5th Gen - Review and Head to Head with Rep 2

[Rolf]

Hi Jeff.

I'm still a bit leery of 3d systems' products. We have also had a rep soliciting us to give their products a shot. We may do that.

Some very interesting stuff has been happening with regards to channel support at Makerbot, but I shouldn't talk about that at all. Let's just say that I wasn't willing to sign anything. That said, I also will not reveal any details, I think that would be somewhat unscrupulous.

On the other hand, I have fallen head over heels for Lulzbot. Bought a Taz 4.1, have since upgraded it to Taz 5 standard with the new all metal Hexagon (fangtooth) tool head v2. Good stuff!

Got a Taz 5 yet? I also have my demo Mini sitting behind me in a box. It's hard to get excited about it, since I have a taz 5 (well, I have no PEI, I like PET, so it's a Taz 5.(-1) I suppose).

I have literally zero desire to mess with Makerbot anymore. Now the challenge seems to be reeducating customers. Sometimes I really detest good marketing!

We should talk sometime, offline!

Rolf

Sorry it has been so long since I've been able to revisit this thread. I swear, this is the ONLY vBullten forum (out of more than a dozen) that I belong to that won't shoot me an email when somebody posts in one of the threads I'm subscribed to.

Thanks for your posts, Rolf. very similar to our experiences, and almost everyone who's spent much time with a 5th Gen. We've still got ours, the customer who owns it had us put it up on Craigslist for him. We started out at $2,200 and have dropped it to $1,900. We've only had a couple of nibbles, we're about to drop it to $1,700. Since we're a reseller, Makerbot did give us another smart extruder after the 3rd one we were on started getting filament jams on every single build. I believe we had less than 20 hours on that one.

We have been using genuine Makerbot filament exclusively.

We are on the latest firmware and Makerbot for Desktop.

My 3D Systems sales guy is trying to tell us that the Cube 3 is Sooooooooo much better than the crappy 2nd gen Cube. After this experience with the 5th Gen Makerbot, we have told him that we'd be happy to bring in Cube 3s into our store, if only we can test drive one for a while and verify it REALLY is better.

[American 3D Printing]

Hi Jeff.

I'm still a bit leery of 3d systems' products. We have also had a rep soliciting us to give their products a shot. We may do that.

Some very interesting stuff has been happening with regards to channel support at Makerbot, but I shouldn't talk about that at all. Let's just say that I wasn't willing to sign anything. That said, I also will not reveal any details, I think that would be somewhat unscrupulous.

On the other hand, I have fallen head over heels for Lulzbot. Bought a Taz 4.1, have since upgraded it to Taz 5 standard with the new all metal Hexagon (fangtooth) tool head v2. Good stuff!

Got a Taz 5 yet? I also have my demo Mini sitting behind me in a box. It's hard to get excited about it, since I have a taz 5 (well, I have no PEI, I like PET, so it's a Taz 5.(-1) I suppose).

I have literally zero desire to mess with Makerbot anymore. Now the challenge seems to be reeducating customers. Sometimes I really detest good marketing!

We should talk sometime, offline!

Rolf

Hi Rolf,

We were all excited to get the Hexagon toolhead for out TAZs (we have a 3 and a 4 in the store), but then we found out about having to reflash it for the hexagon thermistor values, PID values and MAXTEMP values. This would mean that we could either no longer build with our 0.5mm budaschonzzle, our Flexistruder, our Dually and our Flexy Dually. Since we need to use all these other toolheads all the time, that's kind of a non-starter for us. Yes, of course you can reflash back and forth every time you change toolheads, but that seems pretty awkward and error-prone. I spoke with my good friends up the road (Aleph Object's factory is a 2 hour drive from here, I've been there several times), and they do say they are working on hexagon-based Flexy, Dually, and Flexy Dually toolheads. But for now it seems a little hard to justify having a 3rd TAZ out on the retail floor.

Back on-topic, it seems the latest version of firmware for the 5th Gen has improved a few things as far as build quality and reliability. We are now on version 1.6.3.257. What it seems to have done is make the evaluation of what it thinks is a filament jam or a homing error extremely sensitive, so there are a ton of reported homing errors and reported filament jams, but no real filament jams, just reported ones. All you have to do is tell it to load filament and it starts extruding, then tell it to resume. If it weren't for the fact that it appears to do a retraction whenever it thinks there's a filament jam, you could skip the load filament-extrude step and go straight to resume.

My take on it is that they never should have been using a hall-effect sensor to determine hot-end position relative to the rest of the extruder housing. It just isn't precise (repeatable) enough to the resolution necessary for this particular application. I have designed proximity sensors using hall effect for many years, and they're great for applications that don't require as much precision as this application does. You can tell that this is the issue after 3 different smart extruders all act EXACTLY the same: They vary on what they decide is "touching" the bed from one measurement to the next, whether it is in the leveling process or the homing before each build.

