The VORON 0 - A Mini, Fast & Awesome Core XY 3D Printer
This all started on a recent “The Meltzone Podcast” episode in which Tom and I somehow got on the topic of printing really fast…. Build a VORON he said, and this is what I did even though I never heard of VORON before and just can’t understand why! VORON is not a company that sells printers. VORON is an open-source project that started out as a one-person operation to build a no-compromise 3D printer that is quiet, clean and pretty and capable of operating for long amounts of time without constant tinkering. Over the year the engineering team, the community and also the number of VORON printers grew. They do have different size machines from the big and scalable VORON 2.4 to the mini VORON 0. You might be curious why I didn’t choose the popular V2.4 and there is a reason. My goal with this build was not to build a universal 3D printer. I wanted to have a very fast prototyping machine and a fast motion system needs to be lightweight, stiff and powerful. I’m impatient, and even though I own a ton of 3D printers, it always bothers me if printing a single part for a project I’m working on, takes a couple of hours because that means that I can only iterate the design once or maybe twice a day. Even worse, often the design might already be outdated once the print finished. 80% of my parts fit on a 100x100mm build plate, so I wasn’t looking for something huge. The VORON 0 fits that very well with it’s 120mm cubed printing volume and a tiny footprint of only 230x230mm. It also makes use of a fast COREXY motion system and uses linear rails for all axis, which is great because that adds quite some rigidity. Even though a tiny direct extruder is currently in development for the V0 I was particularly interested in the stock Bowden system because it takes away quiet some weight from the printhead. The less weight that needs to be moved, the faster you can accelerate, and the stiffer the motion system the more precise the moves will be due to higher frequency resonances. To be clear – I know that people already printed sub 10 minutes 3D Benchys, but I’ll be totally okay with a decently looking 10 minutes one for the moment. This video won’t be covering the journey to that goal because there were and still are some complications I want to dedicate separate videos on. So make sure to subscribe and select the notification bell if you don’t want to miss that!
VORON 0 stacked on a Prusa Mk3 stacked on a Snapmaker 2.0
As I said in the beginning, VORON doesn’t sell printers or even parts. There aren’t any official sellers of full kits, not even to speak of completely built printers. So I had to source the necessary parts for the build myself. The VORON website provides a great sourcing guide for parts that they tested and highly recommend for the build. Following their guide is probably the best method to end up with a printer that works as it’s supposed in the end.
I, unfortunately, just didn’t have the time and patience to source all the individual parts myself and that’s why I browsed around and found a decent-looking full kit from Formbot on Aliexpress. With a price of $400 plus an additional $50 for shipping, I thought that this couldn’t contain the worst of all parts if I don’t get ripped off. Shipping took around two weeks until I had the box on my doorstep. Just on a side-note: After reading a bit in the VORON discord, I realized that there are also quite a bunch of local shops worldwide that at least sell some parts, like motor kits or pre-cut extrusions for the VORON. So if you go the self-souring route, make sure to inform yourself.
My first thoughts on the Formbot VORON 0 kit
While the package was in transit, I used the time to print all of the required parts that can be downloaded from Github, because that was something that’s not included in the kit. The STLs come marked as accent and non-accent parts. The accent parts are usually printed in color, while the other parts are printed black or whatever other color combination you like. It’s recommended to print all of the parts in ABS because the VORON can get pretty hot on the inside, especially with the full enclosure. Since my primary plan is not to run it enclosed, I used fire-red PETG for the accent parts and for all the other parts Carbon Fiber Nylon. The is a reason, especially for the latter choice. So, as I said previously, I was looking for a really stiff setup and the Carbon Fiber Nylon from Fiberthree that I used is more than 5x more rigid than ABS. Felix from Fiberthree very kindly provided a bunch of their PA-CF Pro material for the build. Since I still had a more than 2-year-old roll of the same material around, I thought I save the new ones and printed the parts out of the leftovers, which will haunt me really badly, soon! The VORON parts are designed beautifully and printed without any supports. I used 4 or 5 perimeters for the parts and 60% infill to make them strong. Carbon Fiber Nylon prints so great and, if kept dry, so easily. Even though pure Nylon might be a pain to print, as soon as you add chopped carbon fibers to the mix, most filaments barely warp anymore. Think about that when you next time see someone printing a really high-performance polymer like PEEK or Ultem in the even cooler form with carbon fibers. That’s often not primarily to add strength but it’s often just for making it properly printable.
