- Anycubic has sent over a 3D printer.
This one I'm actually quite excited about as well.
I mean, I just love 3D printers in general,
but this one, for the price that it costs
and for the features that it has,
is probably going to be the best entry level printer
I have seen.
I'm very excited.
So thanks to Anycubic for sponsoring this video,
and let's see what they sent us.
Got our assembly instructions.
It's quite...
Quite the booklet.
It's all nicely laid out in foam packaging.
It's got all our little bits and bobs.
Let's just get in there and start taking it apart.
This one does ship semi-disassembled.
Most of the base plate is going to be all together,
and then we pretty much just have to stuff
the top access on top of it.
Nice thing about this one,
is it comes with this textured metal, magnetic build plate,
so that'll pop off really nice
and then you just...
Your part's right off.
And then we get to the main event, the bottom plate.
Let's see if I can get this out
without destroying everything.
Okay.
That's easier.
We have a USB stick.
So I'll have our firmware and our profiles for Cura,
which I believe this uses.
There we go.
Yeah, it's a little USB stick
and it even has a little SD card reader slot on the side.
Spare nozzle, what size is this?
Spare, 0.4 millimeter nozzle.
Probably comes one with attached.
We haven't quite got there yet.
And what on Earth is this?
Oh! This will be our PTFE lining tube for the bowden.
This is a bowden-drive printer.
It comes with an eight gig micro SD card there.
Let's get this out and have a look at our base plate.
Oh! There's even more stuff that I didn't even see.
Get that out of the way.
So here is gonna be the big brains of our 3D printer.
This design is a little bit different
than some of the other ones.
A lot of the cheaper models like this one run on wheels.
So the Y-axis here,
as well as the X-axis and jaggery-axis on this,
run on these V wheels,
and then they run into these little slots
on the side of the aluminum extrusion,
and they just sort of glide along there.
It's a little bit of quieter operation
than if you have a ball bearing,
but it's a less precise mounting option
and it's even less precise
than something like a linear rail.
But at this price in this category,
I think V wheels is completely acceptable.
Our hot end assembly looks quite nice.
It looks like it's a standard E3D V6.
And one of the most exciting features about this printer,
is it comes with mesh bed leveling.
So it looks like we have an inductive probe
at the bottom here.
That's what this little orange protrusion is,
and that'll detect the bed,
and the magnetic field will get in the way
and then it can know exactly how level your bed is,
so you don't have to worry about that as much.
It makes this easier for beginner.
Anycubic is calling this technology Anycubic LeviQ.
I don't know if there's any proprietary magic in there
or if they're just making up fun names.
But it seems like it's just magnetic inductive leveling.
It'll be good enough.
And especially at this price performance ratio,
upgrading that down the line,
we'll be talking about that a lot.
Upgrading is more than a possibility,
because it's here in the base.
I guess, the last thing to do now
is just to assemble the thing.
Kyle has assured me that the default pit set
for our LTT screwdriver,
lttstore.com,
come with pretty much every bit
that you would need to assemble a 3D printer.
So we'll see if he's lying or not.
I think these are our jet access profiles.
This one is blank,
and this one here has a little nub-in on the side of it.
There's the nub-in.
What's the front?
The front has the thing with the dingle arm.
Nice and light.
I'm impressed at all.
The extrusion is nice and sturdy.
One thing that you don't want
and you do get on some of the cheaper printers,
is they're really wobbly.
It looks like they've spent the budget
for this printer in the areas that matter, rather than...
It's designed to be made cheaply,
it's not made cheaply.
Okay, well, I'm gonna disappear
and get some more of this assembled,
and when we get to something interesting
like maybe, I don't know,
this gantry assembly,
we'll see you again.
Bye.
(upbeat music)
And we're back.
It's another day.
We've got the printer mostly assembled.
It wasn't very difficult.
It only took roughly an hour.
Very simple.
The instructions were okay.
They're not the best I've ever seen,
but they were easy to follow,
and all the parts fit into each other.
There's no confusion.
All the little bags of screws are nicely labeled.
All the cables for the various axis and end stops
are all really nicely labeled,
and it just sort of put itself together.
It was great.
We do have some steps to do now,
that are a little more complicated
than some other types of printers.
Because we have these V wheels,
you can see we've got a hell of a lot of play everywhere.
We're gonna need to do some,
basically, tramming and calibration.
