I’ve been waiting to finish up with some major life stuff before diving into the world of 3D printers. Now that is finally behind me, and I am currently trying to find out which printer I want so that I can place an order.
So far I’ve set my eyes on the new Prusa CORE One. It ticks a lot of the boxes that I think I am after, including:
- As open as I can get (before going into that Voron-stuff, which I think I’m not ready for). I don’t want to be bogged down with having to run proprietary slicers through Wine and things like that. I am not sure how big of an issue that is with e.g. Bambu or Creality (if at all), but I’ve seen enough rug-pulls and enshittification processes that I don’t really want to risk that. I want to be sure that I can use FOSS tools such as Blender and FreeCAD for design, and similarly open slicers, and the whole workflow will work just fine.
- As future-proof as I can possibly hope for. I think the upgrade path from the MK4 to CORE One shows that they are serious about sustainability and longevity of their devices, and as far as I can tell, I should have no troubles sourcing replacement parts. I also want to support companies with this philosophy.
- Has a decent print volume (I know there are bigger, maybe I will be constrained by this at some point?)
- Enclosed - a major reason I did not want the MK4S was that it was not enclosed (but maybe you can get an enclosure?). It will be placed in my study where I spend most of my computer time (which often times is a lot, so I imagine I will be in the room while it is printing). I imagine, with the additional filter, that it will be better with an enclosure. Also, it will be easier to keep good temperature control during prints, as it can get cold here during winter.
- Locally produced (I’m EU based).
I understand that other manufacturers provide more “bang for the buck” and that I in that sense will be overpaying feature-wise. I am fine with that given my emphasis on the above criteria.
However, I am a complete newbie to 3D-printing. I am sure there are some limitations I have not thought about, and I was wondering if there are any major things I have not thought about that would actually affect me negatively and should make me reconsider this model?
On the enclosure: if you print PLA, PETG or TPU (which will probably be 99,99% of the print’s you’ll do) it has to be open
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Prusa specifically say you don’t need to keep the CORE One doesn’t need to be open because of its temperature control?
That is also my understanding. It has some ventilation in the back that helps with this.
Can you explain this? Why does it have to be open?
Assuming heat creep. Pla’s transition temp is like, in the low 50s +/- a few deg c if I recall, it goes wet noodle and can easily cause jams, absolute pain in my ass doing a bunch of pla prints in the summer on my mk3s inside a prusa enclosure, ended up setting the plate to something like 30c, had issues even with the 140mm exhaust fan on to try dropping the chamber temp. I rarely print pla in my voron, it’s basically hot bed set very low and relying on my print surface to keep the print anchored when I do. Not had issues with petg in an enclosure, personally would recommend using an enclosure for all prints anyhow, even pla gives off some nasties as far as I recall.
I personally prefer abs to either petg or pla for general use, I keep all on hand as there’s not a filament best for all use cases.
I just have to clarify that this is only useful if your enclosure also has a filter.