The eternal quest for that one bed surface that perfectly sticks while printing and completely
releases when cold.
Many have tried to find it, many have failed, but 3D Que have finally done it.
Or at least that’s what they claim for the Quinly system, which promises to turn your
humble 3D printer into a global-scale production unit by adding a network gateway that controls
your printer and that you can use to queue up prints, a lift kit that angles your machine
so that parts can slide off once they’re done, and of course, their special bed surface
that completely releases once each print is done.
For the same job of keeping the printer running, I’ve previously built a super involved auto-bed-changer
system, but this approach seems a lot simpler.
Could it really be that easy?
Are there any downsides to this?
Does it really save you machine time?
And who is today’s sponsor?
It’s Prusa Research with Printables and their MK3S+!
If you’re tired of buggy model sharing sites that are full of three-click designs, check
out Printables - it’s free, it’s really good, and of course, it’s not Prusa exclusive!
The site is constantly updated with features the community asks for and they make sure
to encourage high-quality designs by running themed contests and with a rewards system
that lets you earn useful stuff like free Prusament.
And of course, Prusa also make 3D printers, like the MK3S+.
I think all I really need to tell you is that even though I’ve got much more capable machines,
the MK3 is the machine that I use when I just want to get stuff done - no mods, no tinkering,
just using their factory-tuned slicer profiles, and it just keeps on giving.
So if you’re looking for a workhorse machine for a hobby or pro-level setup, check out
the MK3S+ and if you’re looking for a nicer model sharing site, give Printables a go!
So as always, disclaimer, the Quinly kit was provided to me free of charge for the review,
I do not need to send it back, but no money changed hands and 3D Que had no say in this
review.
So let’s start with price: What I’ve got installed here is the Quinly for the Prusa
MK3 plus the wireless hub, which totals to 548 USD.
If you skip the Rock Pi and use e.g. OctoPrint with a plugin for queuing your prints, you
pay $99 less, but that still makes it 450 bucks for the VAAPR bed surface, a couple
printed parts and some aluminum extrusions to lift the printer.
And I’m just going to say it up front, that is outrageously expensive for what you get.
But in the world of ROIs, up-front price doesn’t matter as long as it provides more value than
it costs.
Of course, the value proposition here is that instead of having to baby-sit your printer
and manually changing or clearing its bed after every print, you just load up enough
filament, queue up however many print jobs, and without any manual intervention, simply
come back and collect the finished parts once they’re done.
The core component, of course, is the VAAPR bed, and it looks like it’s a standard FR4
sheet with some sort of coating on it.
The instructions are very adamant about never cleaning it with solvents, but only with water
and soap.
In the case of the MK3, you simply stick it over one of your existing flex beds, adjust
the PINDA probe if needed, and you’re off to the races.
It would have been nice to not have to take up one of the original flex beds for this,
and I ended up sticking it over one of the smooth PEI sheets, which made for quite a
thick bed assembly overall.
But the PINDA had no trouble reading through the entire stack, autoleving works fine, all
good.
Because you’re propping up and tilting the printer, they also give you parts to relocate
the LCD to the top of the machine, which you’re mostly going to be using to swap filament,
as the idea is really to use a print host to start and manage prints.
I used it with the Rock Pi running 3D Que’s host software, where you simply upload your
gcodes, choose how many copies you want, at what temperature to release, and the rest
happens automatically.
Between every print, it’s also running a clearing cycle where the head moves all the
way down and kind of slides off the parts from the bed.
That’s also what this skirting is for, to make sure that parts don’t get stuck in
the mechanical bits of the printer as they slide off.
And most of the time, this works 100% of the time!
When it does work, here’s how the time savings come out: Let’s assume there’s someone
there who can maintain the printer for 8 hours on workdays, between that, there’s 16 hours
of unattended printing every day, and of course, a weekend as well.
Now, manually swapping a bed and starting a new print really doesn’t take any time,
but because you’re most likely not going to catch the print right as it finishes, let’s
say it’s a five-minute penalty for each print, but you also save some of the heatup
time on the next print.
Because on the Quiinly, it’s not like the next part starts immediately, because after
a print, it has to wait and let the bed cool down by itself.
There’s no fan or anything to help that, and because the release temperature is pretty
close to ambient, that can take a while.
About half an hour, roughly.
So I did the math for a week of printing, starting and finishing Monday morning, with
a couple different models.
For a standard two-hour 3D Benchy, printing each one individually, within one week you’d
have printed about 20 when swapped manually vs. 67 when printed non-stop on the Quinly.
But if you do a full plate of Benchies, it’s not quite that drastic anymore: Because you
need to leave some space in the corner of the bed where the toolhead first plunges down
to clear the bed, you can fit slightly fewer parts on there, and in fact, you probably
also don’t want to print larger parts that would collide with that area.
So the Quinly fits 14 Benchies, while a regular bed fits 24.
But because the Quinly can auto-clear, you get six beds worth of parts after a week,
while you’ll only be able to get 3 when manually clearing.
So that’s 84 Benchies for the Quinly and 72 when done by hand.
With a single larger model like Uncle Jesse’s Skull Planter at 120% scale, you’d get 5
parts printed in a week by hand, and an extra one done on the weekend by the Quinly.
