A standard 3D printer chugs out a 3DBenchy — the little tugboat that the hobby uses as its universal torture test — in something like 30 minutes to an hour. So when a hobbyist drops a video of one materializing in under a minute, the reflex is to assume the footage is sped up. It isn’t. The bar has moved so far, so fast, that the current world record for printing a complete, rules-legal Benchy now sits below the 60-second mark. A three-minute Benchy would have been jaw-dropping a couple of years ago. Today it wouldn’t crack the leaderboard.
This is one of those corners of the maker world that looks like a stunt and turns out to be real engineering. Two builders in particular — Matt the Printing Nerd and Germany’s Jan Roetz — have spent the better part of two years trading the crown, and the back-and-forth has dragged the whole community’s understanding of what an FDM machine can physically do into new territory.
The race to the bottom (of the clock)
The race is run under SpeedBoatRace rules — an unofficial but fiercely policed standard the community settled on so that “fastest Benchy” actually means something. The short version: PLA filament, a fixed model scale, a defined layer height, and the whole print captured on camera with a visible timer. No quietly shrinking the boat or swapping in exotic materials. Get those wrong and your time doesn’t count.
For a long stretch, Jan Roetz was the name to beat. Working under his Roetz 4.0 brand, he’d ground out a 74-second Benchy on his self-built machine, “The Minuteman” — named, not subtly, for the goal of cracking 60 seconds. He has been brutally honest about the cost: he describes the project as roughly 365 days of consistent engineering and dozens of iterations to get there.
The sub-minute wall fell to Matt the Printing Nerd, who posted a verified 00:54.733 — the first sub-one-minute Benchy — on his own CoreXY design, the T250. Roetz answered shortly after, breaking the minute mark himself with a 59-second run on the 20th public iteration of the Minuteman, this time with a revamped bed-motion system. To appreciate the slope of that curve: as recently as 2024 the recognized record was Monika McWuff’s 2 minutes 19 seconds. In two years the field has cut the time by more than two-thirds.
What it takes to print a boat in a breath
The two builds are a fascinating study in opposite philosophies. Matt’s T250 is a CoreXY: the bed stays put on the X/Y plane and only drops in Z, while the toolhead flies. Roetz went the other way with a “bed slinger,” but a deranged one — the Minuteman moves the bed on an air bearing with a suspended-cable drive, killing the friction and slop that normally turn a thrown bed into a vibration nightmare at speed.
Whichever frame you pick, three problems decide the race. One: getting enough plastic out fast enough. A normal hotend simply can’t melt filament quickly enough to feed a head moving that fast. Roetz’s answer is four BondTech extruders coupled into a single shared melt chamber feeding one nozzle — multiplying flow far beyond a stock setup. Two: cooling. When you’re laying plastic this fast, each layer has milliseconds to solidify before the next one lands on top. Roetz built a circular “air knife” that surrounds the nozzle and has chilled the compressed air with dry ice to push it below freezing.
Three, and this is the unsung hero: input shaping. Slam a heavy gantry or bed from a standstill to high speed and back, hundreds of times a second, and the machine rings like a tuning fork — you get ghosting, ripples, and a Benchy that looks like it melted in the rain. Input shaping (and its cousin, pressure advance for extrusion timing) is the firmware math that anticipates those resonances and commands counter-moves so the structure cancels its own wobble. Without aggressive resonance compensation and a frame stiff enough to be characterized, none of these times exist. The motors aren’t the limit anymore. Physics — inertia, melt rate, heat transfer — is.
What a 59-second Benchy actually proves
Here’s the honest part. A record Benchy is a single 25-gram object printed by a bespoke machine that may exist in exactly one unit on Earth, tuned for one model, sometimes babysat with dry ice. It is not a claim that you’ll be printing functional parts in a minute on the desk in your garage. The Benchy is a benchmark, and like all benchmarks it rewards optimizing for the benchmark.
But dismissing it as a stunt misses the point. The mods that win SpeedBoatRace — higher-flow hotends, smarter cooling, stiffer motion systems, better resonance compensation — are exactly the things that trickle down. The reason a stock Bambu or a tuned Voron today casually does speeds that would have been record-class a few years ago is that the speed-freak fringe proved it was possible and open-sourced the how. Matt is candid that his T250 aims at genuinely faster quality printing, and Roetz frames the Minuteman as a step toward additive manufacturing being viable for real local production. The records are the marketing; the engineering underneath is the actual product.
The take
The sub-minute Benchy is the four-minute mile of desktop 3D printing — a barrier everyone assumed was years off, broken, and then immediately treated as the new floor. Nobody printing for a living needs a 54-second boat. But everybody benefits when a handful of obsessives chase one anyway, because they keep finding the next real wall and shoving it back. Watch the footage. It’s bonkers, and it’s the most fun the hobby has had in ages.
Sources / watch: Matt the Printing Nerd’s record run, “World’s First Sub-1 Minute Benchy (00:54.733)” (YouTube) and channel (@MatttheprintingNerd); Jan Roetz / Roetz 4.0’s Minuteman series and 59-second record (channel: @Roetz4.0). Reporting and context: Tom’s Hardware, VoxelMatters, How-To Geek, and the SpeedBoatRace leaderboard via All3DP.
