Bed slinger or CoreXY: which design suits you?
are explained briefly when you hover over or tap them.
When choosing a 3D printer, you quickly stumble over two terms: bed slinger and CoreXY. Behind them lies the question of what actually moves while printing. That sounds technical, but it has direct consequences for speed, space requirements and which materials work well.
The bed slinger: the bed moves too
On a bed slinger, the print bed moves back and forth, and the print head moves left, right and up. This is the classic design that many entry-level printers still use today.
Advantages:
- Simple, inexpensive mechanics
- Open and easy to access, easy to maintain
- Current models are still surprisingly fast
Disadvantages:
- The moving bed together with the print limits the speed
- Tall, narrow parts can start to wobble
- Needs space at the front and back, because the bed moves out
- Harder to enclose, because the bed moves forwards and backwards. For ABS and ASA it is therefore usually less convenient
CoreXY: the head moves, the bed lowers
On a CoreXY, the print head moves in both directions of the horizontal plane. Two motors work together via crossed belts to do this. The print bed only lowers layer by layer.
Advantages:
- High accelerations, because only the light print head is moved quickly
- The print stands still, so even tall objects stay stable
- Compact cube shape that is easy to enclose
- With an enclosed chamber, well suited to ABS and ASA. Whether engineering filaments are possible is decided by chamber temperature, hotend, nozzle and heated bed, not by the design alone
Disadvantages:
- More complex mechanics, belts have to be tensioned correctly
- Generally more expensive
- Enclosed devices are larger and heavier
What does this mean in practice?
| Bed slinger | CoreXY | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | usually cheaper | usually more expensive |
| Speed | good | very good |
| Tall, thin parts | more prone | stable |
| ABS/ASA | difficult | good (with chamber) |
| Space requirement | bed moves out | fixed cube |
Our rule of thumb
Do you mainly print PLA and PETG and want to get started cheaply? A modern bed slinger is perfectly sufficient. Current devices with automatic calibration deliver very good results.
Do you also want to print ABS, ASA or carbon filaments, or produce a lot and quickly? Then an enclosed CoreXY printer is worthwhile. The price difference has become much smaller in recent years.
In our device comparison you can compare printers of both designs side by side.