- Hi, my name is Tom and today I wanted to go through
a quick 3D printing calibration cube comparison between
the four 3D printers that I have.
This whole 3D printing cube has been going around
on Thingiverse lately and it's been pretty popular,
so I decided that I wanted to try it on my printers
to see not only how well calibrated they are,
but also how they compare to each other
because I have several different models,
each with their own quirks and issues.
I've got two of the Monoprice Maker Select Mini printers.
(printers whirring)
One thing I realized really quickly with 3D printing
is that if you have one printer,
you kinda do a lot of waiting.
And so that means if you're doing like a 10 hour print,
there's nothing else you can do in that time.
And that's what I realized really quickly.
It made a lot of sense to get a second printer,
so that way I can be doing more printing and have more fun
like at the same time.
So I quickly went, I think within a month of ordering
the first one, went and got the second one.
The first printer has been perfect
the entire time I've owned it.
It's not given me any problems whatsoever.
The second one is a bit of a different story.
It had a warped bed, which meant it sort of had a concave
dip in the middle which really hurt the print quality.
I could've sent it back to Monoprice,
but it was also a really good chance to kinda dive in
and see how to fix things on my own.
There's a pretty simple fix for the warped bed on the Mini,
which was just to go to Home Depot and buy a sheet of glass.
That was nothing I'd ever done before,
but these are like under two dollars each.
And then buy a three dollar glass cutter,
and you can cut the glass to fit exactly as you need it.
So all in all, took about five dollars
and maybe like twenty minutes of time
and I had a perfectly smooth bed for that printer.
I wanted to buy a printer for my classroom
and so I bought the Monoprice Maker Select Plus
because it's a little bit bigger,
has a little more capabilities than the Minis
and for a classroom, it also--
it's cool looking, it's kind of intimidating looking.
Students see it, think that it's neat.
And this has been an interesting printer.
It works pretty well and when I first got it,
I was really impressed with the quality of the prints.
But it's really fussy when it comes to
how you're slicing your prints and I've been using Cura
and I get really mixed results.
I've had got play with this printer so much
just to get decent prints out of it.
And then last but definitely not least,
I have the Prusa i3 MK2S.
I ordered this printer the day after Christmas of 2016
and I received it at the end of March 2017,
so it took a long time but it's super worth the wait.
I think what's pretty much been said with this printer a lot
is almost feel bad for other printers when it shows up.
Because it's so good that why would I want to use
anything else when this just prints so, so good?
So between all of those printers that I have,
the Prusa, the Plus, and then the two Minis,
that's a wide spectrum of print quality,
of abilities and things like that,
which is why I wanted to print the calibration cube.
I'm trying to keep all the settings the same
across all the printers.
So for the Prusa, I sliced the model using Slic3r
because there's a special Prusa edition of Slic3r
that comes with the printer that works pretty well
and that's what I've been getting the best results with.
For everything else, the two Minis and the Select Plus,
I use Cura because that's basically
what I've been using since the beginning.
I kept all the settings the same as they're recommended
on the Thingiverse description, which is 30% in fill,
0.1 millimeter in layer height and I kept the temperatures
the same which was 205 degrees on the extruder
and 55 degrees on the bed.
And the prints took about an hour to complete.
I made sure to use the same brand of filament
on all four printers, it wasn't the exact same color,
but I used Hatchbox PLA because I found Hatchbox
to give me the best results.
The filament that I've gotten the absolute best results
on every printer with was the silver spool
that actually came with the Prusa.
It's almost empty and I'm really sad about that,
because the quality that this gave was unbelievable.
It looked so good, everything is so detailed.
I knew you could order whatever brand filament this is
directly from Prusa but they're so backed up with their
orders that it takes a long time to get orders processed
and so it's not really practical.
Hatchbox you can just buy on Amazon and then it's delivered
in like a couple days and you're good to go.
I've also got some weird stuff like this
3D Solutech filament, which is pretty cool.
It's like a shiny blue and it has this really cool texture.
This can have a hard time printing on certain printers.
It works great on the Prusa.
Like the results are unbelievable, they're super clean.
I printed stuff like this pen holder that's really
cool looking and works really, really well.
I printed several of those.
I also printed a case for DJI Mavic that like the quality
on that is unbelievable again.
I've also got a lot of colors of PLA from AIO Robotics,
which I like because they sell these little half spools
for like 10 to 12 dollars, which is great.
They're just on Amazon.
The only problem with this, print quality's great,
I found that if you leave it in the printer for a day or two
and then try to use your printer again after awhile,
this stuff gets really brittle, really fast and can actually
just (snapping) like that, just broke off right there.
And it can snap off in the printer which is frustrating,
especially on a printer like the Mini that has a bowden tube
and then you just have a string of filament
that's kind of stuck in there and you have to start
taking stuff apart to get it out.
This is great filament but you definitely need to take it
out of the printer if you're gonna let it sit for awhile.
All four printers are running Hatchbox PLA.
Two of 'em are silver, one of 'em's doing white,
one of 'em's doing kind of a gold.
(printers whirring)
The cubes all finished.
They took about an hour to complete on all the printers.
I did have one issue, which was I had just cleaned
the glass bed on one of the Minis and even though
I put super glue on it, it still--
I guess I didn't put enough or I didn't put it
in the right spot enough because the cube that it printed
came loose about 80 percent through
and just started dragging around the bed.
I had to reprint another one on that printer.
(case sliding and opening)
So the next step after the print is done
is to take a digital caliper and measure the cube.
It's supposed to be 20 millimeters on all sides.
I've got the Prusa, the Plus, the first Mini I bought,
and the second Mini I bought.
And the cube has the X, Y, and Z sides.
So the conclusion is that the printers are all fairly close,
none of them are 100 percent precise.
The first mini is real, real close
with those 19.99 and 19.97s.
The two printers that are closest together are definitely
the Prusa and the first Minis.
It's pretty impressive when you consider in terms of price,
how different they are that those two printers can be
so comparable when it comes to accuracy and calibration.
So there's a couple reasons I decided
to do this print today.
The first one is that I just wanted to print something
and I like having all the printers going at once
because it's really fun and I decided it might be
interesting to do a quick video on that
so that other people could see.
I don't know how conclusive these results are,
if there's any sort of takeaway from it.
In terms of my recommendation, I would kinda suggest
either staying towards the cheaper printers like the Minis
or the higher end stuff like the Prusas
or even something beyond that.
It sort of seems like when you get in the middle
with the Maker Select Plus, it's a good printer
but you kinda lose the simplicity and the reliability
of the cheaper printers, but you're not really gaining
the print quality of the more expensive printers.
So you're sort of in this space where it's like
the print quality's okay but also it's not super reliable,
and that's not really the best place to be.
So anyway, I hope that was helpful or interesting
and I will see you guys later.
Thanks.