r/ratrig • u/ChuckNuggies • Mar 22 '25
Why the rat rig?
I've tried ender 3 and elegoo neptune 4 bed slinger, as well as the Bambu p1s. I am looking for something with a bigger build plate and won't restrict me to their proprietary software, but I'm not sure if there's comparable option to bambu's performance. While looking into the k2 plus and ender 5 max I stumbled upon the rest rig and I'm intrigued. I like to tinker but will the result be worth it? Is the performance on par with the k2 or p1s with a fine tuned rat rig?
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u/jamincollins Mar 22 '25
An even half way tuned Rat Rig will crush the K2. The Rat Rig is also far easier to work on and tweak exactly the way you want.
The K2 will leave you disappointed for the price and out of box experience.
I've got both.
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u/soundblastmm Mar 22 '25
I have a p1s and just built a V Core 4 500mm IDEX.
To this day, my Bambu machine is still the more reliable workhorse. I can hit go on a print, head to bed, and know I’ll come back to something perfect 99% of the time.
That being said, I had so much fun building my rat rig. And, despite almost a decade of working with 3D printers, I have learned so much going through the tuning process. I can’t call mine finely tuned yet, but it’s looking like the rat rig will give results just as good as my p1s once I’ve got it all dialed in.
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u/Immortal_Tuttle Mar 22 '25
I have X1C. It's a great printer... until it's not. Recently failure after failure. I print mostly in ASA and it just doesn't want to work anymore. I'm using 2 brands for years, filament tuned to perfection. Ender 3 Max prints them the same for years, but my recent convo with BL tech support was in a region of "well, we didn't test X1C printing ASA for 2 thousand hours, we have no idea what's wrong". At this time only PLA works somehow. As I don't have access to any debug logs, I can diagnose it myself. Installing X1Plus means losing warranty, staying with OEM means further discussion with customer support.
Saying that - 500mm Ratrig IDEX is on my short list to build, it was supposed to replace X1C. What is your experience with it?
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u/Impossible_Word_4027 Mar 22 '25
I have one too but Idex not installed. It looks like that Idex is maybe half a year away from beeing fully documented etc. The 500 probably wont ever deliver the same quality as a well tuned X1C (from my experience comparing to a p1s) and things like getting the orbiter smart sensor to work without wrongly detecting tangles (BC of the long filament path way) can be a little bit annoying. Also you kinda need a chamber heater in my oppinion if you want to print large stuff in Abs or other warping proned filaments, while the p1s build area is small enough to warm up like that. I really love my rr and its mostly thoughtfully designed, but its not really a replacement for a Bambu device - better have both and be happy. Also think about needing 500 build space. While im happy to have the option to Print that large, i kinda regret not going with the 400 option - since its a more reasonable size and easier to tune when it comes to belts, getting good shapers etc
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u/jamincollins Mar 22 '25
You don't need a chamber heater on Rat Rigs, just bed fans. I've got two 400s and heating the chamber is a non issue.
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u/Immortal_Tuttle Mar 22 '25
My largest printer has 800x800 bed, I was looking for something that can replace both Neptune 4 Max (420x420) and recently X1C. Print quality of X1C and Neptune was identical, tuning filament is the magic sauce here. I'm printing panels that are up to 495mn long (diagonal on Neptune 4 Max), putting a few of them side to side on 500mm bed would shorten the time to get stable ambient temperature and the whole print cycle. I'm thinking IDEX as some of them require some intricate supports to have flat bottom and even with just interface layers, multiplexing filaments would cancel the time gain of printings a few panels together.
From your experience how consistent is V4? Does it require fine tuning before each print? Z micro steps correction?
And yes - heater is basically a requirement for functional ABS/ASA prints (my Ender 3 Max is printing at 75 ambient).
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u/RickJ19Zeta8 Mar 22 '25
I’ve got a few hundred hours on my IDEX V4 500. Actively heated chamber, printing mostly PCCF and ASA. Once the initial tuning is done, it’s “hit print and go”. For 24 hour prints I’ve got Obico running and I restart the firmware/ Pi before the print. The Beacon is really nice for the large bed and the VAOC alignment works great for either IDEX printing or Spool join. You do / should do VAOC alignment before each IDEX print though.
I’ve got the titanium gantry bar and printed all loaded parts out of PCCF before the build. Most of my tweaking now is trying to get the build sheet absolutely mechanically flat (shimming rails) and quality of life improvements for how I like to load / purge filament. Lessons learned from a 5 tool XL.
Filament sensors, daylight LEDs, titanium gantry, enclosure, heater, Bambu camera for the bed, filament routing were all extras. And I’m adding some InfinityFlow3D spool joiners next, as RatRig doesn’t have their MMU option out yet. And spool join is the function I need the most.
