Will they? They will eventually become mass produced and readily available for home users at a reasonable price, but I’m convinced that it won’t happen in the near future (respectively in the upcoming 5+ years), rather, if both the technology and (especially) the appropriate knowledge to make it work for mass production will be achieved and reliable, I expect it to become reality sometime near the end of the next decade. And that’s a big “if”.
Sure, we can debate whether it will be in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years - everyone can throw in a number. On the other hand, 10 years ago people also thought that 3D printers would never reach the mainstream market. It’s hard to predict something like that exactly.
It often goes faster than people think, but only if manufacturers can actually make it happen so that we save on support and materials. Imagine an affordable, budget-friendly PLA printer that doesn’t require any supports at all. No need for support material nor support filament.
This has the potential to become another “Bambu moment”, even if it might be another company that ends up doing it. But “potential” doesn’t necessarily mean a finished product suitable for mass production.
You could be right…and I could be wrong. Time will tell. However, I do agree that it would be awesome to have a fully functional and reliable 5-axe printer available for home users, at a reasonable price.
But hasn’t that software already been developed and proven out for the ratrig and the Voron Trident? Or have they simply had the hardware capability for years, but the software never got developed?
I took a closer look at this printer, but I couldn’t find any evidence to suggest that it is a 5-axis machine, either in the software or the hardware.
The only information I could find on this topic was a GitHub project describing a 5-axis modification. This project hasn’t been maintained for three years and is more of a proof of concept than a fully developed, mass-market solution.
The corresponding slicer was last updated a year ago and is also more of a proof of concept. I have the utmost respect for the programmer, but with all due respect: This can hardly be compared to what we know as a slicer:
As I said, these are all commendable achievements, but what is their place in the bigger picture? For the most part, the project has not progressed beyond the proof-of-concept phase.
This is so far away from “click and print” or even being optimized that it raises the question of how much of this knowledge is actually usable if it hasn’t been updated for years. To me, this sounds more like a dead end. Even when I look at the few rare videos available on YouTube, all I ever see are proof-of-concept demonstrations - everyone is printing some kind of tube, but not a single proper 3D print.
As I said, I may be wrong, but I want to raise the question of how useful this knowledge actually is if it has reached a dead end. In the context of: How much of this knowledge can be put to use when a company wants to bring a real product to the mass market?
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I think I found the disconnect. The trident has some degree of pitch and yaw, but it may (?) only use it for bed tramming. Similar to what the guy in the video I posted is claiming as “5-axis”, but his printer is doing more than just tramming. I suppose if not a lot of pitch and yaw is required during a 3D print, that capability exists in the hardware, but AFAIK the Trident didn’t exploit it for anything more than tramming.
@MeshMaster owns a ratrig, which I believe is the same kind of setup. Maybe he can comment as to whether the slicer exploits it for anything more than tramming? The tramming may well be handled in the firmware and not the slicer anyway, but in theory the pitch and yaw (to whatever degree it exists in the hardware) would likely also be under slicer control, but again, maybe only as a latent capability that’s currently dormant.
I’ll grant it doesn’t meet a rigorous definition of 5-axis, as it’s certainly constrained. However, is it enough to be useful in any scenario? That’s a central question that this discussion pivots on. 3 universal ball joints and 3 independent z-axis motors is all it takes, so it would be theoretically cheap to add if it was designed in from the beginning. A lot of regular 3D printers already have two z-axis motors just to share the lifting load (even an old school Prusa MK3 had that). Theoretically adding one more shouldn’t increase the BOM by a lot. Arguably it would be worth it for the bed tramming alone.
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At that point just put the printhead on an industrial arm and get a really fancy one 
I’m sure itll have other uses too.
//theres guys out there who do this via welding feed, literal metal FDM with oops-all-weldwire, on an arm
I think all printers with multiple z motors, can atleast partially do multi axis printing, with the correct open source software. I havnt personally tried it, But I know the ratrig and vorons can tilt pretty far. They have dancing bed models you can run for fun. Every printer should have a stepper motor on each z lead screw, at this point. With kinematic mounts, I can currently tilt the ratrig 45°. Now if the head also tilted 45°, that could probably do anything. So, really, you need a voron, ratrig or sovol with a multi axis arm inside it. Or atleast a way of tilting a normal printer head setup. That would be sick. Make the bed spin on another axis and I would pull out the bank card
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