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!