I know what I know another 3d printer review you're sick of them let me
explain this one is very interesting because both these were originally
called the CR 10 mini and then they changed the name of this one and they're
different there's they're different in so many ways and then they're so alike
I'll explain it all in this week's filament friday. Filament Friday is brought to you
every week by the generous donations of my patreon supporters. So this is not a
review to sell you printers, click on my affiliate link, nothing like that. I have
been trying to rebuild my print farm I had 5 davinci printers that I was
running prints through that I sell. And it helps support the channel but those
davinci's kept breaking to the point that I can't get replacement parts now
I'm tired of it, the closed source system the whole bit so it's time to rebuild
and I love my Prusa MK2S. I thought about buying a bunch of those. I
love my CR 10 thought about buying a bunch of those. But I really wanted
something in between the two sizes in a bed size and this is a nice both these
are nice 220 by 300 by 300 and they fit on the bench really nicely so it's a
nice in-between size and price wise under 400 bucks right now so it seemed
like a good compromise. Now banggood.com I buy a lot of electronics from them
they've been really good and I like the company and they sent me an email and
said hey we got a CR 10 mini we'd like to send you to evaluate now this was
before I'd even seen this guy I saw it it had a triangular base and I didn't do
my homework I thought it was a metal base I said sure I would love to try
this out though the bed size is perfect so they sent it to me and then I got it
and found it's an acrylic base and then I saw that they had this one on their website
and I said did you really send me the right printer cuz this is not really a
CR10 mini now they call this to CR10 acrylic base and call this one CR10
mini right on your website but they said no this is the one we intended
to send you. So I started playing with this and at about two weeks later
gearbest.com they contacted me about this guy and I
said yeah I'm looking at a print farm printer they said we'll send you one to
evaluate so they sent me this one actually this came from gearbest so you
can get this machine from either company this one's only banggood.com
well I played with this one for a while and just let me explain what I went
through with this and why I like one of these printers better than the other.
So here's the CR 10 acrylic boxed up. It looks very similar to the way the CR10s
are typically boxed right away though I noticed that the bed only had
four wheels and the aluminum extrusion was standing up instead of laying down.
And then here's the acrylic base that basically holds everything together
there's T nuts going across one direction and then there's two longer
nuts would go into the mainframe on the end so there's three screws a T nut in
the center and then two longer screws that screw right into aluminum extrusion
so that's fairly strong but what bothered me most is when I put the bed
in place this is an aluminum extrusion standing on its end and those two
crossed aluminum extrusions never bolt together it's all held together just by
screws that are in the acrylic base through T-nuts. So the next I noticed while I
was doing this that the threaded rod was loose moving back and forth there's a
bearing in there but there was no bearing on the original CR 10 but when I
took it apart apparently it's designed to do this to move so I'll let that
slide for now until we see how it prints. Electronics why it's no different than
the CR 10 it's got crimps on the power supplies which was good it's got a fuse
on the power block it's got a standard board with a AT mega 2560 so it's an
8-bit board very very similar to the CR10 and I'm happy with the electronics and
how it works. Electrical connections are still only
one connector the other ones come out of the box same as a CR 10 but that's been
working okay so I decided to just try a sample print and it once again they
include there well as some call it the decappa-cat but I have yet to get it to
decapitate its prints for me this one looked good but it looked just a little
bit rougher than what I was used to from my CR 10. Now I didn't do just one print
and say oh this is the value but I did start off at that cat.
It was a little bit rougher and I took this one which was the original print
from the CR10 checked it out and it's like totally different finish so I
took the g-code off of that and ran it into this guy but with different
filament which I knew was decent filament and that is this guy right here
I had a problem with it on the bed a little bit but it printed so much better
with that g-code file and the red filament so then I went back to my CR10
printed that same cat printed just as good as the white one and then I
printed on this guy and it printed slightly better than the other two
actually this was the best of the bunch just slightly so when I then moved to
larger prints stuff I actually wanted to print the print farm like this flag and
a few other things I needed to print long and flat
this printer gave me problems this one printed beautifully now this one's been
running like non-stop for two two and a half weeks 24/7 no issue this one I
could not get a consistent large print small like this fine larger this bed
just gave me all kinds of problems so this one actually has six wheels and a
flat aluminum extrusion this one has the standing up aluminum extrusion and four
wheels so the wheels are closer together and there's fewer of them so this bed
just has a harder time I guess leveling and then it's got a fiberglass top so I
guess you can pop it off and flex it which is a maybe a nice feature but it
didn't seem to help this has a glass bed which I love I love glue and glass
that's my favorite way to print and it's more reliable in the long run in my
opinion so I was already noticing that the bed was the major difference between
these two because hot ends and extruder and wheels and everything else looked
the same until I tried to change the filament after a while that's when I ran
into a Bowden tube issue on this guy the filament actually inflated or
expanded where it's down inside the hot end and I couldn't get the filament out
it stuck halfway up the tube well they give you a new one so I put a new one in
it and after a few prints it did the same thing it's stuck in there it's not
stuck in a nozzle it's stuck in the Bowden tube and this is the same
hot end on all three of these machines so what I ended up doing is I had some
of this Capricorn PTFE it's premium PTFE tubing I got it at the Midwest RepRap
festival from the creators Capricorn and it's been fantastic it's actually worked
great on this machine I actually put some on the any cubic i3 and it's been
working great there so the premium Bowden tube seems to really make a
difference if you're thinking about upgrading your machine. Once I did that
it was printing better but I still have bed issues I still could not get this
bed to level so bottom line I didn't go through all the details of this one but
it's it's really a CR 10 mini it really is a mini I'm very happy with this
machine this one I'm going to keep this one I don't know what I'm gonna do with
it yet I can't I can't recommend giving this to somebody I may keep it for parts
I don't know what I'm gonna do yet but just they're the same price I would buy
this one totally buy this one and you can get it from banggood.com if you want
to deal with them I like banggood.com you can buy it from gearbest.com you
don't even have to go through my affiliate links if you want to
appreciate it but you don't have to but I'm probably gonna get more of these
machines right more this machine right here a couple improvements they made
over the CR 10 they got rid of the 3d printed parts the bearing that's up here
that I said was a little bit loose it's loose on this one too that's an injected
molded part on the front here which was a 3d printed part on the CR 10 this is
now a metal bracket so there's no more 3d printed parts on this another
improvement that they made is the bed the connector to the bed on this one it
was soldered and a lot of people had to put strain relief I let mine run for a
month and a half I want to see how long before it would break it it finally did
break the solder joint broke had to resolder it and then I put strain relief
on it this one is a solid connector and it's to the side not in the center like
the a Anet E10 was in the center and gets in the way it's to the side and
it's nice and solid I don't think you have to worry about it breaking on this
guy so they did make some minor improvements overall this is a very
solid machine for the money now it's not a heck of a lot cheaper than the CR 10
so if you want the bigger size it's not a money issue get the bigger size I like this
size for what I'm trying to do it's a good price my guess is that's gonna go
up in price and this will probably stay the same over time but this is a good
machine the acrylic base I just cannot recommend
it I just can't based on a lot of printing on this guy so that's just my
opinion and I'm glad I was able to test this before I bought a machine thanks
for sticking around to the end you want to see some of my project videos there
popping up over here if you want to help support the channel a dollar month to
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you next time on Filament Friday