Thanks everyone for the quick replies! What I distill is that the speed is not that bad at all. I really like the accuracy of my printer not, so I think further tweaking will not help me. Somehow I think the speed should increase for the printers to become more useful for bigger items. Or do other (non-reprap) printers have a much higher speed?
Printers like the makerbot are slower. If you want to go even faster you have to reduce resolution and go with bigger nozzles. The volcano from E3D is a good example. It can spit out low res super strong parts really fast but you wouldnt use it to print a figurine.
I think that the speed can be increased if mendel changed. I suppose that the throubles starts for the inertial mass that move in alternative motion. If we introduce a calibrated spring we can delete the problem, and speed can be increased.
Confirm. 50mm/s for Prusa i3 is good value. I have some issues with bearings at the moment. The max reasonable value I could achieve was 100mm, but the quality becomes worse. Reason is rigidity/inertia. Moved masses at Prusa are pretty big.
Deltas have way lesser moved mass and I could achieve ~150mm/s (I’m still trying to improve the mechanics) and reasonable is ~100mm (mostly because frame is made from acrylic glass (PMMA) and in current version is not rigid enough to withstand higher speeds (quality loss due to printing head inertia).
Overall speed currently sucks on all available printers. To improve the technology must move from single point printing (printing area 0.4mm x 0.4mm) to some kind of array (linear or other shape, for example 4mm linear array may imporve 10x), or to some other physical principles.
If you suppose that there are some vibration when I increase the speed, the first think that all the people think is: oh, the printer is bad, I should reduce the speed. But if you digg in the science and if you study all the problems around you can discover that you can remove all the problems. There are some frequencies that are called natural frequencies of materials. An example? See the resonance effect. For all the problems of resonance there are some rubber support that reduce the vibration. Another problem is the slides and the lubrification. Every material when is coupled has different surface contacts. And each one require the calibrated oil. And the error? Has anyone discovered what is the precision of all the position in our machine? This is the mechanical part of the problem that should be solved.
The Volcano is great… however, the basic thermodynamic laws become the limiting factor. With a 1.2mm nozzle and T-Glase material (2.8mm), the heater struggled to maintain 280c at more than a 30mm print speed. We were able to print 5lb models in 20hrs.
