Is there currently, or will there be an upgrade in the future, that will allow a bigger working surface? Most of the things I do are larger than the currently advertised work surface will accommodate. This is a ‘pre-sales’ question, thank you.
While possible, it’s unlikely. The v1 has an option for an increased vertical axis, but nothing in the x or y. With the design of the machine, extending the X & Y requires you replace everything but the controller and Z axis, so its pretty much a new machine entirely. They could offer an A450 in the future, but it’s unlikely that you’d be able to upgrade an A350 to A450 economically.
It’s also likely that you wouldn’t be happy with print times on that kind of volume. Snapmaker doesn’t recommend exceeding 100 mm/s print speed, so anything you’d print that would take up the current A350 is going to take days.
I have printed several project that are larger than the bed of my v1 (125mm x 125mm), like my build plate dust cover. I was able to find locations that I could break a model up into smaller parts, then reassemble after printing. Obviously that doesn’t work for everything, and does require some extra work, but it can work for a lot of projects.
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I actually was not thinking about 3D printing when I posted this, I was thinking more about the laser engraving and CNC carving.
The laser engraver will be able to be set up in the “h laser” configuration at some point I would assume (as it was advertised in the kikstarter campaign). If you did that with the extra long linear modules(also not released yet) you could get a larger laser area.
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@gjo has a system for engraving cylinders . With some gearing and source compression, this technique could be used to stretch the Y axis. Not sure how well it would work in CNC, but it should work for engraving.
But pretty much anything you make is going to have to fit between the two Z modules, so you’ll have a hard time making the X axis wider.
As to alternate setups, like @Atom mentioned, I’m not seeing many people talking about it. A similar setup was mentioned with the v1, but haven’t seen anything that supports it out of the box. My search-fu is lame today; I only found one unanswered post. I think I’ve seen some people that managed to do it, but they were comfortable editting GCode manually and voiding their warranty. But don’t quote me on that, since I can’t find any support for that assertation.
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Ok, thank you for the input. It looks like the wrong tool for me then. I appreciate you taking the time to help!