I see what you mean and won’t advise against the Ender 3 as well, it is definitely solid and has a great community.
But the stock components aren’t great, it is basically a must to swap the mainboard to something useful as the stock one has soldered (awful) motor drivers, no bootloader etc. etc. With the Anycubic you just swap the motor drivers without soldering.
Also the i3 Mega runs standard marlin firmware, it is just extended so it can take commands from the touch screen (whichs runs its very own software, completely separated from the main firmware). There exist custom marlin versions on github that also support the touchscreen.
I run a custom marlin version with working touch screen and my own customizations, like enabled thermal runaway protection and mesh leveling.
Nah not yet. I’ve had the direct drive parts in my cart / liked on thingiverse but have yet to actually make the jump. I need to buy a 3rd machine and hide it from the wife so I can actually have time to upgrade it.
I highly recommend the Sidewinder X1. Has a very large FaceBook group community, 300x300x400mm build volume, volcano hotend, direct drive and great performance out of the box. I originally had a Wanhao i3 Plus and it was great but had a lot of problems. At the end of the day, I want a reliable machine I can just click print on and not have to worry about it. Yes, the Ender 3 may be 1/2 - 3/5 the price of the Sidewinder, but lots of people waste/enjoy spending a lot of time tinkering with it. There are certainly upgrade paths for the Sidewinder too, such as BLTouch, Hemera, Custom firmware, etc, but I think it’s worth getting to know the stock machine and it’s limitations before you mess with it.
Hell yeah man! I almost bought a different 3d printer for my first one when I was walking around microcenter and saw them so cheap. They didn’t have ender at the time there but it looks like they wised up.
Are you using the Creality glass plate, or something else? I definitely need to replace these weak springs because consistency is all over the place. Otherwise this little thing rocks!
You have to choose tge right material. Can’t use PLA for structural parts.
@jonisingt35r, get an ender 3 and $50 worth of upgrades. Can’t go wrong with it. There are some other printers with same price as ender 3 and slightly better feature set. Consider those too. YouTube "ender 3 vs "and you’ll see the suggestions.
Unless you spend couple of thousands(and also their own limited filaments) you will encounter problems and will have to learn to debug it. Better do it with the printer that’s really cheap and really popular.
Yep. It’s got an awesome build tac like finish that has been really nice.
I got my printers almost a year ago exactly and threw these on immediately. I used zero glue, hairspray, adhesive from the get go.
They’ve both been actively printing about 50% of the time. They run overnight, during the day… The only time they’re not running is when I’m not there to start the next print.
After about 6 months, I did start noticing one of my beds had some curling up issues on small thin first layer patterns. I also noticed it had some weird scratch marks all over it. I asked my lovely wife and she said she was in a hurry and one of the prints wasn’t coming up so she used he scraper “a lot”.
So at 1 year:
Scratched glass bed needs a spritz of hair spray every 5-10 prints (only if I don’t use a brim)
Unscathed glass bed I only clean with isopropyl alcohol once a week
Just make sure you let the glass cool down and parts usually pop themselves off.
