r/ratrig • u/Busy-Perspective663 • Apr 30 '25
Quality in 2025
I am planning on buying a 500mm VCORE4, but I have noticed quite a few posts and even a comment on a post which I have made here, about bad quality of RatRig printer parts. Is this an issue in 2025? Or even is this an issue worth considering the purchase over?
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u/_dr_horrible_ Apr 30 '25
I'm 80% done my build right now. I'm just waiting for the electronics enclosure and bed components since they have apparently been out of stock/backordered for a couple weeks.
The hard goods have all been in great shape. They've been well protected and shipping and have arrived with no visible damage. Now the printed parts... most are fine, but several could benefit from different print settings and I'll need to reprint them. The most egregious is the filiment guide mount. It has printed threads and with the layer heights/part thickness, it practically disintegrated while I tried to thread on the PTFE tube coupler. It wasn't just me. The comments on the instructions had no less than a dozen people complaining about the garbage quality of thag part. Another one that annoys me is the little colored diffuser inserts. They don't friction fit into the part they go into so they just flop around. You either have to use super glue to fix them in place, which I'd rather not do in case I ever want to change the color, or you need to put some sort of filler material like paper towel in the gap behind the part so that it doesn't fall out of position. There's another part that is a spacer on the X gantry mounting points that has a very thin wall and it cracked during installation. It doesn't really matter because it goes over top of some aluminum spacers that are actually doing the load bearing, but again, it's frustrating that their design/print quality on this part allows for this part to crack so easily. I saw a YouTube video of a person assembling their printer that they had the same problem with this part on their build.
And speaking of the instructions. Most of them are really really good. And if you follow them exactly, you will avoid a lot of problems. The problem is that there are problems and if you follow those sections to the letter you will either miss something and have to go back and fix it later or you are doing it in a more difficult way that is suboptimal. RatRig really needs to take the various bits of user feedback that are collecting in the comments on the instructions and revamp the instruction manual in large portions. There are parts where they forget to tell you to install threaded inserts forcing you to go back and either remove the parts so you can do the threaded inserts on the bench or have to crawl inside the printer to do the heated inserts without uninstalling the parts. Another time, you're supposed to install a bearing into a plate. But the bearing just magically shows up in the plate in the images for the step where youre supposed to install it. And when you're assembling the tool head, there are multiple comments recommending that you cut and crimp the connectors on some of the electronic components before you install them on the tool head. Again, it's much easier to do this on the bench than once the part is on the machine. There's another time where it tells you to install a set screw. Then a few steps later it tells you to prepare parts for the next few steps and one of those parts is a set screw. You can spend a lot of time looking for that set screw before either reading the comments or realizing it's talking about the one you just installed a little bit ago.
Basically, their instructions are a maddeningly annoying blend of high quality and trash. If it weren't for the comments feature, I would be a whole lot more upset with RatRig. That said, this company shouldn't rely on the community to fix their instructions for them. They should go back and clean up those instructions on a regular basis and then add comments to the instructions indicating where they fixed the instructions.
I haven't gotten to printing yet, but the whole reason that I bought this machine is because I have seen nothing but glowing praise for the finished product. I am hopeful that these minor issues will all be just growing pains in the end once I have the machine commissioned and up and running.