Are you looking for a large printer on a budget? How about 300 millimeters by 300 millimeters by
400 millimeters for $229. Let's check it out on today's Filament Friday. Filament Friday is
brought to you every week by the generous donations of these patreon supporters.
This is the printer I'm going to take a look at it's the sunlu s8. It's got a big build area 310
by 310 by 400 millimeters which is about the size of a cr-10 but it's 229 dollars. That's a
really low price for such a big printer. Let's see how good this thing is. This was donated
to the channel by sunlu for me to do an honest review. And when I took it out of the box I was
a little surprised. I was expecting a kit. This thing was mostly assembled. This top half was
assembled. The bottom half was assembled. I just needed to connect the two and it came with all the
tools I needed plus extra screws and spare parts if anything should break. Plus it included a large
spool of filament. I think this is like a half a kilogram but plenty of filament to print on this
large printer. It does come with a printed color manual to show you how to assemble it, how to
install filament, level the bed, and even install the software. It's nothing major but for, again a
low-cost printer, that's kind of surprising. Now it did come with a filament stand that you've
got to put together and that probably took me longer than actually putting this thing together
because this just took two t-nuts. There's these two little t-nuts you gotta slide in these rails
and position them at the lines where they line up because there's there's a t-bracket
that goes on the inside of both rails and that holds it plus then there's two screws that go in
through the bottom rail and into this top section on each side. So that's similar to like a cr-10 or
any other similar printer. The wiring connections are really minimal just a couple to motors and a
couple switches and the wiring itself was already in place. It's all in sheathing and it's all
strapped in place underneath the frame and even the strain relief at the back of the bed is very
very solid. It's not going to flex. It's actually a really quality wiring job on this machine.
Inside it's just an 8-bit board but it is a 2560 so it does have enough room for full marlin. It
does have 4988 drivers so they're not silent drivers. It does have a 24 volt power supply
360 watts. It has a typical large lcd display easy to read and then it has
a micro sd card on the front right alongside a usb connection for connecting to your computer.
It does have dual threaded rods and dual steppers and they work really well. I was able to get the
bed to level without any issues. Even the cr-10 only has one threaded rod so that's pretty amazing
for this price point. The extruder top appears to be injected molded and it's pretty solid.
It's actually got a little funnel that goes into the gears that helps if you're trying to print
flexible materials. Semi-flex printed on this pretty good, ninjaflex I still had it hang up
once in a while. It does have a filament runout sensor that feeds into it. Now that thing is hard
to get filament to go through. You've really got to get it pointed but it does work if the filament
does break. It does come with a plain glass bed and a glue stick. I like glue on glass.
I have no problem printing that way and this does give you a very flat surface to level your bed.
The hot end assembly looks very similar to a creality machine except the filament cooling fan
is on the left. The hot end assembly is totally different than creality in fact, when I took
the coupling off at the top I could see there was PTFE tubing trapped within the heat break.
I took off the nozzle and could get that little piece of PTFE tubing out so this
is just like the luke hatfield trick for ender 3 that I showed you guys in a previous video.
And they give you extra pieces in their kit so now the real question how good does it print.
Well that didn't start out so good. This was the first sample print and I got these bumps all over
it. And then I tried a 3DBenchy. Got the same results. I contacted the company and they said
it's the SD card. It needs to be formatted in a fat32. So I just grabbed another card that I
know was working, plugged it in, and this was the result. It's a CHEP cube and it came out decent.
This is a 0.2 layer height and it came out pretty nice except the y side had some definite ringing.
So the jerk settings are clearly off for this machine. Then I needed help in my print farm so
I put it to work printing a bunch of these little plugs. Those came out great and then I needed to
print something big for my son. This is actually a trash can for his boat the surface finish was
really good at 0.28. Then I printed him a tray. Really large tray. Again really good quality so
I could see this printer was doing a great job on both small and big prints. Once I took care of the
SD card this thing's been printing beautifully. And I've had this for over a month constantly
printing so it's been really really reliable. The only issue I found is the fan that's on the
side here that blows across the electronics. When you first start it up it makes noise like
the bearing's starting to go. So probably gonna have to replace that fan but for $229
you're gonna have a few cheap components. But overall this thing's pretty solid and I think for
that price I don't think you can beat it. And the print quality is definitely decent. They do sell
out fast if you're thinking about getting one. I highly recommend you grab one while it's on sale
but overall I can give this a thumbs up because it's a decent printer. If it was $400 I'd say
you could probably do better, but $229? That's an amazing deal actually, for what you get. If
you like what I'm doing here maybe check out some of the other videos popping up. And if nothing
else click on the CHEP logo and subscribe. I'll see you next time right here at Filament Friday.