common. Microwave often do have a fan function, but the vast majority don't vent outdoors. I doubt that running air through a very thin filter will do much good.
With no enclosure I would be pretty confident warping due to low ambient temp is what's causing your print failures. With the top popped my chamber is around 40 °C / 104 °F and I haven't experienced any PETG warping. My printer lives in my basement, which occupies a similar temperature range as your garage. On my old unenclosed i3 clone I would run into warping on bigger PETG prints.
If you're feeling ambitious you could try throwing a (big) cardboard box over the whole thing and see if that helps. A few bed fans for good measure could be enough. I wouldn't treat this as a permanent solution, but it could help you troubleshoot.
My daily printer is a 350 mm^3 Voron 2.4. I print larger prints most of the time, if you dig through my post history you'll find some examples.
Your issue isn't bed adhesion, it's warping. I've had large prints coil to the point of pulling my spring steel bed off the magnet pretty significantly. You can continue to try to fight this (clamp the bed down), but ultimately you're unlikely to succeed until you get warping under control.
Big prints can be very warp prone. In terms of ease/low warpage, I would say TPU > PLA > PETG > ASA/ABS.
Out of the box, Vorons are enclosed. I leave the sides on, close the door, and pop/rotate the top panel 45° for airflow when I'm printing both PLA and PETG. This has resulted in warp free prints for both materials.
For ASA/ABS, I was not able to achieve warp free prints until I was able to hit chamber temps of 55-60 °C thanks to swapping ACM panels and adding some radiant insulation. I also have 4x bedfans to help heat my chamber. Two are normal bedfans and two are part of an under bed carbon filter.
So questions:
Are you running an enclosure?
Do you know what chamber temps you're able to achieve?
For the test in question, top/bottom layers would help more than walls. I could see walls mattering more for different types of loading. Considering this video didn't really see an increase in strength until 40% infill, one or two more top/bottom layers might actually use less material and result in more strength/rigidity.
I resisted converting to Bluetooth headphones for a while and this route provided a decent bridge. Bluetooth LE audio seems like it will be nirvana between low latency, audio quality, and energy efficiency but not many devices support it currently.
This is a pretty cool video. It would be interesting to do the same style test and leave infill fixed at a lower value while progressively adding more top/bottom layers. My suspicion is that more top/bottom layers would result in more stuffness.
Thanks for the reply, I was genuinely curious and haven't looked into this much beyond window glancing.
I've done some level of flatbed scanning with a ruler to get a known scale and the results have been pretty consistent, but I totally get not wanting to be size limited. I generally print bigger things, which is one of the reasons why I haven't looked at a scanner very hard.
A big reason why I wanted an All-in-one 3D scanner was because I want to reverse engineer objects I see "in the wild" and in museums
That's an interesting use case that I hadn't considered. Makes sense that you want portable and adds the extra challenge of likely not being able to touch the object being scanned.
I agree with you, but it is an amusing premise - even if it is pretty inaccurate. Here's some very quick figures.
The majority of the carbon the human body release is from breathing. Evidently it's about 1 kg of co2 a day or so. All the people on earth combined exhale about 7% of emissions we create from fossil fuels. Even looking at something as small as lawncare, the numbers are super lopsided. Your average lawnmower produces about 40 kg CO2 per hour or use, so if you're (un?)fortunate enough to live somewhere with a lawn, cutting it will produce more CO2 than you do.
2.4 owner chiming in. It's a long build and you should probably skip the drag chains due to wire breaks. I am very happy with the printer and the community. Mods are readily available, the stock models are all open source so if you want to make your own mods it's easy, etc. My printer is also extremely reliable - click print, walk away, come back to a completed print. You'll need to do some klipper setup to get here, but it's very achievable with some basic macros like Z Caliberation.
As for print volume, larger prints result in more warpage if you want to print in anything other than PLA. It's all about chamber temps, but larger prints = larger printer = more surface area for your enclosure to lose heat. Big PETG prints needs an enclosure, but it doesn't need to be that intense - I was fine with acrylic panels and even popped the top. Big ASA/ABS prints need an insulated enclosure, but I can now print large ASA things successfully. To go with your enclosure you'll also need a method of actively hearing it. Bedfans, and under bed filtration, is how I dealt with this on my Voron. Since Vorons are designed for an enclosure, all the electronics are not inside the enclosure. I do not know if that's the case for the Prusa.