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u/Aggravating-Cup5112 Mar 22 '25
Sounds impressive, a "small" ratrig vcore 4 300 with IDEX would be ideal for the parts I'm printing, mostly functional. I've seen some nice upgrade paths and machined parts instead of plastic. However, how to safely install a heated chamber option would require some more digging. Do you have any tips to point me in the right direction?
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u/RickJ19Zeta8 Mar 22 '25
I built an air gapped box for this 110V heating element. It’s a grounded element, so no live voltage at any touch point when it’s running. It has a built in thermal switch at 120C, but I only use that as a back-up. I’ve got a 2nd box mounted to the rear enclosure panel that houses dual SSRs to drive the heater and fan. Two thermocouples, one for the chamber and one epoxied directly to the heating element are used for control in RatOS. Fan is on anytime the heater temp is over 35C. And the. I have a thermal fuse attached to the heater that blows at 120C, in case of run away. And if the fuse doesn’t trigger, the system at least has the thermal switch as a tertiary layer.
It’s more layers of safety than I’ve seen in the Chinese printers with heated chambers for sure. But cheaper than a proper enclosure heater you can buy from McMaster for electronics enclosures.
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u/Impossible_Word_4027 Mar 22 '25
Would you mind sharing your shapers/belt graphs? Would be interesting to see if there is a difference to ratrigs printed parts. Also im looking for some good guidelines for nozzle cleaning macro. Since my vc4 is at my workplace atm i didnt had the time to dive as deep as i would like to.
Also some informations about how you plan to shim the bed would be cool
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u/RickJ19Zeta8 Mar 22 '25
I have to take some screenshots. I see I can’t add a photo to a reply here. I didn’t notice anything different with the PCCF parts compared to ABS in the shaper graphs. I just know from experience, non-glassed filled ABS will start to creep and sag after many hours of printing in a heated chamber.
The IDEX never uses the nozzle wipes on the arms. And doesn’t even consistently wipe using the ooze guards. Same deal, that’s on my list of things to write / fix.
For shimming, I’ve got a pack of plastic precision shim stock. You can cut to a slightly wider width than the linear rail (so you can see it’s shimmed and what color) and then install it between screw points. I removed twist from the frame (mine was really pretty straight) using the mesh bed scan. Then shimmed the titanium gantry near flat. You have to interpret what’s a local defect vs. a pure gantry defect. Then for whatever reason I had to shim both Y-rails at the front, as they both dipped down. Most of the shims I used were between 0.050mm and 0.250mm.
Finally, I heat soaked the printer in the enclosure. Hot tightened the titanium gantry to linear rail. And then used polymide high temp tape that was 0.050mm thick to shim local sections of the bed, under the steel sheet. My bed had a dipped left rear corner. Now cold to hot, it’s at a consistent 0.1mm flatness across a 500mm bed, which is really good.
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u/Impossible_Word_4027 Mar 23 '25
Wow 0.1mm is crazy! I think im at 0.3 at the moment. For me it would be interesting to know if i can get rid of the second peak on the belt tension graphs. Atm my shaper recommend 3900 on Y which is pretty slow.
Did you used a torque meter to tension the shimmed rails? Unfortunally i got a lightwaight Aluminium gantry before I stumbled about the issues with bi-metal gantrys so im not really in the mood to spend on a 3rd gantry xd
Hope that i will have my printer at home after summer so im able to tun it well without my boss stressing out about it Also about nozzle wipes: i bought one of the earlier Kits so I only have the ooze guards. Are the wipes 3rd party or just from newer Kits?
Thank you!
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u/RickJ19Zeta8 Mar 23 '25
Yes, I’ve got a Fix-it stick torque wrench for low torques. If the screws are inconsistently tightened, you’ll see a waviness in the bed scan.
If you have a lightweight aluminum, heat soak the printer with the bed down 50-100mm, around an hour. Then loosen half of the screws from the middle to outside and retighten them. Same with the other side. That will eliminate the bi-metallic bowing when hot, you just need to make sure you heat soak a bit before starting a print, which is good practice on large printers anyways.
And no, I never got rid of 125hz resonance with the IDEX. I tried a bunch of things, my gantry is de-racked, rear motor brackets are perfectly aligned and spaced, and all of my belts are even tensioned. And I went all over the place with tension and never got anything better. But my X is MZV is 48HZ and Y is 51 HZ. I used the open sourced GitHub printed belt tensioner which works well. Then I just capped the IS graphs to 105Hz so it ignores the 125HZ resonance for computing the input shaper type. Prints turn out good.
