Invites to weigh in with opinions and experience

[3dCase]

Ok so this has been a bugbear of mine for a while, and now I decided to throw it here in the group to see how other voron owners think of this.
The industrial producers of fdm machines always beat their own drums about reliability, repeatability, accuracy and speed of their machines.
I have always maintained that they are selling mostly hot air, if you keep to these criteria.
There are some machines capable of high tech materials which are hard to do, if at all, on most desktop machines. One thought is PEEK.
But if we are speaking on those mentioned criterias above, I would argue they simply cannot beat our home build vorons, because their systems, both mechanical, electronic and software, are all the same. Yes they might take klipper or a mix of any of the others, build it in and close it off, but it is basically the same thing with another badge and colour.
The hardware again is exactly the same. Belt drives with polymer toothed belts driven by standard steppers. Very rarely have I seen such machine with a ballscrew for instance.
Yet they sell for thousands if not tens of thousands, and the speeds they claim they can run is nothing special also.
I was once on an exhibition for machine building and innovations, which had a fdm section, and one producer showed off a series of machines and printed parts. Their large format printer, costing 25000 euro, had a motorcycle frame part in it, and the wuality was a disaster. When confronted he agreed they should not have displayed it.

I read this article from a canadian source (VPN on a canadian server might be needed) and this is a particular extract which irked me:

“Industrial vs. Desktop: The Performance Divide​

2025 has clearly underlined the fact that there is a widening gap between desktop and industrial 3D printers. Industrial-grade systems dominate Canadian manufacturing for the three crucial factors: precision, scale, and repeatability. Agile Manufacturing Inc. and other Canadian leaders provide volume production of critical components, adhering to stringent quality standards for sectors such as aerospace and medical devices.

Desktop 3D printers are used in rapid creative development, education, and small business prototyping. Their function enhances the larger ecosystem, but sustained investment in industrial-level robustness and dependability is essential to Canada’s competitiveness going forward. “

Personally I think this is misleading at best and a plain lie at worst.

Source: https://ground.news/article/2025-hi...tm_source=mobile-app&utm_medium=article-share

So I honestly like to know what is the general consensus here on this subject?

 

[vinnycordeiro]

Looks like an ad disguised as an opinion article.

 

[3dCase]

Looks like an ad disguised as an opinion article.

I meant opinions or experiences on industrial fdm machines who maintain those claims and thus put down a plethora of desktop machines which cost a fraction of the price.
I am also not a fan of almost any media out there these days, but that is the world we live in.

 

[Driftrotor]

Im not entirely sure what question you are specifically asking here as you seem to have just provided some evidence / information for a section of industry that is now quite vast, but for fdm machines, they are built to specific requirements base on its designed / proposed capabilities / intent of use. And this is true for both domostic and industrial intent.

It is true that our domestic fdm printers have vastly improved over the years because of a huge effort from a collective of individuals to do just that.

Industry moves slightly differently as its all done behind closed doors.
I mean, no-one want to give the potential upper hand to their competitors. So things inevitably move slower.

You must also take into account there is a right and wrong way to design and build industrial machines too.
The right way is reliable, strong but reasonably cost effective.
The wrong way is cheap, which in turn leads to unreliable.

Spec design also
So expected...
Speed
Quality
Repeatability
Ease of use
Ease of maintenance

These all play critical roles

It is unfair to cross judge industrial with domestic machines as they are intended for very differnet purposes.

Sure you can mod to hell and back a voron to print peek and this has been done.
But the cost to do it exceeds most folks budget.
We also dont know how reliable it is to do so.
High heat and dissimilar metals wont work well for this area either, due to differences in expansion and the nature of how a Voron is built.

Yes the cost of a "properly" designed high temperature advanced material fdm printer is exuberantly high.
But consider the R&D the company had to do in order for you to un-crate your new shiny machine and get reliable repetitive printing.

Also the comparison of industrial "conventional" belt drive vs leadscrew is unfair and will be used based on designed intent and costs.

place of manufacture and company pride also play a huge role in the type / quality you will receive of your selected purchase.

Opensource is great and has paved the way for manufacturers to bring products to markets that other users can use to fulfill their dreams without all the tech heavy stuffs.
Yes it is a shame that they knowingly take opensource material and shut it away, but that is out of our control for the most part.
I personally steer clear of them as i love my Vorons very much, but that doesnt mean to say that i write them off for others when recomending them.

