How I finally got my rescue Voron 2.4 running again: steps that actually worked

I picked up a similar fixer-upper last year, except mine was a Trident that the seller swore only needed a new screen. Turned out the previous owner had flashed a firmware meant for a different board and gave up halfway through. I learned the same lesson you did about the wiring, except I skipped it and paid for it when a loose pin on the toolhead kept dropping a motor mid print. Took me two weekends of chasing a fault that one continuity check would have caught in ten minutes. One thing that helped me was keeping the old control board for parts rather than tossing it. Fan outputs and even the fuses on those boards are handy spares when you're diagnosing.

On the hotend, don't write off the printer over it. Mine came with a tiny stock hotend and I had the same ceiling on speed. I eventually upgraded and the whole character of the machine changed, it went from a nice steady printer to something that actually earns its frame. Before that I kept telling people it was just a fun project, and honestly it was still worth it even at half speed.

Also, running calibrations with the panels off is worth doing if you haven't, heat buildup from full panels can shift your numbers between runs and it drove me nuts for a while before I figured it out.

Still learning my way around here but this thread is pushing me to actually finish mine. I bought a half built 2.4 off a coworker who lost interest, and it's just been sitting in my garage for months because I was scared of the wiring part. Reading that you labeled everything with tape as you went makes it sound less intimidating. Did you find the original build manual was enough to retrace someone else's assembly, or did you have to guess at some of thier choices? That's my biggest worry, not knowing what the last guy was thinking when he routed things.

That cooked driver taking a trace with it tracks with what I saw on a board I rescued once, where the culprit turned out to be a fan port that had died and left the driver running with no cooling at all. I now make a habit of plugging a spare fan into every port and checking them one at a time before trusting the board again, since a dead output is invisible til the thing overheats mid job. Also curious what you ended up doing about the damaged trace, because I just jumped mine with a bit of wire and it has held for a year, but I keep wondering if that was lazy.

Seconding the hotend advice. Mine came with a small one too and I sat at cautious speeds for months before swapping it out. The difference wasn't even the top speed so much as how long prints took, a big vase mode job that used to run overnight finished before dinner. Just check that your part cooling can keep up once you push more plastic through, that was my bottleneck after the swap.