[awkward camera work as I wrestle with an overly large frame] Today we're going to take a look at
the mingda magician max which is not only alliterative but it's also huge! Let's go.
The mingda magician max is a massive machine maxing out at a massive
muild mlate size of 320x320mm.
That's over a foot. Over. A foot. That makes it the biggest machine I've reviewed so far by 20mm,
slightly bigger than the artillery sidewinder X2 that it's sat next to
during the test. But should you buy it over the X2? I dunno. Let's ha ve a look around and see.
Assembling this machine is pretty easy although I didn't get a manual in mine,
I will link below to the online manual in case you don't get one in yours either but I did ask mingda
and the SD card contains the manual too, I was also told future shipments will include manuals.
The only thing you need to know really is which screws to use where,
and that there's two in the sides of the upright section and one in
the base on each side. It seems really sturdy once it's together.
There's a cable connector thingy to the bed which you have to connect,
this seems ok, it's screwed in so shouldn't come loose
The cables to the hotend however aren't screwed in. This
could be a concern long term although during the 40 or so hours of test printing I've done,
nothing came loose. I'd be inclined to just put some hot melt glue on these if I did a lot of
long prints, just for peace of mind, last thing you want is one to fall out during a 5 day print.
So, overview of the printer. Huge, I mentioned that, but also with self levelling
so no wheels on the base. The bed is low voltage and I believe it's running at 24 volts
and on screen now are my measured values, these are all pretty good, the 300W bed takes a
reasonably short time to heat up, it's not insulated underneath but it has some plastic
so I think it will create a sort of microclimate under there. Interestingly
I've tested the bed up to 100C and not seen any issues with the plastic.
(I need to do a video on why everything gets dusty
so quickly. I need to figure that out. Any ideas? It drives me mad. )
You get dual z screws and a belt to synchronise them, the bed also runs on two rails instead of
one, it all feels secure and sturdy, as evidenced by the results I've been getting with no apparent
wobble issues with levelling and calibration. You also have tensioners on the x and y,
and I would advise you watch my linked video to know how far to tension these belts.
There's a handle on the top but unless you are 9 ft tall I can't see how you would use it, so
that amused me. The filament holder has actually been properly designed for the printer too,
which is a theme I've seen throughout, whoever designed this printer seems to
actually have some actual skills as you'll see in a moment. The holder just clicks in,
as easy as that, and can be mounted either side. It works fine.
The use of usb C and full size SD cards
is something I very much approve of. USB sticks are also supported.
But what we really want to know is what is going on with the hardware, right?
The hotend doesn't give much away from the outside, in fact it doesnt look special at
all - but thats where you'd be wrong. once you look inside you see some actual innovation here,
this isn't your average off the shelf configuration. The extruder is a BMG type,
which is an ok extruder, but coupled directly to a shorter version of the v6, this is a new
one to me. I've wondered for a while whether you could use shorter hotends with PTFE lining
and apparently you can. Also packed in here is an almost invisible filament sensor,
and also the star of the show, the self levelling system.
Now I thought that the bed levelling would be the same as other printers that use the nozzle
to level but I was wrong. This thing is using a different method, it's not a strain gauge.
I'm not going to give away how I think it's being done, but here's some cool footage.
Also the levelling is fully automatic, you click levelling and it just does everything,
the only thing you do need to do is add a mystery offset at the end, which is presumably
never going to change, because it's levelling to the tip of the nozzle
so the advantage is that changing nozzles won't affect your mesh or z offset!
And here's the obligatory test which is passes with flying colours, this is one very accurate
mesh, with just one slight drift at the back corner but that is really nothing to worry about,
on a bed this size that has no adjustment wheels, this is incredibly accurate, and you can see the
bed mesh at work too by watching the z screws while printing, this isn't
layer change, this is just the z movements for the mesh.
On to the internals of the base. I'm happy to say that apart from it taking me ages
to get into the base due to the number of screws, everything is in order here,
in fact more in order than I expected. We have actual grounding, and we also have ferrules,
both of which are good to see and shows that mingda are aware of the constant complaints we
make about tinned connections and grounding. The board is bespoke with an STM32 ZET6 on it which
apparently clocks in at 168mhz and 512mb of ram which is not too shoddy, if anyone ever gets
round to custom firmware that should be plenty enough for anything you want to do with it.
