on today's maker mashup we're reviewing the artillery sidewinder x1 version 4 3d printer
today we're going to be reviewing the artillery sidewinder x1 3d printer now as you can see this
is a larger 3d printer it is a larger format it has a 0.4 nozzle but it is also a 300 by 300 by
400 build volume which you can see is pretty substantial i was able to print this on this
printer now with this larger printer it is the fourth revision of it and artillery has
made some changes over the years uh with this particular printer and we're going to be putting
it through its standard review process that we do on this channel giving ratings in different
areas and then at the end i will also give a my personal summary of what i feel about the printer
but overall i will be giving you the information about the printer allowing you to really make the
decision on whether or not this printer is right for you so with all that said let's get to work
the box on this printer is very large and heavy but everything is packaged really well on the
inside the good news is you only have to remove a couple of very large parts and once they're
out of the box you should be good to go for setup the accessory bag comes with a replacement ribbon
cable usb cable and the other assorted tools nuts and bolts or the complete assembly there's
a nice full-size flash drive as well like most of these printers we just have a couple of parts to
assemble with some bolts we're gonna go ahead and attach the uprights to the base unit here
and then once that's done we're gonna move on to the spool holder this is just a couple of bolts
here and i'm gonna talk about this a little bit later once the spool holders together then we're
just going to go ahead and start plugging everything in we got our filament run out
sensor here and then we're going to go ahead and plug in the end stops there's one down here
and then we've got to plug in the stepper motors as well overall the assembly goes pretty quick
after we've got everything all wired up we're going to need to raise the carriage
once the carriage is raised up here then we can install these ribbon cables one goes into the
base of the unit and make sure that these are flat and straight going in and then there's another one
on the carriage once you've finished all of this the assembly is complete and we're ready for our
first print okay so let's give it an assembly rating the printer is very very big it is going
to take you a little bit of time to maneuver things into place but overall assembly does go
really quick and it only took about 15-20 minutes to get this printer assembled so with that we're
gonna give it an assembly rating of an eight now that everything's assembled we're gonna move on to
bed leveling despite being the fourth version of the sidewinder x1 it still has manual bed leveling
we're gonna manually bed level this here with our index card but i can say for other printers i've
seen at half the price there are automatic bed leveling features available so this was a real
ding on the feature list for the sidewinder x1 i was not able to find sample prints on the sd card
so i sliced up a calibration cube in cura now i was hopeful that this was going to go well and the
print was printing fairly well until a little bit further down the road it lost adhesion to
the build surface itself so i thought i would give something else a try and decided a benchy
the benchy encountered the exact same issue with the surface everything seemed to be going fine
but then it failed again as a last ditch effort i tried a little glue stick but that had the same
problem as well having no more patience for this i decided it would just be easier to throw a pei
sheet on the top so i can get the adhesion that i really needed out of this bed once i had the pei
sheet in place i had no further problems getting prints to stick and i was able to review the rest
of this printer overall i think the print quality here looked a little mediocre i was very surprised
to see banding here based on the way that they set up their z-axis the sidewinder x1 joins
their z-axis together with a belt which should in theory reduce this but the amount of banding that
i saw on this was a very surprising artillery also says that they have this proprietary
z connector which is supposed to improve overall z quality most of the prints came out this way
where there were some subtle z banding issues on everything and i did try it on a couple of
different prints to rule out some sort of texture on the outside of the print you can even see the
same issues here in this vase mode print that i did which maxed out the build area now what i also
do with the vase mode is i went ahead and tried to run at the maximum 150 millimeters a second
that artillery set is the maximum speed that you can print at and you can see here the results of
that missing holes and a whole lot of problems so even though the printer is set up for higher speed
printing you can clearly see that there's a lot of work to do to get high speed out of this printer
now let's take a look at the inside you can see here a solid state relay for the bed that's gonna
get it to heat up faster and it's got a very modest power supply here for everything else
i was really shocked to find an mks gen l version one in here this is only an 8-bit board
the other thing that i saw in here that really shocked me is look at all of the glue attached
to every single hodgepodge connector then what's even worse is the front display is a
32-bit display given this is the fourth version of this printer i would have expected a 32-bit board
and far better wiring and far less hot glue on the inside of this printer this was not
the last of the confusing things on this printer for me the usb flash drive here
is just asking to get ripped off and broken on this printer as i've mentioned in some
of my other videos i've never been a fan of this ribbon cable approach to 3d printers and
the fact that they supplied an extra one to me says that this is going to fail at some point
the end stops on this printer are inductive and i really don't know why they chose an inductive one
and then if you look under the bed they've included an aluminum foil wrapping around that
i ended up at least one time having this wrapping come down and trigger the end stop prematurely i
also was not a big fan of the way that they wired up the bed here you can see that it's crinkling
already and to me that sounds like a point of failure one of the other problems with this
bed because it is solid glass and not aluminum is that it has inconsistent heating which that
aluminum foil and foam is trying to correct now if i measure here in the center i'm seeing 65 and i
set this print to 70. now getting over to the edge here you'll see it drops down 10 degrees celsius
that inconsistent heating means that you're not going to have a surface that's going to stick well
in all places and that could have been my problem with the glass bed from the start of this video
with this big bed though comes big build volume and i tested the full 400 millimeter height
which you can see here goes to the very top of the printer itself like other printers that say
they have a very large print volume this one also does not take into account the full 400