Regarding channel support at Makerbot, we got a new "Channel Sales Account Manager" named Nicole Klein who is taking over from Bennet Mayrock (Bennett is still there, just not our main contact any more). After her initial email introducing herself on 2/25, I got another email from her saying they might remove us from their reseller program because we haven't been ordering enough stuff I guess. I wrote her back explaining that "hey, I just ordered several thousand dollars worth of Makerbot stuff and what the heck are you talking about?" We went back and forth via email a bit, then she called me (last week i think it was?) and we had a nice conversation. It was a productive call and we really appreciated it.

I think they're really trying hard there at Makerbot, but I also believe that they still have some technical/design issues with the 5th gen printers, mostly related to the smart extruder and how they're trying to make it do something that right now, is past the limit of this design approach. A hall effect sensor just isn't precise enough for this application and you just can't change the laws of physics!

[American 3D Printing]

Well, today we downloaded and installed firmware 1.7.0.274, and (while I hate to introduce more than one variable at a time) Makerbot for desktop 3.6.0.76. We are on our 4th (albeit small) build in a row with zero homing errors and zero filament jams. Knock on wood, we'll see how it goes, but this is better than we've sen since we started running this thing back in August. We've even entertained the idea of buying it off this guy, now we'll have to think about it even harder.

[mastawee]

Had numerous issues with 5th Gen for a year. Needless to say, currently with 3.6 and the latest print head (3weeks old), I am getting some excellent prints on .2mm and .1mm. If you have an older head, they have issues. Smooth extrusion and no under extrusion, brittle prints or clicking. Also, I picked up some Build Tak sheets to print on and all my non-raft prints grab like crazy to the build plate. No peeling or curling.

[American 3D Printing]

Had numerous issues with 5th Gen for a year. Needless to say, currently with 3.6 and the latest print head (3weeks old), I am getting some excellent prints on .2mm and .1mm. If you have an older head, they have issues. Smooth extrusion and no under extrusion, brittle prints or clicking. Also, I picked up some Build Tak sheets to print on and all my non-raft prints grab like crazy to the build plate. No peeling or curling.

We're still having issues with the extruder finding proper Z home consistently (this is the 3rd smart extruder, November 2014 vintage), but yeah, firmware 1.6 has some tangible improvements, both in build quality, and in that silly homing business it does at the start of each build. Now, instead of taking about 13 minutes, it's closer to 4-5 minutes and most of that is heating it up rather than that "sneaking up" on Z home. We still get false filament jams a lot, and homing errors, but not nearly as often as before. It looks like they really are trying to fix the technical issues.

[Roberto]

Hi there,
new Firmware 1.7 is what you should install & use together with 3.6 Desktop.
Homing and others are much faster now.

It's been there for a while - I'm surprised you didn't get it by now.

[American 3D Printing]

Hi there,
new Firmware 1.7 is what you should install & use together with 3.6 Desktop.
Homing and others are much faster now.

It's been there for a while - I'm surprised you didn't get it by now.

We installed 1.7.0.274 on 4/3/15. We are using Makerbot for Desktop 3.6.0.76, installed that same day. I wrote about the faster homing in post #115 above

[pa9k]

Hi Jeff!

Great review, I very much enjoyed reading this. We got a z18 here at work many months ago and I encountered many of the same issues you did. It felt much more like an early access, trial program than it did a released to consumer product. But I will give credit where credit is due, the performance and reliability of this machine has improved dramatically since we first fired it up. I wanted to touch on a couple of the things you had mentioned previously.

First, you mentioned it is very hard to attach a new extruder to the carriage due to lining up the "castle nut" gear thing on the extruder itself and the carriage. If you go to utilities -> attach smart extruder on the printer control panel it will spin that gear on the carriage side until the extruder snaps into place.

Secondly you mentioned you couldn't find or figure out the wifi. It works (Im not sure how well, we have had many issues with ours and ditched it long ago) in theory at least. You must have your printer connected to your pc (which must be connected to the wifi network you wish to connect the printer to) via the usb cable. Then through Makerbot desktop its under devices -> device preferences -> and then network or wifi or something like that.

So I said we ditch the idea of connnecting via wifi, and the location our printers in ethernet or usb is not an option. So we use a USB flash drive. I know you had mentioned they removed the sd card, but I dont think I heard you mention the usb port at all. I assume all 5th gens have them, our z18 certainly does.

This brings me to my next item. The camera. The only way to view it is to have the printer connected via wifi, ethernet, or usb (cable from printer to computer.) The camera is a cool feature I guess, it is really nice if your doing long prints and leave it unattended, you can check in on it. The camera is at a really dumb angle though and you can hardly see anything (other than the inside of the printer) until it has printer has printed a few inches in height. The resolution is really bad on the camera too, something like 300x300.

