After a year of tweaking my Kobra S1 Max I've picked up a few habits that save a lot of wasted filament. Biggest one: before you commit a six hour print to a cover or bracket, print just the mounting tabs at 100 percent scale first. Tabs are where most mods fail, not the body. If the tabs clip on clean, the rest almost always follows. Second tip, pick your material based on where the part lives. Anything near the hot end, like a toolhead shroud or fan cover, should be PETG or better. I warped a PLA shroud within a week of summer starting. For shelf bins, drawer inserts and desktop organizers, PLA is fine and prints faster. Start with the easy wins. A side spool holder and a little sloped chute for the purge pile take under an hour each and instantly make the machine nicer to live with. Save the bigger under-printer drawer projects for once you trust your own measurements, because nothing stings like a riser that's off by two millimetres after nine hours of printing. If you're designing your own parts, leave at least a millimetre of clearance around anything that moves or vibrates and round every corner you can. Sharp inside corners crack right at the layer lines on a printer that runs all day.
Tips for printing your own Kobra S1 upgrades that actually fit
Oct 14, 2026
Last reply: 1 hour ago
3 Replies
That tab-first trick is exactly how I stopped wasting whole evenings on bad fits. I was printing a cable guide for my Kobra S1 and the body came out perfect, then the hook that clips over the frame rail was a hair too tight and I had to reprint everything. Now I do the same thing but I take it one step further and print just the clip section in vase mode, which takes about eight minutes instead of forty. If it snaps on without forcing it, the full part goes in the queue. On materials, I had the opposite problem with heat. My PETG enclosure handle sagged slightly over a couple of months sitting right above the print area, so I swapped that one part to ABS and it has held up since. PETG everywhere else, including the scraper holder and the filament dust filters I taped near the inlet.
The clearance advice is spot on too. I left only half a millimetre around a bearing retainer I designed and the first print seized up as soon as the machine warmed up. Redrew it with a bit more room and it has been running for months. Rounded corners expecially, every cracked bracket I have thrown out broke on a sharp inside corner.
Agreeing with the clearance point here. My under-printer drawer was fine on width but I forgot the whole machine rocks a little during fast moves, and the drawer front rubbed the frame every time it got going. Second version I gave it room to slide and also printed a small test block of the rail gap before committing. Took five minutes and saved me a full reprint. Also seconding the sloped chute, mine lives next to the scraper and I actually empty it now instead of peeling purge blobs off the plate.
One thing that bit me early on was print orientation. I printed a spool holder arm standing upright because it looked cleaner, and it snapped off at the mount after a month. Layer lines ran right across the thin part of the arm. Laid it flat on the next one and it has been solid since. Now I flip every clip or arm in the slicer and ask where a break whould happen before I hit print. Takes ten seconds of thinking and has saved me more reprints than anything else.
Join the Discussion
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Didn't find your answer?
Ask the community — no account required