In this video I'm going to be taking a look at the FLSUN super racer, a printer capable,
allegedly, of printing at speeds of over 150mm/s out of the box.
Can it?
Let's take a look.
A lot of you might know that my first 3d printer was actually a delta, it's still here, mostly
because I have no idea what to do with it.
The mini delta was a good printer, and capable of some genuinely usable prints, but with
the mug sized build plate and lackluster bed levelling, it was a huge relief to eventually
move on to cartesian printers.
But this - this is different.
This is big.
At no less than 1.04 meters from base to top of the filament reel, this is an absolute
monster of a printer, yet somehow fits on pretty much any desk, because it's tall, but
no larger really than a standard ender clone.
If you want tall, but haven't got space for wide, this is a good choice.
Also, since receiving the unit, FLSUN have contacted me directly to ask me to mention
that they have announced a new model coming out soon, which I have no problem with mentioning
and I will point you to a link in the description.
FLSUN have suggested checking their facebook group to see the announcement and I have to
say that while there's nearly no information about this printer, 400mm/s sounds quite...interesting,
to say the least.
If you would like to know more then I guess you can go wait for the imminent announcements.
So back to this printer, it has a volcano style hotend with the v6 style heat coldend,
although notably if we look at the spare hotend they provide, which is an interesting thing
to do, I don't think I've ever been given an entire hotend with a printer before but
it helps me show you it, the heat throat, that's this bit here, is wider than your standard
v6.
This is a good giveaway when looking at a fitted hotend, it usually but not always will
indicate that your hotend is PTFE lined all the way to the nozzle, which in this case
it is.
Good points here are the suitability for PLA and resistance to that melting and sticking
to the inside of the pipes which can be a real pain, bad points are it's a limitation
on maximum temperature, I generally stick to below 230 on PTFE lined hotends, you can
go a bit further especially if you put capricorn in there like I have here, we'll get to that
though in a moment.
One thing I really like about this delta is the filament path.
A lot of printers have a kind of "meh" attitude towards the path the filament takes before
it gets to the actual extruder, and this can cause all sorts of wear or problems, but here
you see a bit of where the extra cost of the printer has been spent - you have a ptfe pipe
running through the chassis, straight into the filament runout sensor, then it's a direct
line to the extruder.
This is really good from a friction and wear point of view.
The bowden extruder is a standard BMG-esque-style thing, and I'll lay my cards on the table,
I don't like these.
In this printer it has been working mostly fine, but I've spoken to a couple of people
who have also had problems with it.
For me, it's a bit noisy and will probably at some point get replaced, that's no issue
for someone like me who knows how to do it including the calibration part, it's probably
a 20 minute job to swap out an extruder then another half hour to calibrate it, so it doesn't
bother me.
Why do I hate these so much?
Well, the number one reason is that this washer and spring on the lever has to be unscrewed
to open it, and it's not a captive washer so about 6 out of 10 times, you'll spend the
next half hour hunting around the floor for it.
And it's noisy.
But I will say it's been working OK for non flexibles over the tests I've been running,
and I think most cheaper extruders tend to be unpopular anyway so...whatever.
The effector, because that's what you call this thing, seems pretty well designed to
me.
It's one of the few printers I've seen that comes with dual 4010 fans as stock, this means
part cooling is coming from both sides, which is definitely a good thing as it cools better
and should in theory produce better overhangs.
In my tests print quality was broadly good.
Delta geometry doesn't always lend itself well to accuracy but I found that calibration
pieces are about the size they should be, and when printing at more sensible speeds,
artifacts are fairly well controlled.
Stringing is basically non existent for PLA under the default profiles and the good cooling
means a decent overhang performance too.
If you crank it up to top speed then of course you're going to start seeing some of these
results degrade, but I would actually agree that it's fair to say that the printer can
hold its own at 150mm/s perfectly fine if you are printing functional parts that don't
need to worry so much about ghosting.
The delta design really excels at this kind of printing.
The downside to deltas in general, and this is somewhat taken to the extreme because of
the height of this printer, is the huge length of the bowden tube, that is the tube that
runs from the extruder where filament is pushed from, to the effector at the other end where
the filament is melted.
The issue you run into is when you use flexible filament like TPU, and that makes delta printers
really not that suitable for TPU.
I did some tests and found it quite frustrating, and if you watch the channel you'll know I'm
not exactly new to TPU either.
The bowden tube on my printer was around 56cm long which is around double the length it
would be on a cartesian printer like an ender, so it's really no wonder there's some serious
challenges to pushing flexible filament through.