Obviously, if you’re clearing manually, you can tweak you print setups so that you’re
there when they finish and you can start the next one right away, but with the Quinly you
can just chuck parts towards the printer, get consistent times per part, and you won’t
have to babysit the machine - when everything works.
The great thing about using a stock surface on a printer and having profiles from the
manufacturer to go with that is that all you have to do is load up your model, choose what
you’re trying to do, and you’re going to have a pretty good time.
Again, that’s why I usually gravitate towards using my Prusas for most of my printing, even
though I have flashier, faster, bigger printers, but I know this one is just going to work.
But once you slap something like the Quinly bed surface on it, it’s a whole new puzzle
to figure out.
There is a table online that tells you what should work and what probably won’t, but
you will have to meticulously tune in every new material you use.
And I don’t just mean going from PLA to PETG, no no, every brand and possibly even
every color of the same material requires completely new tuning.
So the first prints I did were Prusament PLA, and those required a little extra bed temperature
to stick well enough.
Next up, I printed extrudr XPETG in matte black, and those worked really well at stock
temperatures, without any changes.
Then I switched over to extrudr NX2 PLA and that stuck so well, that when the clearing
cycle ran, it twisted the printer’s part cooling fan out of position and ripped its
wires off.
Printer down!
I grabbed the last 5V fan I had, off of my other MK3, and soldered it back in.
I also designed a guard that would protect the parts on the toolhead from this sort of
abuse, and I wanted to print that in Prusament ASA, as it’s pretty close to the bed and
and I didn’t want it to soften and warp.
On the Quinly’s VAAPR bed, that part just came loose a couple of layers into the print.
So I tried the same gcode again on a standard textured PEI sheet, which worked great.
Then, with the ram shield fitted to the printer and everything back in working order, I switched
back to the VAAPR bed, and went to the basic DAS FILAMENT PLA, and that immediately worked
perfectly without any tweaks or any issues at all.
There wasn’t even a temperature bump needed as with the Prusament.
So I’ve had the full range of experiences between parts sticking not at all, just perfectly,
or way too well.
With this surface that’s supposed to grip well at high temp, but completely release
when cool, you’re riding a really thin razor’s edge of having to get all the parameters right.
Regular surfaces can err on the side of “too high” adhesion, but here, even seemingly
insignificant changes can have a huge impact on whether the adhesion is sufficient or not.
So where I think this can really shine is if you have, like, production runs of the
same part, with the same material, just over and over again and you can tune that in really
well once, and then just print with those exact same parameters for the next thousand
parts.
But if you always have new parts or new materials that you’ll be printing, I think you’d
actually be better off just using a regular, high-adhesion flex bed, skipping the tuning
phase, and removing parts manually - which can actually be faster for one-off parts because
you get to skip the mandatory half-hour cooldown phase on the Quinly.
If you don’t get the print settings dialed in, you’re just abusing your printer - none
of the components on here were made to ram parts off of the build plate, and even with
the ram guard that I added I wouldn’t want to have the toolhead crash into parts like
that.
The software running on the Quinly wireless hub supposedly can deal with the printer’s
crash detection triggering, which didn’t work too well for me, so I ended up disabling
crash detection entirely as per the instructions.
Which I’m told are out of date, so you’re still supposed to leave it on, I guess.
You’re also going to have to make sure your parts don’t get too heavy.
With the Y-axis now having to move up a roughly 15° incline, it’s sometimes already struggling
to make it up on its own, and with an extra kilogram or more worth of printed parts attached,
you’re past what I’d consider a 24/7 reliable setup.
The other part to the Quinly system is the wireless hub, which is a RockPi, a WiFi stick,
and a custom OS running on it.
This was the most frustrating part of the entire review.
I’ve had so many occasions where I’d need to power cycle it to get it to connect to
the printer at all, it’s got a queue system built-in that you can add jobs to and pick
how many you want, but I pretty much always had to add the job twice because the first
one just disappeared without printing anything, and during a two-day print job, apparently
it rebooted in the middle of the night and left me with a half-finished print and a confused
MK3.
All while hooked up to a UPS, that is.
I really think that OctoPrint with some queue plugin would be a superior solution to this
in every way.
Maybe if the Quinly wireless hub had some standout features, like being able to remotely
connect and not just from the same network, or some sort of central management for print
farms where you’d run multiples of these, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t even have the
basicest of features like user authentication, being able to sort files by upload date or
reprinting an already completed queue job.
There’s obviously lots of room for improvement still.
The core of the system, the VAAPR bed, when it works, it works great, everything built
around that still is a bit rough.
If your application fits that narrow beam of light where the Quinly system works out,
then you’re going to have an amazing time with it, but honestly, for everyone else,
skip the hassle, skip the cost, and just stick with your regular bed surfaces.
And that’s my take on the 3DQue Quinly System!
Huge thank you to my awesome patrons and YouTube members for making it possible for me to run
my YouTube channel like this, if you want to join in too, you can find the links here
and right under the video.
But even sharing the video or just getting subscribed helps a ton, too, thank you for
watching, keep on making and I’ll see you in the next one!