any cubic has sent over a 3D printer
this one I'm actually quite excited about as well I mean I just love 3D
printers in general but this one for the price that it costs and for the features
that it has is probably going to be the best entry level printer I have seen I'm
very excited so thanks to any cubic for sponsoring this video and let's see what
they sent us got our assembly instructions so quite
quite the booklet it's all nicely laid out in
foam Packaging got all our little bits
and Bobs let's just get in there and start taking it apart this one does ship
semi-disassembled most of the base plate
is going to be all together and then we pretty much
just have to stuff the top axis on top of it nice thing about this one is it
comes with this textured metal magnetic build plate so that'll pop off really
nice now you just put your parts right off and then we get to the main event
the bottom plate let's see if I can get this out without destroying everything
okay that's easier we have a USB stick
so we'll have our firmware and our profiles for Cura which I believe this
uses there we go yeah it's a little USB stick and it even has a little SD card
reader slot on the side spare nozzle
what size is this spare 0.4 millimeter nozzle probably comes along with
attached we haven't quite got there yet and and what on Earth is this oh this
will be our gstfe lining tube for the Bowden this is
a Bowden Drive printer it comes with an 8 gig micro SD card there let's get this
out and have a look at our base plate oh
there's even more stuff I didn't even see out of the way
so here is going to be the big brains of
our 3D printer this design is a little bit different than some of the other
ones a lot of the cheaper models like like this one run on Wheels so the the
y-axis here as well as the x-axis and
which every axis on this run on these V
wheels and then they run into these little slots on the side of the aluminum
Extrusion and they just sort of Glide along there it's a little bit of quieter
operation than if you had a ball bearing but it's a less precise mounting option
and it's even less precise than
something like a linear rail but at this price in this category I think V Wheels
is completely acceptable our hot end assembly looks quite nice looks like
it's a standard e3d V6 and one of the
most exciting features about this printer is it comes with mesh bed
leveling so it looks like we have an inductive probe at the bottom here
that's what this little orange protrusion is and that'll detect the bed
the magnetic field will get in the way and then it can know exactly how level
your bed is so you don't have to worry about that as much makes this easier for
beginner any cubic is calling this technology any cubic Levy Q I don't know
if there's any proprietary magic in there or if they're just
you know making up fun names but it seems like it's just magnetic and
inductive leveling it'll be good enough and
especially at this price performance ratio upgrading that down the line we'll
be talking about that a lot upgrading is more than a possibility because it's
here in the base I guess the last thing
to do now is just to assemble the thing Kyle has assured me that the default pit
set for our LTT screwdriver lcdstore.com come with pretty much every
bit that you would need to assemble a 3D printer so we'll see if he's lying or
not I think these are our z-axis profiles this one is blank and this one
here has a little nubbing on the side of it uh there's the nubbin what's the
front the front has thing with the Dingle ARM nice and light I'm uh I'm
impressed at all the Extrusion is nice and sturdy one thing that you don't
want and you do get on some cheaper printers is they're really wobbly you
know it looks like they've spent the budget for this printer in the areas
that matter rather than you know like it's designed to be made
cheaply it's not made cheaply okay well
I'm gonna disappear and get some more of this assembled and when we get to
something interesting like maybe I don't know this Gantry assembly we'll uh we'll
see you again bye
and we're back it's another day we've got the printer mostly assembled it
wasn't very difficult it only took roughly an hour very simple the
instructions were okay they're not the best I've ever seen but they were easy
to follow and all the parts fit into each other there's no confusion all the
little bags of screws are nicely labeled all the cables for the various axes and
end stops are all really nicely labeled and it just sort of put itself together
it was great we do have some steps to do now that are a little more complicated
than some other types of printers because we have these V Wheels you can
see we've got a hell a lot of play everywhere we're going to need to do
some uh basically traveling and calibration they've given us this wrench
and most of these wheels here have an
eccentric nut which allows us to tighten them up and make sure we can get this
slop out of this system one thing I'm not entirely enthused about is that
it's only driven and supported on one side I guess they've done that as a cost
saving measure but I'm not entirely sure
this is going to tram up the way that I want it that feels really tight now
but I'm concerned it's not going to move very well what's kind of interesting is
they recommend that we take this little cardboard box that all the tools came in
and bring the x-axis sorry the bring the
z-axis up throw this over here and then lower
z-axis down onto the toolbox that's sort of
like squaring it I guess and now we've got to loosen some of these screws I've
got the V Wheels all nice and tight now and there's no more Flex in this
x-axis Gantry one of the things that's a
little bit interesting is there's no adjustment for the bed at all and I
wonder if they've done this as like an extreme cost saving measure because we
only have one support on this side like to drive the z-axis up and down but I
think they've included best med leveling specifically to address
the tramming issue so what I'm seeing
right now even though I have everything relatively
like tight and perfect we can't go too tight because then the motors won't be
able to move it but if this is your bed what I'm seeing on the nozzle right now
is it sort of starts here and then it comes in a in an angle towards the right
hand side of the bed and if we didn't have bed mesh leveling there would be
really no way in this printer at least that I see with no adjustments on the
bed to um to get rid of that but with
bed mesh leveling I can measure all the different points on the bed and then I
can move the the z-axis up right I can
sorry yeah the z-axis would come up as
the nozzle moves to the right and it would effectively get rid of that completely okay we've got the power in
got a nice color screen on the front there we will start off I guess by
giving it a home I can hear rather loud
fan not super loud but you'll notice it
from the power supply I guess there we go and let's try the auto leveling
feature so it's going to home all the accesses and then it's going to uh
hopefully do an auto level so it should do a full
probe of the entire bed and my hope is that it stores that internally so that I
don't have to you know do an auto level every single print because this is
rather slow especially with the z-axis
only being driven on one side I don't think it wants to do like super fast Zed
