Thanks for sharing your experience. I do hesitate on projects like this for this rreason, it's always the small stuff that seems to get in the way of a streamlined experience. That said, I feel like building one rather than buying off the shelf would give me a lot more know-how about how to troubleshoot and maintain the system I am using, plus I prefer to support Open Source initiatives when I can over walled gardens.

You know, as an aside, this kind of part kitting is one of those things that I think LLMs might actually make a meaningful change in very shortly. No one wants to individually order all the parts on a BOM right now because it is a bunch of labor, but do it once with an activity log of your purchasing behavior and the sites/vendors used and there is no reason it cant be fully automated and shareable as simply as the BOM itself. Add in a function to check pricing and inventory against other related vendors and it could get quite good.

I've built a 0.2 and a 2.4 from kits and they're great printers with loads of mods available, but I find them had to recommend unless you have the ability to print your own parts. You can buy a kit that comes with the printed parts or get them through the print it forward program, but if you break any of the parts during the build, it can be challenging to source a replacement.

If you do build one and don't have access to another printer, I would recommend printing replacements for the most critical components once you get it running (especially the hot end parts).

Otherwise, they're super fun projects and I can't recommend them enough.

There's so many mods out there for them too because of their openness, I've got a v2.4, flying gantry is cool as heck but I'd consider doing a trident, the 350mm bed size is overkill for most of my prints.

I find mine produces some really nice parts, able to hit chamber temps into the 60s pretty reliably, warp isn't really a huge concern for me with it.

Yeah, they're definitely pretty interesting. I'm usually interested in the other end of the build volume scale with large machines, but it's super cool to see how they manage to pack so much into such a small space!

Not so far. The initial calibration was a bit of work to get right, but their discord was a lot of help. I went there with a bed mesh issue and found someone had already asked about the exact same issue and their solution fixed my problem perfectly. I also had to do a fair bit of testing to get a PLA profile that worked well (the already built ones I could find were for ABS and PETG).

Nice! Great list, do you run any of them?

My claim was I didn't know of any others. I've seen rat rig and voron. I'm not sure if they are really open source. I tried to contact them last year, but the documentation was locked. I'll favorite your list flow when I get some time. I'd love to build something like my first reprap.