Option on a 3D Printer on a $500 budget

[curious aardvark]

First I will point out that I currently have 6 fdm 3d printers that cover all the popular forms of FDM printing:
cartesian, I3. delta and corexy.

The corexy is the newest and - quite frankly - blows all the tohers out of the park for speed, quality, build quality, noise (it's virtually silent) build volume and just about anything else you can think of except (lol) manufacturer support. Which with your budget you should not expect anyway :-)

So I will make the case for a twotrees sapphire pro 2 corexy. Runs at around $330.
It will work perfectly fine as it comes.
I printed three things and converted mine to a direct drive extruder, changed the firmware - a case of putting files on an sdcard and powering p. And I added a microsd to standard sd adaptor. I just find the microsd cards too damn fiddly and I have a lot of small old sd cards around.

In the last month I have thrown prints at it that none of the other printers can print reliably and it's just chuckled and said: is that all you got ?'

It's got a great motherboard, good power supply and an absolute beast of a solid frame., plus good linear rails and silent stepper drivers.

For the money it's a phenomenal bit of kit.

They also make a larger machine the sapphire plus at around $500, that has a larger build volume and probably a more stable bed setup.
Though as I can knock out a fully working iris box at 150mm/s - I don't think is a necessity.

There is NOTHING out there for the money - or indeed a lot more money, that even comes close.

It does have a very nice touch screen and should you want to you can add a wifi module if you want to. But a raspberry pi and octoprint tends to be a better option.

It's not fancy - but it just does the job stupidly fast and with amazing precision.

And you have the added advantage of being able to pm me with endless queries :-)
I've spent about $15 on a pei sheet and sd card adaptor and desinged a few mods. And I don't foresee ever having to do anything else to it - ever again :-)
But if you want to piss about - there are no end of people on the facebook group who spend their time coating gold bricks with lead and then complaining when the totally unnecessary 'upgrade' doesn't work as well as the original part :-)

So that's what I'm pushing this season: twotrees sapphire pro 2.

As far as abs goes - it's not worth bothering with. But there's nothing stopping you putting the machine in a large box lined with polystyrene sheets.
Pla and Pet-g is better on almost all accounts and the sapphire prints pet-g like a total champ :-)

My thread:
https://3dprintboard.com/showthread....corexy-printer