They've given us this wrench,
and most of these wheels here have an eccentric nut,
which allows us to tighten them up
and make sure we can get this slop out of the system.
One thing I'm not entirely enthused about,
is that it's only driven and supported on one side.
I guess, as they've done that as a cost saving measure.
But I'm not entirely sure
this is gonna tram up the way that I want it.
That feels really tight now,
but I'm concerned it's not gonna move very well.
What's kind of interesting is they recommend that
we take this little cardboard box that all the tools came in
and bring the X-axis...
Sorry, the...
Bring the Z-axis up,
throw this over here
and then lower the Z-axis down onto the toolbox.
That's sort of like squaring it, I guess.
And now we've gotta loosen some of these screws.
I've got the V wheels all nice and tight now,
and there's no more flex in this X-axis gantry.
One of the things that's a little bit interesting,
is there's no adjustment for the bed at all,
and I wonder if they've done this
as an extreme cost saving measure,
because we only have one support on this side
to drive the Z-axis up and down.
But I think they've included bed mesh leveling,
specifically, to address the tramming issue.
So what I'm seeing right now,
even though I have everything
relatively tight and perfect...
We can't go too tight,
because then the motors won't be able to move it.
But if this is your bed,
what I'm seeing on the nozzle right now,
is it sort of starts here
and then it comes in an angle
towards the right hand side of the bed.
And if we didn't have bed mesh leveling,
there would be really no way in this printer,
at least, that I see,
with no adjustments on the bed,
to get rid of that.
But with bed mesh leveling,
I can measure all the different points on the bed
and then I can move the Z-axis up, right?
I can...
Sorry.
Yeah, the Z-axis would come up
as the nozzle moves to the right,
and it would effectively get rid of that completely.
Okay, we've got the power in.
It's got a nice color screen on the front there.
We will start off, I guess, by giving it a home.
I can hear, rather, loud fan,
not super loud.
But you'll notice it from the power supply, I guess.
There we go.
And let's try the auto leveling feature.
So it's gonna home all the accesses,
and then it's going to,
hopefully, do an auto level.
So it should do a full probe of the entire bed,
and my hope is that it stores that internally
so that I don't have to do an auto level every single print,
'cause this is rather slow.
Especially with the Z-axis only being driven on one side,
I don't think it wants to do super fast Z movements.
But you'll never need that anyway, really.
For me, I always run a bowden set up
because it does allow for those faster print speeds.
I want my prints now,
and this is a great way to do it.
The shorter the tube, the better.
So by having it really, really close to the carriage here,
you're gonna have less of that slot.
So this is a really good setup and a nice trade off.
I always like to see that.
The test print I've done,
I've tried to go sort of balls to the wall,
and they're claiming 10 centimeters a second
to a hundred millimeters a minute.
Sorry, a hundred millimeters a second.
So I've asked the print to make it do
a hundred millimeters a second,
pretty much the whole time.
So I'm excited to see that.
See if we lose any steps.
It appears that this printer uses the Marlin firmware,
which is quite nice.
That's what I use at home too.
You could have, I guess,
then technically flash whatever you wanted, but...
I don't know.
And that also means that you can pretty much,
use whatever slicing software and host you want.
For me, I like PDA host, or Repetier, or Repetiter.
It's nice for machine control.
I run my machines at home via USB,
so I don't print with SD cards 'cause I'm weird.
Don't add me.
The nice thing about that,
is you get to see real time feedback of your print.
We're gonna be doing this little, fidgety, spinnery thing,
which should give us some indication
of tolerances that this can achieve,
and also, should print nice and quick too.
It's mostly just...
It's mostly just external perimeters
and a little bit of infill.
I couldn't get the USB connected.
I don't know if that's my fault
or if it doesn't contain it,
but I can't really find any information on that.
Maybe it was just a guess on my part.
But I've got my SD card in now,
and let's...
Let's get this print sliced up.
I'm gonna use PrusaSlicer for this,
'cause that's what I like.
Now I'm just getting the filament now.
We've moved over to the build corner
because we gotta do some other filming,
and this print's gonna take 20 minutes or so.
Let's just push it through manually
and then we'll do some feeding.
I just wanna get it through the bowden tube
and make sure it's not encountering any resistance
as I push it into the hot end.
The more resistance you get through your hot end assembly,
the worse your volumetric speeds are gonna be,
'cause your stepper motor's not gonna be able to keep up.
