not everyone has the cashola to shell out on a fancy 3d printer and even
relatively basic home enthusiast ones can still cost hundreds or even
thousands of dollars or at least they did
feast your eyes on the easy three x1 a
sub 100 3d printer straight to you from
shenzhen china it moves it extrudes
sometimes it goes up but it has basically zero competition in
this price bracket so we absolutely needed to take a look at it
just like i need to tell you about our sponsor storyblocks video saves you time
and money with studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost
check it out today at the link in the video description
i know what you're thinking because i was thinking the exact same thing this
thing has to be a hot pile of garbage
but hold on for a second even if it is hot garbage you have to appreciate that
hitting such a low price point while delivering something that functions at
all is pretty impressive there are multiple injection molded parts each one
requiring a costly tool to manufacture and it even comes 99 pre-assembled
there's clearly a lot of value for your money here as long as you temper your
expectations the accessory package includes what you need and absolutely
nothing more you get a small screwdriver a few meters of pla filament a card
reader and microsd card pre-loaded with manuals software and a test print file
and finally a 12 volt two and a half amp power supply the x1 gets away with such
a wimpy power supply by the way because there is no heated print bed
but that means that you're only able to print in pla as most other plastics will
have bad adhesion and warping issues without a heated bed
which is fine i mean we can't recommend pla for anything structural but for
decorative prints single-use widgets or toys it gets the job done just fine that
is as long as it's a decent quality filament
out of the gate the included g-code file produced this little cat model and there
is a lot that we can learn from this the stringing between the ears and the tail
tells us that while the x1's hot end cooling fan seems to be working the lack
of a part cooling fan so one that helps solidify the plastics after it's been
extruded means that the printer ends up either dragging material along with the
nozzle or printing on top of semi-liquid
material there's also visible porosity along the
perimeters of the model that tells us that our filament is not extruding
evenly now initially we blamed the printer for this understandably but upon
closer inspection of the included filament we discovered that it is
complete garbage the diameter of this small length of the
starter filament varies by over 0.3 millimeters from one end to the other to
put that in context most manufacturers strive to keep it under .05 millimeters
across an entire spool like this one
the good news is that once we switched to some decent filament the print
quality actually improved dramatically
it's still not great especially side by
side against prints that are coming out of our ultimaker 3 plus but it's in line
with our expectations given the price point and i think we can do even better
so from here out we're going to be making our own g code using a slicer
which takes our 3d model and slices it
hence the name into multiple 2d layers that are laid down in order to make the
3d shapes we want now ez3 did include
their own slicer called easywear which uses the unity engine
yes that unity engine from escape from tarkov so that's neat and it functions
just fine with the default settings but the menu is a bit unwieldy and for some
reason the settings list kept scrolling itself upwards so after one test print
of our LTT logo which i have right here
sort of holding together still we made the decision to move to a slicer that
cullen our writer for this video was more familiar with that's prusa slicer
which actually ended up making things worse rather than better believe it or not
too much material was being extruded and the nozzle was too low on the first
layer dragging itself around in the pla after iterating half a dozen times
though and moving to a slightly larger coin mostly just to help with the part
cooling so that it's not going over the exact same spot that's still liquid
right away we actually started to see some half
decent results now we've still got some infill and
perimeter blending issues which was a little surprising given the up to 30
overlap that we tried but overall big gains were made and we felt like the x1
was ready to take on benchy
the benchy benchmark model is an excellent trial print for a few reasons
one it contains nearly every difficult 3d printing feature like curved
overhangs tiny surface details long curved perimeters and both small and
slanted holes for comparison this blue one here is
printed on our ultimaker 3 plus you can check out our full review on that
printer in the card up here now it's not perfect there's a bit of weird
patterning in the vertical surfaces but it has nice crisp edges with no
stringing and its bridged sections are pretty good considering that there's no
support structure included most of these issues can really be
attributed to a lack of tuning and our fast print speed compared to the x1s
it's easy to see which machine did the better job oh by the way we didn't
mention this but it comes with a magnetic print bed mind you it's kind of
ruined already from just like a dozen prints but anyway
with more dialing in we probably could get better results than this
particularly on the underextruded sections but the results here are
as expected our solid infill is still under extruded which means that even
after the tuning we've done so far there's more time we would need to
invest in order to improve print reliability these hanging bits under the
roof here indicate both a lack of speed and cooling you see a similar problem in
the undersides of the archways and as for the smokestack on the top that
turned into a hot gooey blob and this is an example of fine detail print problems
that you simply cannot fix by slowing down the printhead because it can't
solidify with the hot end so close to it
now there are some files out there to hack a cooling fan onto this printer and
actually a heated bed while you're at it but this isn't the printer to buy if
you're trying to do even a moderate amount of 3d printing it's an ultra low
box starter machine designed to fit onto a bookshelf or in a dorm room closet
along with all of your shirts from lttstore.com if all you wanted was
something to tinker with and if you can manage to make a bath toy or two for
your kids so much the better well it works which is actually more than we
expected for under a hundred dollars but if you want consistency and plug and
play operation it's worth the money to grab something like a monoprice up mini
which comes in at 219 or if you can swing it a prusa mini
speaking of swinging i'm swinging right into this sponsor segway
storyblocks video gets you studio quality stock video clips for a fraction
of the cost you can download all the stock video your heart desires from
their member library including hd and 4k
footage after effects templates motion backgrounds and more we use it quite a
bit on our techwiki channel and all the content is royalty free so you can use
it for commercial and personal projects such as youtube videos
or youtube videos or anything else it's just for us it's commercial right so new
clips get added regularly so there's always something fresh to download check
it out today at the link below to learn more if you guys enjoyed this video uh
wow we don't actually do a lot of 3d printing videos but um hey you could
check out our ultimaker 3 plus review i guess that was a long time ago luke was
still reviewing stuff