3D Printer FYIBUILD VOLUME IS A SUGGESTION #001
Part of Build Volume Is A Suggestion. Channel: Ivan Miranda.
“My printer isn’t big enough” is apparently a solvable engineering problem.
What you’ll accidentally learn
- Why a bigger bed is not automatically more printer
- Frame rigidity, motion, and when an “upgrade” is actually a new machine
- Calibration and slicer tuning at stupid scale
- Belt / continuous printing — when increasing X is not enough, remove the X limit
- Modular fabrication: every printed part of a giant machine still has to fit on some bed
- Why 4× larger is not 4× the same kinematics
The giant printer
Ordinary Cartesian mechanics become increasingly stupid as mass and dimensions increase.
In Building a Giant 3D printer to 3D print myself, Ivan states a build volume of 1110 × 1110 × 2005 mm — more than 2.5 m³ — and calls it his largest build to date. The frame is 40 × 40 aluminum extrusion. He designed it so anyone could attempt the build: every printed part, including the huge corner pieces, fits on a 200 × 200 mm bed. Once the frame is upright it is more than 2.2 m high, which is why he installs as much hardware as possible while the gantry is still on the table.
The lesson is not “buy a bigger printer.” The lesson is that large-format machines are a rigidity, access, and assembly problem first. Build volume is a spec you buy for the 90th-percentile part, not a personality trait.
The life-size clone
Congratulations. Your first print is a person.
The same video — and Tom’s Hardware’s report on it citing Ivan’s numbers — uses the new volume to print a life-size red PLA copy of Ivan. Maiden settings: 4 mm layer height, 1 mm nozzle, zero infill, three walls, variable speed. The full run took 108 hours including interruptions; successful print time was 76 hours. Finished clone: 4,375 layers.
Scaling a Benchy is a slicer joke. Scaling a human is a heat, time, and failure-recovery problem. A 4 mm layer with a 1 mm nozzle is not a baseline calibration profile — it is a different process that happens to use the same G-code verbs.
The 3D-printed tank
Printed components stop being “models” and become structural machine parts.
Ivan’s giant tank is a multi-year series, not a one-off STL. In FULLY 3D PRINTED TANK THAT DRIVES WITH PEDALS (from scratch) he is still iterating a rideable hull after years of issues, swapping melted drivetrain parts and adding aluminum plates for heat dissipation. In GIANT 3D PRINTED TANK GETS A TURRET (from scratch) a NEMA 23 turns the turret; he notes 12 V for now and 24 V later for the cannon electronics. Hackster’s write-up of a later electronics pass describes a move from brushless + VESC to an ODrive, PWM from an RC receiver, and enough current that the printed chassis is now a vehicle, not a display model.
If the part has to carry a motor, a battery, and a person, filament choice and wall strategy stop being aesthetic. That is the PLA vs PETG vs ABS question with consequences.
The treadmill printer
When increasing X isn’t enough, remove the X limit entirely.
Belt printers already trade a rigid Y bed for a conveyor so long parts can keep walking off the machine. Desktop belt printers still have a desktop X and Z. In We made a Treadmill into a 3D printer!! - w/ Proper Printing, Ivan and Jón Schone (Proper Printing) put a gantry on a treadmill instead. Ivan’s own narration in that video: a 2,010 mm print — 5 mm longer than the longest thing he can print on the giant Cartesian — in about 36 hours, after a motor pulley failed and was reprinted in nylon. The belt, he notes, is destroyed. “It’s like it wasn’t designed for this.”
Hackster’s recap adds the geometry that matters: belt printers print at an angle (often 45°) so a layer can finish on the belt. Steel uprights, heavy linear rails, oversized steppers, custom heatsinks so motors stop melting printed mounts, and a 1 mm-class extruder sized to push kayak-scale plastic.
This is the upgrade rule taken to its logical end: name the failure (“Y is finite”), then change the architecture, not the SKU.
The kayak
Congratulations. Your print now requires maritime testing.
The treadmill exists to print a full-size kayak in one piece. Hackaday’s report on Ivan’s later speed run: a previous kayak took seven days; extruder tweaks pushed throughput past 800 g/h; heat became the new failure mode; the hull was sanded, 3D-penned, foam-filled in key cavities, and epoxy-coated. It floats. It is too narrow, wounds the pilot on the way in, and is not what you would take on the ocean. Ivan says he will need changes to actually use it.
Watch the current kayak video from his channel — title on the upload: I 3D Printed a Kayak in Less Than 24 hours.
Waterproofing and buoyancy are not slicer settings. They are post-process and hull design. Emily’s Benchy that became a boat is the segmented version of the same argument.
What to steal as a method
- Design the giant machine so its printed parts still fit on a small bed.
- Treat scale as a new process (nozzle, layer height, cooling), not a multiplier in the slicer.
- When a printed part becomes structure, budget heat, fasteners, and service access.
- If one axis is the limit, ask whether that axis should exist.
- A print that has to float, drive, or carry a person is not done when the G-code ends.
Sources
- Ivan Miranda on YouTube
- Building a Giant 3D printer to 3D print myself
- FULLY 3D PRINTED TANK THAT DRIVES WITH PEDALS (from scratch)
- GIANT 3D PRINTED TANK GETS A TURRET (from scratch)
- We made a Treadmill into a 3D printer!! - w/ Proper Printing
- Tom’s Hardware — life-size clone
- Hackster — tank electronics
- Hackster — treadmill printer
- Hackaday — kayak in under a day