I own a Febtop Optimus - anyone else here?

[lawton20]

Came across your old thread, I'm in exactly the same boat except I bought the 5W laser which I've never used. I bought the V2 upgrade too, but have never transformed the V1 or installed the the V2 upgrade.

Similar story, bought in the first round of the kickstarter/indegogo, whatever it was. Missing parts on arrival. Followed all the instructions to find it crashed and broke on first use due to a jumper being in the wrong place on the control board that doubled it's output steps resulting in overrun and smashed the nozzle into the base. The controller box had a "warranty void if broken" sticker which I was holding sacred to keep Febtop support, support that responded once a month. I look back now having worked out it's a standard smoothieware board that I should have ignored the sticker and just replaced the board myself.

Thankfully I didn't have the heated bed on at the time. Later they put out an update with no special instructions, turned out it expanded the probing pattern for the delta levelling. If you had your heated bed installed with the connector positioned to the back, it would drive the hot end into the connector and LED, breaking the LED open and shorting out between the LED and hot end body, frying the control board. 3 months of fighting I finally got an exchange of control box. I had to send mine to Sweden, which indicates to me they at least started in Sweden and likely sold out to China. Guess I helped find the hole in their process that let the update out without instruction to rotate the bed 120degrees.

Final straw 3 years ago was I ended up with compounding problems. Another poorly defined firmware update resulted in a nozzle crash had left a dimple in the middle of the heated bed, which upset the auto levelling as it registered an extreme low point in the middle. The learning here being if it ain't broke, don't fix it and updated firmware doesn't automatically mean better. Before realising this, a subsequent print ended up leaving a huge gouge in the PEI sheet. I then restricted myself to using a 3rd of the plate that was workable. After some odd levelling issues which lead to adhesion issues, I set the first layer very low, used sand paper to liven up the PEI sheet and ended up with print sticking too well. In trying to get it off I bent the build plate and it was all over then. I enquired about replacement bed which was still available then, they wanted like $150USD to buy replacement, but $450USD shipping to Australia. I couldn't pay that much and the following week they pulled all V1 and V2 parts from the Febtop website.

Now I'm trying to revive the printer and found it's got a broken extruder too.

In the last 4 years I've had zero help from Febtop, totally soured me too. Maybe I exhausted them with the early issues I had, maybe they ignore everyone with a V1 or V2 Optimus and pretend they don't exist. If you send them an email that doesn't mention V1 or V2 you will get a response pretty quick, but not if you helped establish and build the company by buying an early version and tipping further cash in buying their upgrade, no reciprocal support!

I've advanced my garage and tooling since then and now have manual lathe and manual milling machine. I've just made a replacement aluminium plate for the heater bed, this time 8mm thick so it's stronger and so I can re-machine the surface if needed. When I removed the heater PCB from the OEM aluminium plate, I found it's just held together with double sided tape at the edges, leaving air gap between the aluminium plate and heater PCB. No wonder why it took so long to heat up. It's reassembled now with thermal grease and can heat up an 8mm plate a bit faster than it used to heat up the original 2mm plate.

I'm sure anyone reading this who is familiar with the V2 upgrade would think why not abandon the V1 delta and move onto V2 as it doesn't need the hexagonal shape bed? Well, it didn't come with a heated bed for the V2. I'm not sure if it was meant to, but it didn't. Not sure if it's climate, skill or material quality, but I've never been able to print PLA without a heated bed. The path to heated bed repair with V1 or retrofitting something to V2 seemed equally off putting at the time. I also love to watch the delta system work, it's mesmerising.

I landed on this thread today looking for information on the extruder so I can work out an alternative, had to share that I've had a similarly disappointing experience with Febtop. Hope you have worked out a way forward for your Optimus issues as it was a hell of a lot of money to throw away buying one of these disappointments.