And if we wanna be printing fast,
then we need no resistance.
That's printing nice and fast.
So first layer of doing at about,
I don't know,
60 millimeters a second,
which is still pretty aggressive for our first layer.
And it's laying it down quite nicely.
I am seeing some issues with that tramming, though,
so maybe I didn't do the mesh bed leveling properly.
We're getting a little bit of over extrusion there,
but again, this is all my fault.
The printer is moving absolutely silently,
so I think it has to use the TMC 2130s.
Really what you're buying at this price point,
is just a base and a platform to go off of,
and if they've included all the mechanical stuff
that you could possibly need,
then you can go through and upgrade it,
like the fan and the power supply,
or you could get a different power supply
or a quieter power supply.
You could put a different firmware on it,
you could adjust the settings,
adjust the tune, that sort of thing.
The software they've included
has got some really nice quality of live features too.
I can pause the print.
And it also has power loss protection.
We're not gonna test that,
'cause I just kind of want this print to finish.
But if I unplug the cable or you have power outage,
and the print will resume.
It'll reheat the hot end,
it'll re-home itself
and start back from where it left off,
which is nice.
I guess we'll let this print finish
and see if the quality's good,
see if the tolerances are good enough.
I mean, minus all the stringing.
But again, that's my fault.
That's not necessarily the printer's fault.
Okay, I'll see you in a bit.
I've got it assembled,
we gave it some testing,
and I spent the rest of the afternoon
kind of fiddling with it.
Now when you're 3D printing,
you have a bunch of variables.
You have, how fast you're moving the tool
or the print head, or the X carriage.
Every single one of these variables
needs to be correct and controlled.
And for a beginner, I think it's quite difficult
to know which one of these may be tens to 30 variables
you have to target to get a proper print or a part.
We'll start with this one here,
which I printed quite aggressively.
This was done at a hundred millimeters a second,
which is sort of the upper echelon
of what Anycubic is claiming for this printer.
And as you can see, we had X-axis layer shift.
So the stepper motor that controls the position
of this axis here,
was moving too fast,
there was too much tension on the V wheels, whatever,
and the computer thought that
the tool was in a spot that it wasn't.
The next one, this was...
I was just printing and screwing
with the printer at the time,
so this doesn't really count.
And now we can see we're kind of...
We're getting better as we go down the line here.
When you buy an expensive printer,
sort of maybe double the cost of this one,
triple the cost of this one,
what you're really paying for, in my opinion,
is less variables that you'd have to control an account for.
That doesn't necessarily mean that
they're gonna be the best.
I think if you're gonna be buying a cheap printer like this,
there's going to be a long learning curve.
Even for me, just getting the V wheels
to be the exact correct tension so that there wasn't sag
on the far side of the axis,
and that the Z-axis height adjust
was actually moving both of them,
on the first couple of prints here,
I didn't have them tension quite correctly,
and so when the Z-axis height adjust
was moving the X carriage,
it was just pulling this side up and down,
and this side was not really moving that much.
So this came off the printer and they're all free,
but it's got some blobs and things.
I was playing with the retraction settings, quite a lot.
There seems to be some issues with over extrusion.
It likes to blob.
That could be this filament,
but it's new and it's dried.
We can see some under extrusion artifacts
along this side here,
which is very interesting.
And, yeah, a lot of stringiness.
I will give credit to the bed.
The bed works extremely well.
It's nice rough surface,
it's not peeling.
Everything stuck to it really quite well.
One quality of light feature that I think it's missing,
is end stops along the backside,
so that when you put the bed on it's sort of square.
I was finding I'm having to grab the the hot 60 degree bed
just to get it straight.
The only problem is that this printer is $200.
It's even cheaper right now,
as it's offered as an early bird thing.
That's incredibly good value for what you get.
You get a...
You get a 3D printer for 200 bucks.
I guess for $200, this is a fine printer
that can squirt plastic where you want it to squirt.
The problem is that if you're a little more advanced,
you might not have this as a good base for the long run.
But for 200 bucks, it's a great gateway drug
into the 3D printing hobby.
And as you've only spent $200,
you've still got loads of money left over
to go buy like a $600 touchscreen toaster.
Sarah did a review of that,
you can check out here.
Thanks to Anycubic for sponsoring this video.
They make a lot of other good stuff too.
Checking 'em up.
Thanks, bye.