Hello, 3D Printing Friends! Today on the BV3D Channel, we'll get
a look at the FLSun Super Racer! Stick around and we'll get into it,
right after this! I'm Bryan, and you... are watching BV3D!
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Okay, so today we're taking a look at the Super Racer, which FLSun was kind enough to send over.
The Super Racer is FLSun's newest Delta 3D printer. Now, my friend Garret, over at 3D Print
Farm, recently had a video about this printer as well, where he printed a HUGE dice tower with it.
And every time he said Super Racer, he seemed to be putting all the emphasis on the first syllable
of "Super." And all I could hear was... Soup Eraser.
Soup Eraser. A Soup Eraser.
Soup Eraser. Okay, so back to the printer.
FLSun says its default printing speed is 150mm/s, and it's a HUGE tower of a printer, standing about
a meter tall with a spool of filament on board. It has a filament runout sensor; it has a BMG-style
geared extruder, pushing filament through a Bowden tube to a PTFE-lined, Volcano-style hot end with a
0.4mm nozzle. You can set the nozzle up to 255˚C, but I don't recommend going past about 235˚C. At
temperatures above that, the PTFE liner can start to degrade. It has a 260mm diameter bed, which can
get up to 100˚C, and a build height of 330mm. It's got silent stepper motor drivers, a detachable bed
probe, and a seriously nice wired touchscreen that attaches magnetically to a bracket on the frame.
That lets you grab the screen, interact with the printer, and then put the screen
back in place. The three axes have linear rails, 10mm belts, and high-torque stepper motors.
The parallel arms connecting these to the end effector are carbon fiber, with strong springs
keeping them in place. And it comes with the usual assortment of extras: flush cutters (yay!), a
scraper, a MicroSD card and USB card reader, screwdriver, Allen wrenches, a nozzle wrench,
a tube of grease to keep things lubed, and an acupuncture needle for use in the
event of a nozzle clog. There is also a brush, for keeping the printer dust free.
And it came with an absolutely ADORABLE 200g spool of filament. It looks like a scale model
of a regular spool! In addition to all that, though, FLSun gives you a set of spare hot end
parts. The heater block, nozzle, heat break, nozzle heater cartridge, and thermistor.
And finally, it's got a handy drawer on the front for keeping all those tools in one place.
Okay, so putting the Super Racer together is easy. The included manual shows the assembly steps.
The short version is that you bolt the three axes to the top shell of the printer, then bolt
the bottom shell on, attach the end effector with the parallel arms, bolt on the extruder,
and plug in the cables. I would estimate you're looking at maybe 30 minutes from unboxing to done.
If you're more of a visual person than a read-the-manual person, the MicroSD card contains
a text file with links to FLSun's YouTube videos. The videos cover assembly and troubleshooting,
and using the touch screen for leveling, filament loading and unloading, and printing. Speaking of
the touchscreen, it's easy to use. The screen is attached to the printer with a curly cord,
and is held in place magnetically. You can adjust the position and angle of the magnetic mount to
put the screen where you want it, within range of the cord. Some other printer screens have weird
contrast issues when not viewed straight on, but this one is viewable from pretty much any angle.
And it uses a capacitive touch sensor instead of a clear plastic overlay.
Overall, the screen behaves like the screen on a smartphone. However, like a lot of touch-based
user interfaces, this one tries to hide a lot of the complexity of a 3D printer.
For the most part, I guess that's okay. The things you need on a constant basis are there.
A print button lets you select files from the MicroSD card for printing; a Tools button lets
you set nozzle and bed temperature, and a keypad is displayed so you can just type
in the temperature you need. You can also load and unload filament, move the end effector around, and
probe the bed in a process called auto leveling, which doesn't LEVEL anything, but instead senses
the level of the bed. "Leveling" is just one of those terms we have to deal with in 3D printing.
But if you're used to being able to dig down through the menus to set jerk and acceleration
values, or adjust the steps per millimeter on the extruder, you'll be disappointed. For that
kind of work, you'll need to temporarily tether the printer to a computer running Pronterface,
or connect it to a Raspberry Pi running OctoPrint, because you'll need to type G-code commands
directly to the printer to set those kinds of values and to save them to the printer's memory.
And while that's more of an intermediate level thing, and not necessarily a beginner level thing,
I've seen other printers that allow you to directly enter G-code commands from the screen,
and I think that sort of thing might be handy to have on this printer. So one of the things that
comes on the MicroSD card is a recent-ish version of Cura. The card I got came with version 4.4.
And it's semi-customized, containing only FLSun printers, and a pair of FLSun-provided printer
profiles for the Super Racer. One profile is named "fast," and one is named "fine." The problem,
at least for me, is that the included 4.4 version of Cura is Windows-only. They don't include a
customized Cura for Mac or Linux computers. So I downloaded the current version of Cura, 4.12.1,
and installed that on my Mac. Conveniently, it includes printer settings for the FLSun printers,
including the Super Racer. And it includes two printing profiles. Normal, which slices with
0.2mm layers, and Fine, which slices with 0.12 mm layers. So I sliced and printed two XYZ cubes.
This is normal. This is fine.
The Normal one, Cura said it would take only 13 minutes. In reality, it took 19 minutes. Still,
that's pretty dang fast for an XYZ cube. Printing this on an Ender-3 would typically take 35 or 40
minutes with my usual settings. But it's a little rough around the edges. There is a
bulge on the corner at the left side of each face. There's a bit of a gap along the top
fill where it meets the face at the left side of the Z. And there's a gap at the bottom of the z.
Now, this is the Fine one. Cura said this would take 26 minutes to print, but it took 33 minutes.