Accent (red) and non-accent part combined
Unfortunately, I don’t have any footage of the package that arrived with my VORON kit, because it smelled so badly of freshly lasered acrylic that I had to quickly rip it open and put the parts outside for venting. A couple of days later, I started with the build. The parts delivered in the kit didn’t look bad at all. There was a Meanwell PSU, LDO stepper motors an SKR mini E3 V2, Gates belts, a Raspberry Pi, a V6 hotend including titanium heatbreak, a removable and PEI powder coated bed and a full parts kit for the dual drive Pocketwatch extruder. The sheets for the enclosure were transparent and black 2.5mm acrylic and all the screws came in labeled bags. The extrusions were cut to pretty much the exact length and pre-drilled and tapped. Only at that point I realized how tiny the machine is really going to be. The extrusion were only 15x15mm instead of the common 20x20mm ones, the motors were NEMA14 instead of NEMA17 and the linear rails were also way small than I thought. I won’t go over the full build, because I don’t want to bore you to death. If you’re interested in a full build video series check out and subscribe to “Nero 3dp”s channel. You find a huge collection of videos about all the VORONs and also things like Klipper, Input Shaper and much more.
All in all, the build took me a good 10 to 15 hours, including wiring. Some parts are really small on the V0, so if you rather have bare claws than hands, maybe check out one of the bigger VORON models. Still, the build was a real pleasure. Some might call the machine over-engineered but I’ll just call it well engineered. Nothing seems superficial and belt-tightening is super handy with the nuts. Besides one cross drill in the extrusions missing, too little M2 nuts and the grub screws of one pully missing, the Formbot kit I bought really contained everything I needed. The printer can be used fully enclosed and mine came with all of the side panels but since I’ll probably run into cooling issues in the sense that I don’t have enough cooling, I, so far, didn’t install the panels and the top cover yet. Though for the top cover, I have a really interesting idea. I want to put an activated charcoal and HEPA filter in it to avoid the smell and dangerous particles when printing ABS or PC.
VORON provides a build manual for the whole process though it’s not super detailed and I regularly had to check the CAD model for clarification. Unfortunately, that also stops at the point when it’s time to install the electronics. There is also a setup guide that includes wiring diagrams but no best preactice on how to route the wires. So cable routing and management is up to you. At that point it’s a good idea to have joined the VORON discord where the members will happily help your out if you have any questions.
Rather than building and using the Pocketwatch extruder, for which all parts were included in my kit, I put an E3D Hemera in its Bowden configuration into my machine that fit perfectly. There is no particular reason not to use the included extruder on the machine as a start; I just had the Hemera lying around. I also didn’t use the included V6 hotend because that’s limited to around 12 to 15 mm³ extrusion rate, and I’ll need more. Adding a volcano hotend isn’t really an option because that would take away quite a bit of the already limited 120mm z-height and also, since it’s dangling around that much, is in my opinion not very good for fast printing. The VORON files come with stls for three different hotend options: the V6, a dragon hotend and a SliceEngineering mosquito. So I reached out to my friends at SliceEngineering and asked if they’d like to sponsor a Mosquito hotend for the build. In its standard configuration, it’s already capable of slightly higher extrusion rates than a V6. If you additionally use the Magnum heatbreak you significantly increase the meltzone to push out way more material per time than in the stock configuration. I estimated and noticed that I need around 30mm³/s for my 10 minutes 3D Benchy, so a more capable hotend was a must for me.
Mosquito (left) VS V6 with Volcano
To finish the electronics a soldering iron and probably also a crimping tool, to attach the plugs to the end of the cable, are a must. You’ll have to make sure that the cable chain is short enough that it won’t clash with the x-axis during homing. You should also definitely install the thermal fuse to the bed to avoid overheating problems. The power cable of the silicone matte included in my kit, is also too thick that I wasn’t able to fit it and a ground wire through the cable chain, so I ended up with a separate ground wire for now. Since the bed heater is AC, you shouldn’t omit it because it’s a potential electrification risk. Talking about AC; the bed is controlled via a Solid State Relay. Ensure that you have one, that is on in it’s high state, otherwise it will start heating the bed right when you turn the machine on if you use the standard VORON configuration probably until you notice it or your thermal fuse blows. I noticed it early enough to avoid damage but mine still was an active low one but I talked to Formbot and they’ll probably start shipping active high ones for future kits. One thing where I’m not particularly happy about on the VORON 0 is that there is no cover for the electronics compartment and on the PSU as well as on the SSR there are exposed live wires. I enclosed the SSR and need to figure out something for the PSU to not shock myself while picking it up.
