Today we’re going to take a look at the Artillery X1. You might have seen a review
or two of this printer on other channels from a couple months ago, but this is the newest
iteration, the v4. From what I’ve seen, the X1 supposedly has always been a printer
that was really close to being a perfect low-budget machine and only had a couple of flaws that
would need to be figured out, so what I really want to know is if Artillery or Evnovo finally
managed to push it over the edge and turn it into a great printer or if they’re keeping
it as another mediocre CR-10-inspired lookalike. Alright, so I’m going to be doing 3D printer
reviews all throughout November, and I’ll try to cover the ones that, you know, you
might look into for getting as a Christmas gift or just for yourself. And I’ll try
to make these videos a bit shorter, since I’m sure there will be plenty of reviews
to watch from me and from everyone else. And of course, I won’t be giving you the lovely-dovey
sugarcoated version, if you want that, just, you know, have a look at the manufacturer’s
website or at one of the many “reviews” that just try to get you to buy the printer
through an affiliate link. So let’s get cracking on the Artillery X1,
starting with the specs. We’ve got a 300x300x400mm build envelope with a standard V-slot frame,
the hotend and extruder are a a direct-drive E3D Titan Aero Volcano knockoff, with a sock,
the bed is a coated glass sheet with a mains-powered silicone heater, and it does not have auto
bed leveling, but comes with a touchscreen and a filament runout sensor.
What’s unique about the X1 are these flat flexible cables that are used on the Z-axis
and on the X-axis. That all comes to a price of around $430.
What sort of a print quality does that get you? I’m going to call this “really decent”.
There is a bit more curling visible than I’d like and on prints where you can see it, it
looks like either the filament pulling up on the toolhead, the motion system having
some inaccuracies, or the spool mount up that likes to wobble the entire frame is still
causing some imperfections. Overall, though, this level of quality is very respectable.
It’s also been very reliable for me so far, which is something that you really need for
a printer this size. If this one has an oopsie, it can mean days of printing lost instead
of just a couple hours on a smaller machine. As far as the user experience goes, that’s
ok, too. The included manual is detailed, the initial assembly is fast and relatively
easy to do, and they’re even reminding you to adjust the v-wheel on every axis. The alignment
of those is notoriously bad on pretty much every machine that uses them and when you
try to use the printer as it’s shipped, with loose wheels, you’re not going to have
a great time. For software, Artillery are providing Repetier
host with profiles for Slic3r. If you’re not familiar, Repetier host is a really weird
thing. It’s made by a German company and basically, it’s another UI on top of your
slicer, so it provides a consistent top-level UI and then passes on the actual slicing to
Slic3r, PrusaSlicer, Cura, etc. I find that concept super inefficient to use, since you
still have to jump into the slicer itself to change any settings, but you’re like,
not actually supposed to then use the slicer directly, but instead do your object arrangement
and gcode saving through Repetier Host. Maybe it makes sense if you also use their Repetier
Server print server, but as is, I would prefer to use any other UI instead of the Repetier
Host one. And because they’re using the “old”
Slic3r instead of the optimized PrusaSlicer, the slicing itself can be excruciatingly slow
at times, too, this vase took, I think, 15 or 20 minutes just to slice, vs. seconds when
using the same setup on PrusaSlicer or a modern version of Cura.
The X1 comes with two profiles, PLA normal and PLA fine, and they’re actually well-tuned
and work great with the X1 hardware. There’s no profiles for PETG or any other
materials included - and with this “improved” hotend, the printer caps out at around 240,
or at most 250°C before the PTFE starts to get damaged.
So let’s have a bit of a closer look at the components used here, and let’s stick
with the extruder and hotend. It is a budget Titan Aero Volcano clone, and instead of using
the characteristic single-piece frontplate and heatsink, it’s these two parts that
are just screwed together dry. Which… works, I guess, at least with a teflon-lined heatbreak,
since those are less reliant on proper cooling, but without the air guide structure that the
original Aero uses, this version spills air all over your printed part, which is another
factor that will make printing ABS, ASA or maybe even PETG somewhat unpredictable on
this printer. The hobbed gear in here is not particularly
sharp, and I do expect that to be a limiting factor if you try to push the printer a bit
faster than it’s printing now - as is, with the stock 0.4mm nozzle this extruder isn’t
working all that hard. Two parts on the extruder that seem a bit off to me - the idler lever,
which seems to be a problem for a lot of people out there, hasn’t been an issue for me,
but the filament guide between the hobbed gear and heatbreak is. On the original Titan,
these are made from POM so that filament doesn’t stick to it as you pull it out of the hotend,
on the X1, it looks like it’s ABS, and I did have this clog up solidly once when trying
to unload filament. This thing takes a long time to take apart and reassemble.
