Apologies for the delayed reply, it’s been a week.

Vorons are capable because the base design is pretty good out of the box and because the design is open source. As other companies come up with cool ideas you’ll usually see a mod to adopt them to a Voron. It wouldn’t surprise me if this idea is adopted. Until very recently, things like hot ends were commodity parts made by third parties and not the printer OEMs. This made part availability fairly guaranteed and also feels more open. The good news is that it looks like Bambu will sell these parts at some point.

As for existing options in Voron land, there three popular mods out there for multi-toolhead: StealthChanger, TapChanger, and Mad Max.

Sounds like a good place to plant some mint!

The do, they’re just hidden behind panels on the fascia like most modern cars.

On the front it’s hidden behind some trim:

And on the back there’s a reason why there’s a small seam in the fascia in this area:

The regal and Cruze both have them if you’re talking about the 2010ish+ models. I would be surprised if the Impala didn’t have one too, but maybe it didn’t.

Regal

Cruze

These are a somewhat newer occurrence in the US, so if you drive older cars you really might not have run into them. Most cars designed in the past 10-15 years have them.

We have a thin strip of mint that’s exactly what you described. Fresh mint all spring and summer is great for a variety of reasons, plus it smells good. That said, we’re constantly fighting runners trying to grow in every conceivable crevice. It tries to grow in the cement expansion joints and in the joint between our house and sidewalk by the door.

This is arguably about an un(der?)regulated futures market gone wild. If you can buy all the production for the year, before it’s even been produced, you’re going to create a shortage. One could argue that supply and demand is out of whack and that more fabs = more supply to meet demand, but if Western Digital completely sold out of hard drives when we’re only 1/6 of the way through the year then more supply isn’t really the way to fix it.

I recently had a drive fail in my 4 bay nas. Amusingly, synology branded drives seem like they’re pretty close to p ice parity with OE drives these days.

As someone who hunts said butts, can confirm!

Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.

I live in SE MI. There are two things working against residential solar here.

First, in terms of peek sun hours it’s just not a great proposition. Yay cloud cover and short winter days

More importantly, we no longer have net metering. If you generate surplus energy you can still sell it, but you sell it for below what you would have to pay it for.

Amusingly, modern wifi can offer higher speeds than Ethernet for the same level of effort. Most home Ethernet is still 10/100/1000. That’s megabit, not megabyte. 2.5 gbps and faster nics are not commonplace for both computer and routers/switches/hubs.

You’re never going to see 46 gbps on wifi 7 in the real world, but it’s still way faster than 1 gbps.

From someone with a NAS for photo/video editing and has looked into installing 10 gbps Ethernet.

It’s normal

This is disappointing. Not because it’s normal, but because so many photos of prints you see on the web extolling print quality are in ideal lighting. It’s misleading at best. I will say surface quality is oodles ahead of my old I3 clone, but this has always miffed me.

I think it’s more visible the thicker your layers are

I do tend to print in chunkier layers. Also thicker extrusions and nozzles…

If you’re printing with ASA, perhaps you could use some light acetone smoothing

It doesn’t really bother me as my prints are functional, but there’s always been this nagging thing in the back of my head regarding surface quality relative to what folks on the internet present they achieve. The photo in this post is guilty of this TBH. The print looks way worse on the bed thanks to a taller printer with top mounted lights resulting in a steep lighting angle relative to vertical surfaces. It’s like going on a picturesque trip only to find out that all the photos you’ve seen online take a lot of liberty with timing (ie super early/late in the day) and/or framing.

Not on a stock OnePlus 12

I started photography in the mid 00s with a D40 and moved to a D5300 in the 10s. My most beloved lens from that era was a Nikon 70-300mm VR FX AF-S f/4.5-5.6 G.

There isn’t really an equivalent of that lens these days as it seems like everyone is making a 100-400 instead and those are generally bigger dimensionally and weight wise. That lens was not particularly sharp once you got out of the center, although it wasn’t much of an issue for me thanks to the APS-C crop.

There are some lens designs that have been basically the same for decades now (hello Sigma DG DN) and are still excellent, but I wouldn’t paint 00s glass as all being mature. I’m using a Tamron 150-500 these days on a Sony FF body and the Tamron focuses way faster, is sharper in the center and across the frame, has great bokah, and offers better micro contrast.

