Help to choose the 1st 3D printer - Tronxy X5SA Pro or Creality CR-10 V2

[crabjoe]

I've never owned a 3d printer in the past, and I've never seen any 3d printer in person. I just bought the Tronxy X5SA Pro.Here's my thoughts...

Off the top of my head, and without any experience with the Creality, if someone were to ask me which they should get, especially as someone new to 3d printing, I'm going to suggest the Creality. The reasons are simple.

The Tronxy is a mess. It's a true DIY kit, but a bit worse. The instructions are terrible, you get all kinds of extra hardware. Not just additional hardware you need, but you get stuff that's not needed. You also end up missing hardware you need. I was missing washers and a L bracket.

The assembly is a mess, and you better have patience and a machinist's square. The reason I say it's a mess isn't because of the hardware. It's because it's hard as heck to get square and the parts... pulleys and such aren't to spec. I'm talking I had to adjust the rollers or whatever they're called just to fit the linear rail. There's no instructions on how to even adjust them. I was lucky to find one video as to how it was done.

The holes in the injection molded parts I had to drill though because they were clogged. some of the threaded holes weren't threaded properly, meaning I had to re-thread them. I'm lucky I had the tools because of tinkering with other stuff.

Now here's another problem.. it's in the actual printing. I've come to find out that it uses a Chitu board and the firmware is closed source. To send commands, you have to program some into the firmware. For example, if you set retracting using Cura, it means nothing because it's preset in the firmware. This mean you have to remember to send gcode to update the firmware first, if you want to change retraction. There's other things slicers can't do because of this.

There's also the lack of support. I'm not just talking about support from Tronxy, I'm talking community support. I'm guessing there isn't much support because these printers just aren't that popular. This means when you open up a Slicer like Cura or even Prusa Slicer, you can't pick the printer's profile. You have to either create your own or tweak something else. I'm using the Creality CR10 profile with tweaks. This means it's not going to be optimal. It's a royal pain because hunting this stuff down because there's a lack of community.

I can't say much from experience to the Creality, but I will say this, based on build videos and reviews, the Creality has it all over Tonxy. Not only does it show them being way easier to build, but their printers look to be pre-supported in available software and the firmware looks to be open source Marlin. Community support looks outstanding too. I can't google 3d printer without Creality popping up.

The Tronxy X5SA Pro might be a better build platform and in theory is a better printer, but in reality the Creality is going to be a better package out of the box with better support.

If I were to do it again, I would go with Creality, if I didn't, I'd probably get some other brand of printer. Tronxy's QC is just bad...

Regardless of price, there's no reason that a DIY kit should have such bad QC. Because if I hadn't had the tools, for example, to drill and re-thread stuff, I'd still be looking at parts on the floor...

BTW, once I got everything put together, it seems to print well... BUT it's a huge learning curve, not just in learning how to slice, but to figure out these little quirks of this printer. So far, I've come to find that the bed goes out of leave really easily because the prints stick like they're super glued. Yes, I do remove the print surface, to remove the print, but I'm pulling and twisting on it so hard to remove the print, I think it's warping the print surface. It's causing me to relevel manually every time. It's out of the .5 variance allowed with auto leveling. I'm hoping, eventually, I'll figure out an easier way to remove prints. For now, I've got a flex plat on order.