Once more thing that whoever is making this Titan Aero knockoff has also messed up is
the tension adjustment. Not only is the adjustment screw kinda hard to use with the way that
the extruder is mounted on the X1, but the extruder body also just doesn’t have the
little hole where you can see what your idler tension is set to, so adjusting it on the
X1 is a bit of a gamble anyways. Between the change in material for the filament guide,
the downgraded hobbed gear and this, it seems like another one of those cases where a cloner
will try replicate a part, but make little changes that don’t seem like a big deal
to them, because they don’t know how the part actually works, but in reality, those
changes do make quite a difference. Overall, it’s still an average, usable setup, it’s
just that there’s no point in this being an E3D knockoff when you don’t get most
of the benefits of the original. By the way, are you subscribed? We’re going
to see a lot more weird and unoriginal designs in the coming weeks - click that button or
you will never know which ones those are. Ok. I also wish the Volcano was using a larger
nozzle than the 0.4 out of the box, because as-is, the printer can’t move fast enough
with its large glass bed and relatively heavy toolhead to make use of the Volcano’s higher
meltrate, prints still take a long, long time to finish if you actually use this printer
to make large parts, as intended. The printer has 400mm of usable print height, but even
when using just 1.5% of that available height and the faster slicer profile, you’re already
looking at 10 hour of print time. A 0.6mm or 0.8mm nozzle would really help this printer
along. Before I jump into the electrical and electronics,
which are… a pain point for this printer, let’s quickly stick with the heated components,
the heated bed, where prints should stick to, and that does work well, it’s got this,
I guess, screen printed surface on the glass, which works great for PLA. It sticks well
during prints and releases easily afterwards, it does leave a bit of a texture, but there
is a massive problem with the way the bed is built and that’s that it is incredibly
unevenly heated, which is actually not all that uncommon for bed that just use a glass
sheet with a silicone heater stuck on. With this one, the spots in the corners where the
height adjustment screws are located are significantly colder, so any warp-happy prints that extend
out to those areas might give you some trouble sticking down. Really, the fully usable area
is about the size as on better printers one size class down.
Alright, so while everything up until this point is… fine, I guess, the electrical
issues, for me, are an absolute deal breaker because they’re not something the average
user will be able to fix or even recognize, but they’re also a ticking time bomb that
could quite literally set your house in fire at any given time.
I’m not talking about the flat flex cables that have been an issue for people in the
past - they work perfectly fine on my machine and I’m not seeing any hot spots in the
connectors that would degrade them over time. What I’m talking about is the 230V, main-powered
components in here. This printer uses a 230V heated bed, which, if done correctly, I think
is a great addition, because they are able to get to temperature really quickly. Couple
issues with this one. When I unboxed the Artillery X1, the 230V heater mat was already starting
to come loose from the glass on one of the corners. If you would use the printer like
that or if it ever comes loose again during a print, that corner is going to burn up quicker
than you can say “fire extinguisher”. Next, the way the heater’s wiring is routed
from the base to the moving bed. It uses some sort of a semi-rigid sleeving, but instad
of rolling smoothly, it kinks in three distinct spots. That’s going to put a ton of stress
on the wires and they will eventually break. By the way, if you want to know how to set
up an electrical fire, this is it. This thing is the reason why I do not want to use this
printer. Now, what’s interesting is that it looks
like the X1 at some point used a different type of sleeving that actually bent more smoothly,
you can even see that in the background of some of their YouTube videos. But the fact
that they apparently downgraded this stuff or didn’t properly validate for use - I
don’t know, that doesn’t sit right with me.
If we look at the electronics, it’s an 8-bit MKS GEN L mainboard, coupled with a 32-bit
controller for the touchscreen. The main board runs Marlin 1.1.9, which has all the safety
features enabled as far as I can tell, but again, the wiring on all of this, even though
it’s not safety critical, is still quite bad. There’s mismatched connectors all over
the place, locking plug into non-locking sockets, single “Dupont” style female connectors
into header with pins that I know are too short to make proper contact, and it’s all
held together with hot glue. Spicy detail about at AC wiring: This pin down here is
exposed live voltage through the switch’s neon lamp. Considering that the frame of the
printer is not properly grounded, that does become a rather “juicy” detail.
I think the nail in the electrical coffin is the lack of CE, which should be obvious
considering the flaws - this printer and its power supply do have the “China export”
logo, but not the “CE” logo that would certify that this machine is built to European
safety standards and is legal to import into and sell inside the European Union. It’s
also lacking the paperwork that would need to be included with the machine, so if you
order it from outside the EU, it might actually get confiscated by customs.
Yes, there is a “CE conformity certificate” that apparently applies to the X1, but when
you just google the issuer, the Shenzen HX company, you find expired permits they’re
showing off on their website as well as a blacklist entry on the TÜV website because
apparently Shenzen HX is involved with forging TÜV testing reports for face masks.
I could keep on going here, like the touchscreen is alright, but it’s one of the worst translated
and hastily-thrown-together interfaces on a printer these days, and even though the
print quality and functionality as a 3D printer is fine, as soon as you look under the hood,
it becomes a rather scary machine to use. Artillery or Evnovo have fixed issues on the
X1 models before and I really hope they fix the rest of them, too, but until they do,
this is a printer I’m going to have to advise you to stay away from unless you’re know
what you#re doing and are really committed to fixing its flaws.
But you know what you should not stay away from? Today’s sponsor, Skillshare.
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$10 a month. Thanks Skillshare!
And thank you all for watching! I’m probably not going to earn any affiliate commissions
from any of you buying the X1, but if you think this video helped you out in any way,
you can support the channel just by leaving a like on the video or even on Patreon or
YouTube memberships. I definitely appreciate everyone who’s already doing that, because
it means I won’t need to suck up to the manufacturers of these machines to make producing
these reviews worthwhile. Anyways, that’s it for today, keep on making,
and I’ll see you in the next one.