00s glass is in somewhat of a weird spot. It doesn’t have as much “character” as the glass that came before it and it’s also not as technically excellent as the glass that came after it. That said, it’s pretty affordable these days and is completely useable to get great photos. I will say that photos, even taken with the D40, have held up really well.

Eh. The days of DIY printers both costing less and out performing are a thing of the past. I would argue that Vorons are more capable than say a Baubu, but I digress.

2.4 R2 owner chiming in. I built mine about 3 years ago after window shopping for a year.

Why Voron in 2026?

• They’re fully open source. This has a couple of benefits such as (basically) guaranteed repairability in the future and super easy modability. Basically all the parts are standard, so you should have no problem sourcing replacements. Want to change something? Download the official CAD and remix
• Being open source means there’s a huge quantity of official and unofficial mods available, as well as tons and tons and tons (and tons and tons, but I’m getting tired of digging up links) of commercial hard parts if you want to tinker. Yes, commercial printers also have mods available, and even some hard part swaps, but Voron is next level if you like to tinker. Even if you don’t like to tinker, some mods are fantastic from a quality of life perspective and of course there are many many vendors that will sell you kitted parts
• The printer itself is highly capable in ways that go beyond just being CoreXY. Both the 2.4 and Trident can mechanically get their bed and gantry in plane because they use multiple z-steppers to move the bed (trident) or gantry (2.4) up/down. Bambu’s printers use a single stepper and a belt to connect things
• Even if you buy a BOM in the box you’ll learn a ton building the printer

Why not Voron?

• No official store or kit means you’re going to either rabbit hole who to buy a BOM-in-a-box from or spend a lot of time self sourcing. I personally went with West3D’s configurator
• You’re building a printer from literal nuts, bolts, linear rails, and extrusions. It’s not a hard build, but it is a long build. If you can put together IKEA furniture you can build a Voron, but it’s going to take 20-40 hours
• They’re not the budget proposition they once were
• You’ll spend more time thinking through the build up front (who to buy from, what components to swap, what out of the gate mods, etc). Easy example: want to tune for resonance compensation? Gotta mount/wire up an accelerometer on the toolhead, unless you use one of the many tool-head PCBs that include one
• Cable chains look dope, but wire breaks are real. They’re easy to repair, but they’re annoying. Granted, you can just go umbilical out the gate. LDO’s Nitehawk SB is dope
• You want to go even bigger. You can stretch a Voron taller, but Rat Rigs go quite a bit bigger

Edit: final thought. IMO I do not find myself wanting for “tech” and there’s really not much missing from a Voron out of the gate. Nearly anything a Bambu can do is easily adopted to a Voron if you want to.

Self designed very specific objects are where it’s at regarding 3D Printing IMO. Once you get into the habit of realizing that you can print a part for <x> you’ll find yourself doing it again and again.

Examples I’ve designed and printed include:

• two bluetooth speakers. I’m getting ready to print my first subwoofer
• tons of replacement parts (parts for kids toys, replacement knobs for our stove as the oem ones are $50/pop, etc)
• wheels with TPU tread and pockets for bearings for a fold up wagon. We’ve used that to cart our two kids around for 3 years now

You also find yourself being more adventurous with modifying other things knowing you can print interface parts. For example, our outdoor table had a 1.5" hole for umbrellas. We wanted a larger umbrella, which requires a bigger hole, so I cut a portion of the metal center of the table out and made a plastic adapter. I’ve also done lampshades and a bunch of other odds/ends around the house.

lol, I see. Printer tuning is a very real struggle for some and it happens that tree supports are one of the things that you can run into.

If you’re moving and it’s not windy -20 doesn’t sound that bad. -35 sounds pretty brutal. -20 would also be pretty rough if it’s windy.

I’m a yank whose been stuck between daily highs of 0 F (-17 C) and 15 F (-10 C) for the past month. It’s always amusing shoveling my driveway in the evening after the kids are asleep and I start taking off layers due to body heat + sweat despite it being properly cold. I can’t imagine trying to dress appropriately where you can’t easily retreat inside and try again if you got it wrong the first time. I imagine that sweat is the enemy when you’re out in the elements like that.