My last point id ninja flex. Im not gonna say we used it (we definitely have never used it, after all it voids your warranty) but I did have someone who works at makerbot say theu use it all the time with good results. It seems it would like a higher temp, much slower speeds, and a little more overlap of the shells. Thats just what I read on the internet, remember we have never used it on our machine because makerbot said no.

I dont want to sound like I'm disagreeing with you at all, just wanted to provide a little insight from the experiences I've gone through.

One last thing, the false filament jams. We turned off filament jam detection, as I'm sure you've figured out to do by now. But we've also made a few filament filters. Basically a shell with some foam inside which you saturate with mineral oil to help the filament feed through the long long tube up to the top. Seems to have helped a little with print quality as I think its feeding more reliably now, but I'm still scared to turn the jam detection back on.

[American 3D Printing]

Hi Jeff!

Great review, I very much enjoyed reading this. We got a z18 here at work many months ago and I encountered many of the same issues you did. It felt much more like an early access, trial program than it did a released to consumer product. But I will give credit where credit is due, the performance and reliability of this machine has improved dramatically since we first fired it up. I wanted to touch on a couple of the things you had mentioned previously.

Thank you for the kind words pa9k

First, you mentioned it is very hard to attach a new extruder to the carriage due to lining up the "castle nut" gear thing on the extruder itself and the carriage. If you go to utilities -> attach smart extruder on the printer control panel it will spin that gear on the carriage side until the extruder snaps into place.

True, they added that feature with one of the firmware updates.

Secondly you mentioned you couldn't find or figure out the wifi. It works (Im not sure how well, we have had many issues with ours and ditched it long ago) in theory at least. You must have your printer connected to your pc (which must be connected to the wifi network you wish to connect the printer to) via the usb cable. Then through Makerbot desktop its under devices -> device preferences -> and then network or wifi or something like that.

Oh, we found it all right, but could never get it to work. That was a couple updates ago. Maybe they fixed it?

So I said we ditch the idea of connnecting via wifi, and the location our printers in ethernet or usb is not an option. So we use a USB flash drive. I know you had mentioned they removed the sd card, but I dont think I heard you mention the usb port at all. I assume all 5th gens have them, our z18 certainly does.

Yes the 5th Gen has one on the front. We simply use inexpensive laptops as printservers for each of our printers.

This brings me to my next item. The camera. The only way to view it is to have the printer connected via wifi, ethernet, or usb (cable from printer to computer.) The camera is a cool feature I guess, it is really nice if your doing long prints and leave it unattended, you can check in on it. The camera is at a really dumb angle though and you can hardly see anything (other than the inside of the printer) until it has printer has printed a few inches in height. The resolution is really bad on the camera too, something like 300x300.

Our started taking a picture of the completed build a couple of updates ago. Seems a little silly, but there you have it.

My last point id ninja flex. Im not gonna say we used it (we definitely have never used it, after all it voids your warranty) but I did have someone who works at makerbot say theu use it all the time with good results. It seems it would like a higher temp, much slower speeds, and a little more overlap of the shells. Thats just what I read on the internet, remember we have never used it on our machine because makerbot said no.

We build with Ninjaflex every day on our Lulzbot TAZs, but they require a special extruder because you can't push it without it being completely enclosed in a tube or pathway. If you look at how the Makerbot smart extruder is designed, it would be absolutely impossible to build with ninjaflex (or filaflex) without extensive modification of the smart extruder. BTW, you build with ninjaflex at 220-230°C, and typically 30-45mm/sec. You also need extensive retraction on travel moves as it oozes like crazy.

I dont want to sound like I'm disagreeing with you at all, just wanted to provide a little insight from the experiences I've gone through.

No, indeed the whole reason for forums like this is for everyone to share their collective experiences. I have tried to be as objective as possible in this thread and simply report what we've observed. Your input is greatly appreciated!

One last thing, the false filament jams. We turned off filament jam detection, as I'm sure you've figured out to do by now. But we've also made a few filament filters. Basically a shell with some foam inside which you saturate with mineral oil to help the filament feed through the long long tube up to the top. Seems to have helped a little with print quality as I think its feeding more reliably now, but I'm still scared to turn the jam detection back on.

I will give Makerbot credit for giving the user the ability to resume a build after the thing stops due to either a real or false filament jam. Reprap style machines just keep on going if you don't notice and intervene right away and then you have a failed build.

[curious aardvark]

So the big question pa9k
Would you buy another makerbot 5th gen - knowing what you do now and knowing how many other printers there are in the same price bracket ?