Wire management and routing looked pretty nice in the end with the help of those adhesive cable clamps. The last step was flashing the firmware. Even though you could run the machine with a standard installation of Marlin, the firmware of choice is Klipper and that’s also the reason why a Raspberry Pi is included in the standard build. Contrary to most other firmwares, Klipper is not running on the controlboard itself but on the faster Raspberry Pi which then does all of the complex path planning for cool custom features like pressure advance and input shaping. The controlboard then only passes on the step signals to the drivers. Klipper is usually interfaced with Octoprint or the even more custom-made applications Mainsail or Fluid. I went with Octoprint, just because I’m familiar with it and its configuration and I wanted to use plugins like Octolapse. Installing Klipper is well documented but will require you to use a couple of shell commands to install it and compile the custom firmware. Configuration is done via a config file that can easily be accessed via Octoprint and in which the printer itself, steppers, directions, currents, speeds, etcetera are configured. I had to change a couple of settings until my printer moved into the right direction and at least for my active low SSR had to change that setting as well. Once that was working it was finally time to get to printing! The first print should always be the VORON cube of which you post a video on Reddit to get your official serial number!
When homing the V0 for the first time, I didn’t even hear it moving because the TMC2209 make it so silent! There is no bed probe, so leveling is all done manually via three screws. I started with PLA and got really beautiful print results but as soon as I started printing faster, the material showed that it needs a ton of cooling that the two 30mm fans just can’t provide. Even though movements are silent, as soon as the fans start kicking in, the machine is not the most quiet if you don’t fully enclose it. I then switched over to PETG which was already behaving better in terms of cooling, though somehow the stringing just didn’t want to go away. Even though I hadn’t enclosed the printer yet, I put a roll of Extrudr ABS on it and … well…wow…was impressed with the printing results. Beautiful and highly detailed prints at easily double the speed compared to the speed profile on a Prusa MK3!
The combination of lightweight and stiff motion system plus the use of Klipper produced some really beautiful prints. Again, here, without any serious tuning, I ran with 120-150mm/s, accelerations of 4000mm/s², and got parts that don’t even show huge signs of ringing or other speed artefact. That’s even without the use of input shaper! To get these nice ABS results, I also used the auto-cool feature in Prusaslicer that turns the part cooling fan on, the shorter a layer takes to print. Yes, cooling and ABS seem to work very well on the VORON so far, though I didn’t print any huge models, yet.
Thanos Bust by Eastman printed in Extrudr ABS
Unfortunately, with ABS that was when my problems that I mentioned in the beginning, started. I already noticed before that it seemed that I regularly had to retighten basically all screws. And by an amount that is more than you’d consider settling, so this is probably material creep. For parts that got warm it was even more obvious! With the heat from the bed, the carrier itself quickly started severely deforming and I had to re-level the bed basically after every print. Honestly, that’s probably mostly my fault because I was so focused on using the super stiff and strong carbon fiber Nylon for the mechanical parts. Felix from Fiberthree warned me, that this was an issue with older batches and that was recently fixed, but the spool of material I used was one that was 2.5 years old and thinking about it, I even had the same issue on the CPU cooler bracket I printed in the past. I think this is one beautiful or nasty example of materials creep, so the slow permanent deformation of a part under constant load. The material flows away where it’s loaded so I lost all of the pretension in my bolts and since creep is a function of time and temperature, it even lead to the whole bed carrier deforming under its weight. I think this is also finally the time to perform my constantly postponed creep test for 3D printing materials. Before I continue my endeavors towards the 10 minutes Benchy, I’ll re-print all of the parts and re-assemble the printer. However, I’m currently not 100% sure which material to use. Fiberthrees new Carbon Fiber or Glass Fiber Nylon, ABS, PETG or maybe some kind of polycarbonate? I really don’t know! What’s your opinion?
20-minutes 3D Benchy
So I’ll have to end this here for now though still wanted to show you that the VORON 0 is a really beautiful, well-engineered and capable small little printer. It’s probably not suitable for everyone with it’s tiny print volume but should still be plenty big for many applications where speed, quality and high-performance polymers are involved! Sourcing the parts, and putting everything together is a considerable amount of work, and not everyone might be happy wiring electronics or even working with mains voltage. The $450 I invested in the kit was well-spent in my opinion and I’m looking forward to the tuning that’s still required to get my final goal because my fastest Benchy still sits at around 20 minutes. But what do you think? Where do you see upgrade potential and bottlenecks on my way to the 10minutes 3D Benchy, and would this be a machine that suits your needs? Post a comment down below! Links to the VORON website, assembly and sourcing guide, Discord, and also the kit I bought are down in the description.
🛒 Equipment used in this article:
VORON 0 Kit (Affiliate): https://geni.us/VORON0
VORON 2.4 Kit (Affiliate): https://geni.us/VORON24
FiberThree filaments: https://fiberthree.com/
SliceEngineering Mosquito (Affiliate): https://geni.us/SEMosquito
SliceEngineering Magnum Heat Break (Affiliate): https://geni.us/SEMagnum
E3D Hemera (Bowden): https://geni.us/E3DHemera
Crimping Tool (Affiliate): https://geni.us/PyRxC1
Soldering Station (Affiliate): https://geni.us/T2MAgzG