So in a nut shell
Industrial machines is a mine field and doing your homework on them is critical to you getting a machine that works for you, even if it means that 500,000 dollar budget os wiped out to get one.

Domestic is for us smaller folk that like to tinker and reivent stuffs, even designing better domestic printers for more capable machines, but cost inevitably increases.

Peek is the holy grail for many but youd need a really really good reason to need it jn the first place.

 

[3dCase]

Im not entirely sure what question you are specifically asking here as you seem to have just provided some evidence / information for a section of industry that is now quite vast, but for fdm machines, they are built to specific requirements base on its designed / proposed capabilities / intent of use. And this is true for both domostic and industrial intent.

It is true that our domestic fdm printers have vastly improved over the years because of a huge effort from a collective of individuals to do just that.

Industry moves slightly differently as its all done behind closed doors.
I mean, no-one want to give the potential upper hand to their competitors. So things inevitably move slower.

You must also take into account there is a right and wrong way to design and build industrial machines too.
The right way is reliable, strong but reasonably cost effective.
The wrong way is cheap, which in turn leads to unreliable.

Spec design also
So expected...
Speed
Quality
Repeatability
Ease of use
Ease of maintenance

These all play critical roles

It is unfair to cross judge industrial with domestic machines as they are intended for very differnet purposes.

Sure you can mod to hell and back a voron to print peek and this has been done.
But the cost to do it exceeds most folks budget.
We also dont know how reliable it is to do so.
High heat and dissimilar metals wont work well for this area either, due to differences in expansion and the nature of how a Voron is built.

Yes the cost of a "properly" designed high temperature advanced material fdm printer is exuberantly high.
But consider the R&D the company had to do in order for you to un-crate your new shiny machine and get reliable repetitive printing.

Also the comparison of industrial "conventional" belt drive vs leadscrew is unfair and will be used based on designed intent and costs.

place of manufacture and company pride also play a huge role in the type / quality you will receive of your selected purchase.

Opensource is great and has paved the way for manufacturers to bring products to markets that other users can use to fulfill their dreams without all the tech heavy stuffs.
Yes it is a shame that they knowingly take opensource material and shut it away, but that is out of our control for the most part.
I personally steer clear of them as i love my Vorons very much, but that doesnt mean to say that i write them off for others when recomending them.

So in a nut shell
Industrial machines is a mine field and doing your homework on them is critical to you getting a machine that works for you, even if it means that 500,000 dollar budget os wiped out to get one.

Domestic is for us smaller folk that like to tinker and reivent stuffs, even designing better domestic printers for more capable machines, but cost inevitably increases.

Peek is the holy grail for many but youd need a really really good reason to need it jn the first place.

You make some good points, and as a machine engineer myself I agree with the points made in general, but I still see, in quite a few cases, that at the heart of the industrial fdm machine is sitting a machine that differs very little from our desktop version, but integrated in a larger shell, some added visual control things and a chamber heater, and obviously some changed building elements. I am not talking about the sintered metal machines, since thise are totally newly designed from the ground up, and they follow your design principles you mentioned.
I am purely speaking of a machine offered as if it is industrial and costing anything from 6000 up to 25000, which once you take away the outside panels simply is an almost exact copy of a regular desktop printer.
And we see more and more companies using normal desktop machines. One example is Prusa printers. They are used in the automotive industry (Skoda and others) to print many things which supports their production. Standoff blocks in forming machines for instance, but their are lots of other items as well. Every single one of these used to be milled and fdm is saving them money and time.
Now if Skoda would have been a blind believer of the fdm machine sales pitch, they would have invested a far larger amount of money for those machines.
And that is my point, the claims for those near-copies do not sound true as it would do for a truly newly designed type of machine.
So maybe you are correct and a large part is actually consumer driven, since they would perhaps believe those stories over and above all the amateur stuff they read on facebook.
Fact of the matter remains though, that you actually could fullfil a large range of industrial spplications in fdm with a good quality non industrial machine.
For those who copied and repackaged one such machine and then charges north of 20000 euro or dollars is misleading their clients.

The good thing is that most likely there will be manufacturers who designed their fdm machine completely from the ground up, and their machine may well be exactly what they claim. Trouble it is hard to distinguish between them for some customers looking for such machines.
Maybe in another ten years the market “rinsed” itself from those that are in it for a fast buck, leaving only those that produce a real industrial machine.