Well I've had this thing for nearly a week and put a few pounds of plastic through it, here are my thoughts.
It's big. Not as large of build volume as I had written down on paper that I wanted, but in real life, about at the limit of what most people would be willing to manage. Smartass delivery driver barricaded me in my house with it. I had to walk around from the back door.
From cutting the box open to printing the first part took about an hour, maybe a little longer, I wasn't exactly timing it; no assembly required, just unpacking and following setup instructions. It is very much ready to go out of the box.
It prints just about everything on the market except peek and probably some other ultra problematic stuff I don't know about. Ships with a second nozzle (hardened steel for the carbon fiber stuff). CoreXY so it's fast (600mm/s). Probably not as fast as Voron but fast enough to look (to my eyes at least) like the print head is teleporting when it makes a rapid move; just disappears and reappears 3" away. That's something I'm not used to so it still draws me in and makes me stand there watching it and being unproductive.
Hot end goes up to 350C, build plate to 120C, and heated build chamber to 65C. Auto bed leveling, input shaping, all the stuff the cool kids have. It is running Klipper and has Fluidd web interface. Open source FTW. Nothing about it is locked down that I can tell. I haven't jacked around with any of the config files but I've looked through them.
Direct drive extruder means TPU is no problem. It also means there's a lot of weight being slung around at warp speed in there, so it needs to be on a sturdy bench. I put it on a wobbly one to start, and it had parts and tools falling off all sides of the bench.
The heated build chamber is just what I needed for all the ABS parts I need to make. I have never had this much success with ABS.
With about 1.5kg of ABS through the nozzle, this is the closest thing I've had to a failure:
The first ~20% of the layers look like poo but I'm pretty sure that's my fault. I usually turn my filament dryer on the night before so the filament is nice and dry, and preheated, and then in the morning turn the printer on, let the build plate and chamber heat up for at least 30 minutes for everything to equalize, and then print. I keep the dryer running while printing. That morning I had forgotten to turn on the dryer the night before and I just turned everything on the same time. 30 minutes later started printing and above was the result. I theorize that the beginning of the acceptable print quality coincides with the time that the filament dryer finally got the roll up to temp. Here's what I'm talking about with the filament dryer:
So far I've printed TPU, a bunch of ABS, some PETG, and the obligatory PLA benchy with the small roll that came in the machine. No issues with any of it.
I am very happy with the printer but here are the gripes I've managed to rack up so far:
- the front window doesn't go up high enough. All the action happens at the very top of the machine and they only left about an inch through which to view it, and that inch has a curve in the window "glass" right in the middle of it. It's hard enough to see by eye but near impossible to get an un-distorted picture of the action from the front.
- the auto bed leveling takes forever and runs by default on every single print when sent from the laptop; no way to disable it in slicer. You can however just upload the file to the printer, then go to the printer and select the file, disable the bed leveling, and then print. But that's an extra step (or more steps, depending on where you put the printer).
- at the end of the print, nozzle, bed, and chamber temp setpoint all go to 0. Also during auto bed leveling and homing, all temp setpoints go to zero. If you're like me and want to keep those internals at a consistent operating temperature all day long, well this printer seems designed to stop you from doing that. I haven't looked into it but I'm guessing there's probably a g-code that slicer is putting at the end of all my files to set the Temps to 0 and I could probably manually delete it, but I doubt that will help for what happens during auto bed leveling.
Also I got a bondtech extruder with slice mosquito hot end for the old I3 along with a BigTreeTech SKR and a RPi, and I'll be diving into resto-modding that old dinosaur pretty soon.
p.s. check out how sexy acetone-treated ABS is:
