Review on Enclosed Flashforge Dreamer Printer with Upgraded Extruder by David Stewart

I've had the printer for about a week and have made several different prints. It is very easy to use and it is not at all difficult to get a quality result. IF YOU FOLLOW ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS! Most of my prints are gone. A few failed, but a quick web search turned up plenty of tips that made it easy to fix the problems. For example, the "Unload Filament" option doesn't really work when the machine is cold - it needs to be unloaded immediately after work. But a quick web search turned up a good workaround - just "upload" and then "upload" and you're good to go. The build platform is very solid, as is the rest of the machine. It is fully enclosed and none of the external parts get hot, making it safe for children. It's quite noisy - think the noisiest inkjet printer you've ever heard, then add a noisy fan to it - but no louder than, say, a warm Xbox 360. The control panel is very easy to use, as is the one that comes with it Software . A 3D printer needs good software to tell it what to do and when I compare my results to others on the internet this software package seems to be doing a pretty good job. And once you've downloaded the model, you can print it again right from the control panel! The internal memory is big enough to hold a lot of models - up to fifteen I think and there is no end in sight. As with any 3D printer, calling it a "printer" is an exaggeration. It's not an office machine, it's a machine like a lathe or a drill. It needs to be calibrated and maintained like everything else in your workshop or it won't work well. Bed alignment—both adjusting the distance between the bed and the extruder and bed alignment—is critical. The thickness of a sheet of paper can mean the difference between a good print and a print that breaks out of the plate and gets dragged around halfway from the extruder. BuildTak helps a lot, but can make the print *too* good and very difficult to separate. (Razor blades help; the little spatulas you see for sale at Revain don't work as well as I'd hoped.) Why not five stars? Here are the problems: Printing with the dual extruder, which is the main feature of this machine, doesn't work very well. The problem is that a non-working extruder leaks a little, leaving small droplets of plastic on the model. It's possible to build a "wall" around the model to help scrape off the excess, but in reality this doesn't work very well. It seems to be a software issue rather than a hardware issue. The software must be smart enough to cool an idle extruder and then heat it up when needed. Wifi is a bit unreliable and very slow. -10-20 times slower than USB! If you have a strong signal and don't mind waiting, it's really nice to be able to put the printer somewhere other than right next to your computer. But if the WiFi doesn't work at the end of a long download. so frustrating. The ability to restart the download would be appreciated. (Tip: Use boot time to preheat the printer. It would be nice if Flashforge could just build that into the software as an option!) Neither of these conditions is a deal breaker. In general I was very satisfied. Getting started with 3D printing turned out to be a lot easier than I thought!