Again, still about twice as fast as if I printed with 0.12mm layer heights on an Ender-3. This one
looks much better compared to the Normal one. The faces look a lot better, the corners don't bulge,
and the Z face doesn't have that slight gap at the left where it meets that wall. But it does still
have that gapping at the bottom of the Z itself. So I also sliced some CaliCats using both the
Normal and Fine profiles. With the Normal profile, with 0.2mm layers, I got this result in 28
minutes, instead of about an hour. It's actually not too bad for an under-30-minute CaliCat.
No major issues, though there's a bit of a pattern to the surface finish. The tail doesn't show any
cooling related issues on the 45 degree overhang, so that's good. With the Fine profile, with 0.12mm
layers, I got this result in 51 minutes. Surface finish-wise, it looks a lot better. Like, it looks
really good. And this would easily take an hour and a half with my usual settings for an Ender-3.
Looking at some other test prints, I can get some remarkably string-free retraction/stringing tests
out of it. And here's Loubie3D's Aria dragon. On Normal, she took an hour and 38 minutes to print,
which is a full hour faster than the three hours, 15 minutes I'm used to. And here's Aria on Fine,
after just under three hours on the printer, instead of the five plus hours I would have
expected. Now, both the Normal one and the Fine one have some stringing in between the wings.
And while the Normal one has the occasional bump on the skin, the fine one came out
...fine. It's nice and smooth, except where the strings are happening in between the wings. Now,
the stringing was kind of unexpected, given the stringing test model I showed a minute ago. But
apart from that, they both seem to have come out pretty good. And I don't see other major problems
with it. And it can knock out a Benchy pretty quickly, at 57 minutes for Normal instead of
the one hour 45 minutes I usually wait. That said, at the normal speed this Benchy has a few issues.
It's got a bit of a lumpy license plate at the back, and the filament was curling up a bit on the
bow as it was being printed. This issue on the bow is almost always related to insufficient cooling.
Beyond that, though, the Benchy looks okay. So the Super Racer is a pretty fast, capable printer. And
I know part of that comes from what the slicer is telling it to do, but the other part is its
ability to actually carry out those instructions. Now I'm mostly a PrusaSlicer user, and I don't
spend a lot of time in Cura. So i'm sure there are tons of tweaks and settings that can be adjusted
to improve the print quality on Cura's Super Racer profiles, while maintaining the speed.
In fact, if YOU'VE got a Super Racer, and you'd be willing to share some tips with everyone,
particularly for enabling a no-strings relationship with printed models, put those down
in the comments so we can all benefit. Oh, one last print here. I scaled up Aria to 300mm tall,
and printed her with the Normal profile. She took about 12 hours and 45 minutes to print. And
one thing I gotta say about Delta printers, they make for good time lapses without a lot of effort.
And this big Aria? She came out pretty good, too. Okay, now that we've seen some of the output,
here's what I like about the Super Racer. So yeah, the obvious thing is that it's fast. In
some instances, it can turn out a print twice as fast as I tend to get with my other printers. It
seems sturdy, and well-designed, and it's pretty easy to assemble with just a handful of steps.
And that touchscreen is nice. The user interface is easy to operate, but some intermediate to
advanced settings are missing. I like being able to pull it off the front of the printer
to either check the progress of a print, or change a setting midstream, or load or unload filament.
Parts cooling seemed to be mostly sufficient for what I was printing, although in some instances
the speed of the printer was overwhelming its ability to cool one layer well enough before the
next one was laid down, like on the bow of that Benchy. It's not "fall asleep next to it" quiet,
but apart from some fan noise, it's quieter than a lot of 3D printers. The power supply fan seems to
be the loudest one on the machine. So now, here are a few of the things I didn't like about the
Super Racer. I had "fast" in the likes category, but I think there are some instances where it can
be a little too fast for the filament I used with it. You can run the nozzle hotter to kind
of compensate for that, but that can introduce other issues like stringing or blobs on a print.
As with any 3D printer, you have to find a balance between speed and good-enough output,
and so you may find yourself spending time tuning slicer settings to get where you want to
be. The positioning of the MicroSD card slot is a little awkward, since it's around the back of the
printer, and you need to have eyes on it to make sure you're putting the card in the right way.
It might be easier to plug a flash drive into the USB port in order to print, but you have to flash
the firmware to switch from using the MicroSD card to using the USB port. Like, there are literally
two versions of the firmware. One that uses the MicroSD card slot, and one that uses the USB port.
To be fair, it's not difficult to do, and FLSun DOES include both firmware files on the card,
but it's kinda cumbersome. In contrast, my Artillery Sidewinder X1 has a setting
to switch between using the USB port and the MicroSD card. Before assembly, I checked the
high current wiring on the main board. These are the ones clamped into the screw terminals.
The power inputs had connectors crimped onto them, but the output wires for the nozzle's heater
cartridge were tinned with solder. The heatsink fan wires were right next to it, and also tinned.
So I snipped off the tinned ends, stripped off some insulation, and crimped on some ferrules.
The fan really didn't need these, but I figured as long as I had the tools out, I'd do those as well.
Sometimes, I feel like I just keep going on and on about why the high current connections and
3D printers need to have ferrules on them when they're used with these screw terminal blocks.
But I'm going to continue bringing it up when I run into it, because from what I can tell, it's
safer than having the ends of the wires tinned with solder. Well anyway, that was a lot of words,
but there's really not much to dislike about the Super Racer. It towers over all the other
printers in my collection. Big thanks to FLSun for sending this over, so we could get a look at it.
Well, 3D Printing Friends, that's about all the time we have for this episode.
And now that we're at the end, let's go print something cool... and FAST!
Hey, real quick before you go. I wanted to say thanks for being one of the Super Awesome
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that's it for this one. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time here, on the BV3D Channel!