millimeter height of the area you can see here how it's had to bend excessively to reach the extruder
this excessive bend you can see going into the geared extruder is caused by this angle that's
created at the full build height so be warned if you do get this printer that using the full
400 millimeter height could cause damage to the extruder or cause your print to fail when you use
the full print volume another point of frustration was the two screws that you're going to have to
reach on in the back of the printer to adjust for the size filament spool that you're going to be
using this just seemed ridiculous i also tested out the power failure recovery and there was a
bit of an oddity with this as well while powering it off and recovering seemed to work okay when the
display came back on it gave me an error message telling me that it could not find a file on the
disk so originally i thought things were broken however pressing the confirm button did restart my
print but the fact that this is confusing really would be frustrating for a new 3d printer user
the good news is both the power recovery feature and the filament runout sensor works
successfully in my testing so while the messages are confusing the good news is it does actually
work okay so let's put some ratings behind this and we'll start with features and quality
first we're going to talk about some of the good things i love the geared extruder i
love that it's got a volcano nozzle and i really love the big area so those are real pluses
however the bed is made out of glass and for me that is really a no-go
it really didn't work well and you're locked into it forever unless you're going to completely
replace it with a magnetic sheet and a pei or something along those lines i just think your
options are truly limited with it and for that i definitely think that is a negative
part of the printer now the aluminum underneath it that is triggering those uh inductive sensors
i really think that's another negative here and the spool holder to me very small thing that is so
easy to do correct on a printer yet for a version for this particular spool holder for me doesn't
work so when i look at the features and quality on this printer the best i can rate this is a six
now let's talk about our first print now it started out okay and i was starting to get a
good experience with the printer but the fact that it popped off and after repeated attempts i was
unable to get a successful print off the glass to me that really puts a bad experience for the user
and especially for new for 3d printer users so for as far as the first print i'm gonna give it a one
the print quality overall seemed very mediocre for this price range and for that i'm only going
to give this a six for a printer with a four hundred dollar price tag i would expect to do
very limited upgrades but yet there's things on this printer that you can upgrade and things you
can't the 3d printer main board is probably an 80 upgrade and it was one if you got this
printer the one of the first ones that i would do however you have things like the pei sheet
which makes it a little bit more difficult when you have a glass bed now while you can stick
that on there switching surfaces then becomes a little bit more difficult so from my opinion an
upgrade on this is probably not something you would want to do but the ability to upgrade it
really is only about a six this printer really does look like it's made for tinkering however
in my opinion it's not there's far too many proprietary components on here
to make upgrading and modifying the printer easy so i'm going to rate the class of this printer as
a tool 3d printer this gives us an overall printer rating of a 5.4 or when rounded down to a 5.
okay so let me talk about my personal feelings about this printer i think most everyone have
watched this entire video uh knows i'm really not a fan of this printer i was super excited about
it i uh was really looking forward to the latest version this is the v4 so in theory artillery has
fixed a lot of the issues that they had um from an upgrade standpoint i have real concerns about
this printer because uh it uses these proprietary cables here so to me this puts it more in a tool
category than a tinker category the other things i really didn't like about this printer is that
it is using an 8-bit board but the touch screen on the front is a 32-bit display doesn't make any
sense to me um for four hundred and thirty dollars uh in my opinion you could build a printer uh from
the ground up for four hundred and thirty dollars and have more features and better features uh in
my opinion the uh main board in here is an mks gen l version one it's 8-bit it's running uh the old
uh version one of marlin so you're kind of using out-of-date technology as well so i wasn't really
a big fan of that uh from an upgrade standpoint even if i put a new main board in there which that
would be probably one of the very first things i would change on this printer uh other than the
spool holder i would immediately want to change out that main board to a 32-bit board and uh
that way you would be able to then benefit from the volcano nozzle that is in here and the geared
extruder which is another thing that really didn't make sense to me um you've got the ability to in
theory print at high speeds but because of the 8-bit board it's really going to also limit you
as you can see here when you're doing a lot of curves because uh all of those computations that
need to take place so a better processor a 32-bit processor would be a lot better
than something like this like a 1-4 skr turbo would be a a good quick replacement for this
printer now uh the other things like i said if you were looking to upgrade this
ribbon cable is not going to help you uh you've got basically a proprietary extruder set up here
uh the aero extruder you could easily upgrade with maybe an original one but rewiring it is
now nearly impossible because they want the ribbon cable route the other problem here too is because
uh bed leveling and this glass bed that was on here was so unpredictable i would recommend a bl
touch but now you've got a more or less hack a bl touch in here and then wire it into the main board
so overall i would not recommend this printer i just think that for the 430 dollars there is a lot
of other printers in the market space where you can either buy a smaller printer and upgrade those
features to include let's say a geared extruder or look at building something a little bit better
than this so that is my opinion of this printer i've given you really all the details about
it so you're more than welcome to make your own informed decision i would also like to hear about
your comments do you have an artillery signed wider i saw a lot of different amazon reviews
very mixed some positive some negative so if you've got one of these printers or was
thinking about getting one i'd love to hear it down in the description so with that it's
going to bring the end of today's video if you liked it make sure you mash that like button
and don't forget to share and subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming 3d printer review
videos so with all that said i want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
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