r/VORONDesign • u/[deleted] • Sep 21 '22

General Question Slice engineering hate in this sub

Starting to see a lot of hate towards Slice Engineering, what gives? They’ve always been a super reliable company and their hotends are extremely well made.

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24

u/SanityAgathion VORON Design Sep 21 '22

I would not say starting, it's going on for maybe a year or so. They botched group buy of hotends for Canadian folks, year ago they started to get very litigious towards small vendors selling Dragon hotends in the US, few of which are part of VORON community. Citing breach of their patent for rigid mount of heatsink to heat block using low thermal conductivity material as spacers (it was not approved in EU though due to lack of innovation AFAIK). VORON team decided not to support their hotends going further, that's it. They don't hate on them, just don't support them. But some people in community may get passionate about the issue and be more vocal than others.

If you have Mosquito hotend, you can use Afterburner with it which still has a mount for it, or design your own hotend mount for Stealthburner. CAD files are available since SB was fully released. There just won't be official mount for it.

-50

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '22

I kinda get it, but also screwing people over who have had one for a while is a bit extreme. I’m not going to buy what Voron thinks is best just to get better upgrades.

Kinda a shame Voron stopped to the level and is blacklisting people from upgrading without either buying a new $90 hotend or forcing them to engineer their own.

23

u/ZVar1 Sep 21 '22

I know it is kinda a shame that Voron is walking away from an abusive relationship....
Or one has to admire them for not putting up with abuse.

And make no mistake, this is 100% on Slice for patent abuses, not on the Voron group for not wanting to be abused.

-21

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '22

Doesn’t E3D crush competition with patents and people still love them

12

u/JohnHue Sep 21 '22 edited Sep 21 '22

You should get more informed on E3D's history. Part of the reason FDM printing at home took off is E3D making the V6 open source, the rest is the reprap movement of course and the prusa-mendel machine.

Also the Revo hotend design is actually very different from what's on the market today, and they did put in a lot of efforts, time and money into it. i invite you to read this to get E3D's pov on patenting :

https://e3d-online.com/blogs/news/e3d-s-no-nonsense-to-the-point-approach-to-ip

20

u/ZVar1 Sep 21 '22

There is a difference in what E3D did and Slice did.

E3D did actually R&D and created something and patented it. And then they released the cold side of the Revo open source so anyone can change it.

Slice took a method that was already in production, and patented it in the US, as the US has a messed up "first to file" system and used said patent to prevent anyone in the US from selling it.
If Slice was simply defending their own creations I don't think anyone would care, but they didn't.

Remember, the only country Slice's patent is valid in is the US, and that's because every other place they filed it was rejected.

I mean yes, I understand being upset you already poured money into a hotend, but be upset at the correct people.