How good is a sub ?100 3d printer ?

**curious aardvark** · 05-16-2019, 08:16 AM

Complete printer and Dragonfly print :-)

As you can see from the dragonfly - no stringing or print issues of any kind visible. It came off the bed easily and all the articulated joints are clean and loose.
Colour me impressed :-)

Just need to sort the sizing issue and I reckon I've got a really nice printer.
It's been a fair bit of work, but at the end of the day I have to say, that if you pick the right base model and have some idea what you are about - then YES you can get a decent printer for under a hundred quid.

The dragonfly was printed at 210c, 65c bed, 100mm/s, 0.2mm layer height.
Current retraction settings: 2.5mm at 50mm/s.
First layer went down at 30mm/s - considering the complexity of the wings, pretty impressive !
Oh yeah also printed the first layer at 200% - so 0.4mm.

One thing I did notice - the bed and extruder temps were nailed on. No fluctuation in the bed temp whatsoever and very little in the extruder.
At least as good as the delta.
It takes a while to get to temp, but hey - who cares, lol

At an hour, it was the longest print I've done with the printer so far. The shorter usb cable appears to have fixed the issue where it used to reset in the middle of a print. I actually haven't used the sdcard extender yet. The board registers it as being there - so don't envisage any issues.

Things left to do.
Finish up starting gcode and get dimensions accurate. Hoping that will be relative quick job this afternoon :-)
Flexible Cable holder, to keep the extruder cabling neat and out of the way. No rush, cabling seems to move okay with no obvious issues at the moment.
Possibly redesign fan duct to attach to front of extruder, rather than the side - as at maximum y-axis it catches on the back right bolt head.
Discovered that when levelling the bed.