by Phenom

04/19/26, 15:55

Here we go. So I wondered what build size I should go with, and at first, I was waaaaaay overkill with my choices (as I always do, I just cannot start simply, I never could).

I first chose to go with the 415*415 variant which is what I called the perfect balance (as all things should be). But then I saw the price difference between bigger components and the “standard” ones…

And then my sales // engineer professional bias came back and made me wonder

“What do I even need it for ? Does it justify the additional costs”?

I can print 95% of the parts I do right now on my 235*235 ender 3. So I guess, 315*315 is more than enough for now ? Let’s discuss this with future Phenom.

(Hello future me ! Is the print space too small ? Do you suffer from engineering inflation? ¹ Told you so !!)

1. Engineering inflation : Do you now the concept of “lifestyle inflation” ? It’s a concept in personnal finance that says the following : people that earn more money are not necessarily richer because they also SPEND more money. Well, engineering inflation is the concept in which you progressively gather more tools and go bigger and bigger on your engineering projects, which means you also need bigger and more expensive machinery. You know where I’m going … ;). Is this a thing ?

Anyways I wanted to let you know how I’m organized. I pretty much separated all files, pretty much in the same way than the github repo.

Professional bias episode 2 ; I slightly modified the excel files to account for the things that I might (or should not?) want to monitor. Like costs for example !

Cash, bucks, dough, money, bread, funds, amount, capital…

Here I marked in gray everything that I already bought, all the costs etc…

To note : I haven’t added everything yet. And theres a lot of things that I already have that I haven’t yet added… Also, I might have slightly underestimated some costs … Once I’m done, I’ll do a recap with everything, because .. well, because why not?! I love graphs! And to suffer by seing how much I spent!

Speaking about what I already own ; I also added in my files what I found to be a missing function in the boms ; being able to compare what you already own vs what you still need with an additional row and some conditional formatting. Very pratical when you are in your local store and need some screws for example ;).

I added a column “dispo” (“own” in english) and if the number is the same than “needed”, it greys the complete column out.

Overkill ? Maybe.

Pratical ? Definitely.

In the next article we’ll speak about my frame and the build.

Thanks for reading and the support !

Phenom.