movements but you never need that anyway really for me I always run a boat and
setup because it does allow for those faster print speeds I want my printing
now and uh this is a great way to do it
the shorter the tube the better so by having it really really close to the uh
to the carriage here you're gonna
have less of that slop so this is a really good setup and a nice trade-off I
always like to see that the test print I've done I've tried to go sort of balls
to the wall and they're claiming you know 10 centimeters a second to 100
millimeters a minute sorry 100 millimeters a second so I've asked the
print to make it do 100 millimeters a second pretty much the whole time so I'm
excited to see that see if we lose any steps it appears that this printer uses
the Marlin firmware which is quite nice that's what I use at home too
um you could have I guess then technically flash whatever you wanted but I don't know and that also means
that you can pretty much use whatever slicing software and hosts you want for
me I like PDA host or repetir or rapper
day it's uh it's nice for machine
control I run my machines at home via
USB so I don't print with SD cards because I'm weird don't add me
um the nice thing about that is you get to see real-time feedback of your print
we're gonna be doing this little fidgety spinnery thing which should give us some
indication of tolerances this can achieve and also should print nice and
quick too it's mostly just um it's mostly just external perimeters and
a little bit of infill I couldn't get the USB connected I don't know if that's
my fault or if it doesn't contain it but I can't really find any information on
that maybe it was just a guess on my part but I've got my SD card in now and
let's uh it's got this print
sliced up I'm going to use Pusha slicer for this because that's what I like I'm
just getting the filament in now we've moved over to the build corner because
uh we got to do some other filming and this print's going to take 20 minutes or
so let's just push it through manually and then we'll do some feeding I just
want to get it through the Bowden tube and make sure it's not encountering any
resistance As I push it into the hot end the more resistance you get through your
hot end assembly the worse your volumetric speeds are going to be because your stepper motor is not going
to be able to keep up and if we want to be printing fast then we need no
resistance that's printing nice and fast so first layer of doing at about
I don't know 60 millimeters a second
which is uh still pretty aggressive for first layer and it's laying it down
quite nicely I am seeing some issues with that tramming though so maybe I
didn't do the mesh bed leveling properly uh we're getting a little bit of over
Extrusion there but again this is all my fault the printer is moving absolutely
silently so I think it has to use
um the TMC 2130s really what you're
buying at this price point is just a base and a platform to to go off of and
if they've included all the mechanical stuff that you could possibly need then
you can go through and upgrade it like the fan and the power supply or you
could get a different power supply or a quieter power supply you could put a
different firmware on it you could you know adjust the settings adjust the tune
that sort of thing the software they've included has got some really nice
quality of life features too I can pause the print and it also has power loss
protection we're not going to test that because I just kind of want this print to finish but you know you unplug the
cable or you have a power outage and the print will resume it'll reheat the hot
end it'll re-home itself and and start back from where it left off which is
nice I guess I'll let this print finish and see if the quality is good see if
the tolerances are good enough I mean minus all the
stringing but again that's my fault that's not necessarily the pringer's fault okay I'll see in a bit I've got it
assembled we gave it some testing and I spent the
rest of the afternoon kind of fiddling with it
now when you're 3D printing you have a bunch of variables you have how fast
you're moving the tool the printhead or the X Carriage every
single one of these variables needs to be correct and controlled and for a
beginner I think it's quite difficult to know which one of these maybe tens to 30
variables you have to Target to get a proper print or a part we'll start with
this one here which I printed quite aggressively this was done at 100
millimeters a second which is sort of the upper echelon of what any cubic is
claiming for this printer and as you can see we had a x-axis layer shift so the
stepper motor that controls the position of this axis here was moving too fast
there was too much tension on the v-wheels you know whatever and
the computer thought that the tool was
in a spot that it wasn't the next one this which I was just printing and
screwing with the printer at the time so this doesn't really count
um and now we can see we're we're kind of we're getting better as we go down
the line here when you buy an expensive printer
sort of maybe double the cost of this one triple the cost of this one what
you're really paying for in my opinion is less variables that you
have to control and account for that doesn't necessarily mean that they're
going to be the best I think if you're going to be buying a cheap printer like
this there's going to be a long learning
curve even for me just getting the V
Wheels to be the exact correct tension so that there wasn't sag on the far side
of the axis and that the z-axis height
adjust was actually moving both of them
on the first couple prints here I didn't have them tensioned quite correctly and
so when the z-axis height adjust was moving
the exit Carriage it was just pulling
this side up and down and this side was
not really moving that much so this this came off the printer and you know
they're all free but it's got some blobs and things I was uh playing with the
retraction settings quite a lot there seems to be some issues with over
Extrusion it likes to blob that could be
this filament but it's new and it's dried we can see some under Extrusion
artifacts along this side here which is very interesting
and yeah a lot of stringiness I will
give credit to the bed the bed works
extremely well um this nice rough surface it's not
peeling everything's stuck to it really quite well
one quality of light feature that I think it's missing is end stops along
the back side so that when you put the bed on it's sort of square I was Finding
on having to grab the the hot 60 degree
bed just to like get it straight the
only problem is that this printer is two hundred dollars uh it's even cheaper
right now as it's offered as an early bird thing that's incredibly good value
for what you get you get a uh you get a
3D printer for 200 bucks I guess for 200 this is a fine printer that can you know
squirt plastic where you want it to squirt the problem is that if you're a
little more advanced you might not have this as a as a good base for the long
run but for 200 bucks it's a great gateway drug into the 3D printing Hobby
and as you've only spent two hundred dollars you've still got loads of money
left over to go buy like a 600 touch screen toaster
um Sarah did a review of that you can check out here thanks to any cubic for
sponsoring this video they make a lot lot of other good stuff too check it out
thanks bye