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Review on πŸ–¨οΈ Pre-Assembled 300x300x400mm Artillery Auto-Leveling Printer - Exceptional Performance by Kevin Taharka

Revainrating 2 out of 5

Excellent with some nuances.

Edit: Changed to 2 stars due to some annoying issues. My immersion heater has a short circuit; I took a closer look and most of the plastic tubing was worn away, for lack of a better term, and at a pretty steep angle. Luckily nothing was noticeably fried. The thermistor is also housed in a fancy metal cartridge that doesn't fit other Vulkan heater blocks, so be prepared to pop in and crimp your own thermistor. If you don't want to just return the whole car (assuming you kept the packaging). This is one of the few printers that comes with a Titan extruder and a Vulkan hot end. For those who don't know, this is pretty important - it helps with extruding, especially when printing LARGE. I removed the 0.4mm nozzle and replaced it with a 0.8mm nozzle as I wanted to use this printer primarily for larger, less detailed prints. Anyhow, this is in my opinion one of the best printers currently available for the price - for some experience I have owned, built and operated several printers ranging from cheap used mono value printers to Ultimaker 5s and custom cores like Railcore II. If you haven't seen them yet, there are some good reviews on Youtube about the printer, although some of these may be a bit outdated. The assembly of these printers is very easy and very fast. I had some problems because my Z-axis didn't match the base perfectly and caused awkward efforts. However, I got up and started typing for half an hour or so. Printing was pretty decent with some PLA profiles I took from my CR10S and adapted for direct drive extrusion/volcanic hotend. The printer is surprisingly quiet, even compared to the Prusa I3 MK3S, with the fans being the loudest. Maybe I'll "upgrade" the Noctua at some point, but to be honest it's not a big deal at the moment as it's so quiet. The partial cooling fan doesn't match the layer height and print speed I've tried (>0.6mm); I may need to upgrade to a dual fan setup in the future, such as with the petsfang hotend node. This is normal for lower layer height and speed; You may need to change settings due to the volcanic hotend exposing the filament to heat for long periods of time. The touchscreen is quite pleasant, although the buttons can be a bit confusing at times. There is no Live Z adjustment, but it's easy to change it with a firmware change - I believe TeachingTech has a video of this, as well as associated firmware files, likely sourced from tinymachines3d. The lack of automatic bed leveling is normal. This is very easy and you don't have to do it often, especially if you swap out the springs for silicone mounts. This is an inexpensive and effective upgrade. However, I think one of the greatest features of this printer is that overheat protection is enabled by default. At the time of writing, there are almost no printers currently available that have this enabled from the factory (although I'm sure Creality is in a hurry to catch up). Every printer should have this, especially if you print unattended.

Pros
  • Good product for the price
Cons
  • Flamboyant