I would suggest if you do want to print flexibles, to use the stiffest you can find, I recommend
noulei or ziro TPU, on my test piece sunlu filament would not play at all with repeated
curling up in the extruder, but ziro worked fine when I tweaked the settings right down.
I changed the bowden tube for a capricorn to test if it would help, the main advantage
in my opinion with capricorn is the smaller internal diameter, but whether it made a difference
is hard to say, I did manage to print the octopus here first time, although I've previously
explained why this is an easy model to print.
On harder models with more challenging geometry you will struggle, but I am going to share
the TPU profiles I made, see the description.
So about the bed.
Bed levelling is done by means of this thing that you clip on, and it's held magnetically.
It's basicaly a tactile microswitch.
I am a huge fan of this as it is super accurate, uses minimal parts, and once your mesh is
stored you don't have to carry that weight around with you.
Because the bed is mounted basically solid, you don't really have any need to re-level
often, if at all.
I think the bed levelling and accuracy has been something that's really outstanding on
this printer, if you hate levelling or adjusting the bed and having to constantly deal with
it then this is absolutely something you should pay attention to.
The bed is round as you may have noticed which means the build area is sort of the same as
an ender 3 but also sort of different, the build volume is 26cm diameter by a huge 33cm
height which is just over a foot.
These printers typically have the center of the bed as coordinate position 0,0 which means
it's slightly different to how ender clones typically work but luckily all this works
fine in cura out of the box, which by the way was absolutely no problem, I don't tend
to use the bundled software with printers as it's normally just an older cura so I do
as I would advise others to do and ignore it, just get normal cura and in this case
a profile exists, so you're up and running faster than you could probably browse the
included sd card.
Which by the way comes with this reader.
Which is.
Cool.
The included profiles default to the aforementioned 150mm/s which is quite crazy, and if you've
seen my last video on energy usage you will have already noticed that the standard benchy
takes only 47 minutes.
The interface, actually it doesn't look like the standard marlin OS that most printers
use these days, but if you dig into it a bit, it actually is.
I am actually a huge fan of the interface, the default screen shows you exactly what
you need, but also shows you the current print speed, I mean it's not taking into account
acceleration but it's still cool to just be able to see that, I've not seen that on other
printers.
What I really like about this screen though is it's actually capacitive, meaning it's
meant for fingers and not a stylus, and as a result it's really responsive.
It does beep when you press it and I don't believe you can turn that off, but that's
not something that concerns me, I like the audible feedback.
What the screen does lack though which would be nice, is any ability to tune the printer
beyond the basics.
If I wanted to change the extruder for example, I would need to recalibrate the e-steps which
is the ratio of the motor speed to the actual amount of filament pushed through, and normally
marlin would let you do that on the screen.
Instead you would have to connect octoprint or a usb cable to a printer to do that.
I'm not going to really cover the build process at all, I didn't even record the footage,
the printer is around a half hour build and the only thing you really take away from it
is how easy it is to build with just these screws to put in on top and bottom, and a
few bits to just snap on.
The effector itself just snaps on with the arms being spring loaded.
I'd say half an hour for build time.
I am however going to poke around inside.
I have heard that these printers have in the past come with two different boards on them,
being an SKR I think 1.3, or the mks robin nano.
That's interesting because I'm familiar with both of those, so I was quite keen to see
what was in here.
Another thing that's good to see is a decent supply of spare parts.
Especially with respect to the build plate and touch screen.
The levelling sensor isn't too pricey either if you lose yours.
So I guess I need to wrap this up into a kind of conclusion.
Firstly this is easily one of the most robust and well built printers in the price range.
The build quality is way higher than you would expect, and with the slidey rails and carbon
fiber rods as well as the hugely thick profiles on the corners it's not messing about.
I'm not suggesting you do, but I feel like you could push this off a table, pick it up
and just carry on.
I think its real pros are the ease of use and setup time, the speed and performance,
the build quality and frame sturdiness, the bed and its levelling system, and the fact
it's given me almost no problems over the review process.
I think the negatives would be the challenges to print flexible filaments, the relatively
weak extruder design, and the lack of marlin source code provided.
Overall I'm surprised by what you get here for your money.
Delta printers are never particularly cheap compared to cartesian ones, and that they've
managed to present such a polished product is quite impressive.
Anyway that's it for now, as I mentioned at the start there's a video on the way about
delta printers in general which I'm both looking forward to and dreading, so watch out for
that.
All links are below in the description, and please check out our discord.
And I will see you next time!