This slot is puzzling because it looks like it would fit an NRF24L01 so that's..interesting!
Wiring is all neat, I have no issues with this personally, so let's get printing!
What's on the SD card is this thing. We'll just...move on.
I also advise you largely ignore the slicer part of the manual, especially as mingda have provided
profiles for this printer already in the latest version of cura 5, so there's huge advantages
in using that rather than the provided one on the sd card. You can just add the printer and
go, the included profiles are fine, although I find z-hop annoying so I turned that off,
otherwise they are well tuned and give good results.
Big printer means big prints so I went straight in for this dinosaur skull made out of bone colour
filament, although to me, bone, I'm not so sure. Looks like a giant murray mint. Thats probably a
UK thing. They rot your teeth and are this colour. This is printed I think at 150%, so it came out
pretty huge. The standard cura base print speed is 60mm/s with 30 for walls, which
is not slow for a bed slinger, and the quality considering is actually surprisingly high. This
means that even with a .4 nozzle you can print big stuff like this in less time,
the skull was a 2 part print with the longest part being around 17 hours which is not bad.
Something I do like about this printer's firmware build is it actually .. .. beeps when it's done,
although I keep thinking there's an error but no, it just beeps when it's done.
I did my usual calibration print and it came out just fine. I accidentally used sunlu glow in the
dark, I thought it was just green, but there you go, or there you glow. This is actually pretty
good, especially when you look at the ghosting or lack of, considering the mass of the bed,
thats quite impressive. I've had much worse from much smaller printers.
We need to talk about the bed adhesion for a moment. I do not know what they have done to
this bed, but things just don't come off. I mean that is a totally double edged sword, because
during the tests literally nothing failed to stick to the bed, which is great for a glass bed.
But things are quite a task to get off when they're finished. Even if you account for
expansion and print at 75C, when they cool, they still stick. I imagine as the bed ages this will
settle down, but for the time being I find you have to give everything a really good smack to get
it to come off, which does work. But yes, you will not have issues with things sticking to this bed.
Next up I tried TPU. This is a new TPU I have from eryone, link below in the description,
its a rainbow tpu which I only just learned is a thing. I printed this out
and it came out so well I had to print another one but bigger. That looks really cool.
I will share the TPU cura profiles I made on my website
although I didn't have to change much from the defaults. My standard stringing test showed that
I probably need to spend some more time tuning retraction but it's acceptable anyway for real
world use as you can see. Being a BMG style extruder I'm less confident of the much softer
tpu types but it should still print them in some manner so I am not concerned enough about that.
What else, oh, marlin. It looks like it's running marlin 2, but there's not a lot to go on here,
I don't have access to the source and did raise this and was told that would come later
[disappointed noises] so I had to do some
of the legwork myself here, with a thermal runaway test...
[loud hairdryer sounds kind of like BRRRRRRRRRRRRRR]
...which it did pass. Would have been easier to look at the code but whatever, it
is enabled, that's good. I should have the jerk
and acceleration setting on screen hopefully. The interface is not too bad. I think the only
thing that I would have liked but couldn't find is a disable stepper option. One thing I really do
approve of is the preheat menu, they've included a ...well...I'll show you. See that in green?
It means you don't have to press plus a million times. Much better than usual.
One last print I want to show you is this marble tower printed in eryone mini rainbow,
this looks really cool and no I haven't tested it yet as I apparently don't have any
steel bearings the right size, and I haven't even printed the other bits like the screw,
but it looks really cool and took about 20 hours I think.
So I think it's probably time to sum up. I struggled to find anything I didnt like about
the magician max, for a printer I admittedly wasn't really overwhelmed with initially, it
actually hugely outperformed my expectations and seems to be built with some attention to detail.
I think there's going to be some getting used to the insanely high adhesion bed and I have
some concerns about the connectors, but otherwise you are really not going to have much to complain
about with this printer, it looks like it could turn out to be a workhorse. What do you think? Let
me know in the comments as usual, and I will see you next time for...I think...a prusaslicer video
because if you've been paying attention there's some huge news over in the prusaslicer corner!
(lightning infill...no way!) Anyway thank you for watching!