Voron in School?

[Farranger]

I am currently working to get my local community college to add some advanced tech to their Advanced Manufacturing Lab and have an Additive manufacturing class - eventually to become a series of classes.
In addition to weldiing and machining tools, they currently have one Bambu Labs P1S, 3 Elegoo Mars Pro resin printers, an Ultimaker 2 and 2+, and 2 Tronxy Moore 2 Pro clay printers. (Yeah, I don't know why either.)
Several community colleges in the area have bought some Bambu Labs stuff, as well as some local makerspaces, citing how easy it is to just get good prints.
I hold a different view - most of us learned to print in the pre-Bambu lab days where you could actually see and understand what was happening inside, and I think that is important.
My first 3d printer was the original Creality Ender 5, and it gave me some good prints with its fixed carriage (not core xy) and floating bed.
So the Voron Trident makes sense to me, even though it is clearly advanced over my old Ender. ...

I want to build at least 15 Tridents, purchasing one complete kit as an exaemplar, and we'll source the the parts and materials for the others. I think there will be an advantage to self-sourcing that others don't have because we'll buying stuff in bulk:

• extrusions in bulk lengths (2-3 meters?) that we will rough cut and then mill to length, as well as drilling and tapping,
• buying wire by the spool that we will cut to length and crimp in batches,
• we probably will even cut and tap our own linear rail, thereby only having to purchase the carriages (I am not that crazy),
• and everything else we'll buy in bulk quantities - boxes of fasteners, motors, boards, power supplies, etc.

The idea is to cut costs without cutting corners. I don't know if an actual price check will bear that assumption out, but that isn't my real question.
My question is whether or not a Voron Trident as laid out in the info on the Github site will be reliable and sturdy enough to hold up in a classroom of beginners, and if not, why not, and what should expect to have to change?

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to your opinions. (I think ... LOL)

 

[vinnycordeiro]

Honestly? Just buy Prusa printers. Easy to maintain and they have client support when needed. As much as we love our Voron printers they are still hobby-grade printers.

 

[endstop]

"Hobby grade", I disagree strongly. For an organization, Prusa may make sense for the convenient package, but for different reasons.

Granted, my 2.4 Stealthchanger with CNC parts costs about as much as two Core Ones with MMU.
But, "Hobby grade" - Not at all, the opposite actually. The Voron does just about everything right where Prusa has me scratching my head. It plays in a different league. Speed, precision, usability, durability. What Voron lacks is aggressive marketing. Don't get me started.

That said: The project you're describing screams "death march", full-time enthusiast job with everything still in shambles long after your boss decided you should really be doing something else.

Why do you need so many printers? Keeping them running in an... ahem ... hostile environment is not trivial.
How about buying an "A" printer and a "B" printer from the same reputable kit, with "B" printing while "A" is recovering from student's accidental "blob-of-doom-fights-spaghetti-monsters" artwork (wrong temperature... oops)

Electrical and fire safety (insurance) might need looking into.

 

[NoGuru]

I have to agree with Vinny here. Get a Bambu or Prusa.
Vorons take some skill to make and you are asking for non stop broken printers that others have worked on...no thanks.