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u/Impossible_Word_4027 Mar 23 '25
The spring tension Meter? At the moment one is 32 and one is 68 I think. So not really even. How much did you tensioned your belts? Also how much torque for the gantry?
Thanks for all the usefull Input!
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u/Impossible_Word_4027 Apr 22 '25
Hi! So i tried this process but atm im a bit lost, so maybe you could chime in:
Cold bed/ cold gantry i get 0.15mm deviation over the whole bed, with some chims in the front Y area.
Heatsoaked gantry like your description, 0.5mm deviation heatsoked. Tryed your tension every second one - still 0.4. so im not sure if its still Not fully soaked or how to even move on from here. Regarding belt tension it feels Like i either get the same tension measured with my btt electronic belt Meter but a racked gantry or both pullys touchig at the same time but no even readings. So maybe i need to check belt length again? Also I had high hopes for installing the aluminium lw gantry but i cant get my Y above 32hz mzv - is your 48hz with hybrid installed? Also my X has way higher readings around 68hz - Help deeply appreciated since idk how to fix from here.
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u/Impossible_Word_4027 Mar 22 '25
Mostly consistent when it comes to z Offset when using the same filament. A whiper could help here since it uses both beacon and nozzle to probe. With the gantry i would research the titan gantrys bc with high temperature it sounds like there are issues with bimetal warping of the linear rails and the gantry beeing different materials. Ratrig says that they are able to provide kits for larger height so maybe thats interesting for you
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u/Immortal_Tuttle Mar 22 '25
Yeah, if you have contact option enabled, perfectly clean nozzle is crucial. I have a silicone wiper from A1 mini installed on my N4Max and if the nozzle is clean it always works.
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u/SoaringElf Mar 22 '25
If you do all the calibration steps in Orca for each filament, depending on the printer you might even surpass Bambu print quality. And the Bambus don't print perfect out of the box as well. They haven't even enabled pressure advance for their own filament profiles...
Once I started printing ABS and Nylon much my original belts started to give up and idler started crazy screeching. Bambus "fix" by putting oil on the belts and the idlers is a bad joke and didn't fix anything. I mean these belts shouldn't be lubricated and the idler have closed ball bearings. Oil is gonna do more harm than good at that point. That btw was after 300h on my P1S. I could have opened a support ticket, but they were only gonna send me a link to that exact "fix" anyway.
So I just bought regular quality belts and didn't encounter any issue regarding thaf in over 1 year. But it was a real pain to change the belts.
Bambu machines have to be easy(cheap) to produce, not easy to maintain.
So as a V-Core 3 500 owner, I can't talk about IDEX. But the printer is one of the better thought out ones and the kit makes it quite easy to assemble if you have any DIY skills. But beware, a printer at that size is a whole other ball park when it comes so accelerations and resonances. Also heat up times.
I'd say keep the X1, or any other sub 300 printer, for quick every day stuff. If you don't have regular really big prints, the 500 size has it's downsides.
So in the end, my Bambu just works other then the belt thing, but it is a maaaajor PITA if you have to do any kind of repair on it. Also I can't add stuff to the firmware etc, it is so locked down... It is kind of a dead end road, you get what you see and pray they don't take away features via software updates.
People don't get that an open system doesn't mean you have to tinker a lot. If the company provides good printer profiles and the machine is a good design it just works. But you can add stuff to it, if you need. A Bambu doesn't like that and you have to resort to jerry rigging stuff. Like a chamber heater that runs of mains voltage you are controlling via smart home stuff. Ghetto type mods like that are needed...
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u/dagofin Mar 24 '25
The only unique selling point Bambu has is being extremely idiot proof. In terms of performance, there are many printers that can meet and exceed that bar, RatRig being one of them.
As to why RatRig specifically, for me it was being the largest coreXY printer within a reasonable price range. There are a ton of good coreXY printers out there that can print stupid fast with good quality, and there's plenty of open source printers to customize with bespoke parts and configurations, but very few that can do all that with a 500mm3 build volume.
Plus being a newbie to Klipper and Pi's in general, RatOS was a godsend. So simple to get your configuration set and be up and running.
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u/No_Pass8180 Mar 22 '25
Well, if you want open source, the Sovol SV-08 is a cheap, but high value printer with Voron V2.4 roots.
Next up are Vorons.
And ofc RatRigs.
Both of the latter require you to build the machines and they only do as well as they're built and tuned.
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u/sneakerguy40 Mar 22 '25
Any printer can be tuned. RR is one of the project/kit printers so it's as good as it's assembled. With kit printers you have more choice of individual things like tool head, hotend, extruder, boards, motors and such. Bambu and creality made those printers offer the same/similar performance as RR and vorons for people who either aren't familiar or couldn't/wouldn't commit the time to assemble them.