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

[American 3D Printing]

Drum roll:

It took ONE HOUR AND 8 MINUTES!!!! To make what the Rep 2 does in 16 minutes! WTF??

Bear in mind this is on top of that darn Z-height calibration and heating which total around 15 minutes per build.

Okay, calm down, maybe it's making .05mm layers at 15mm/sec or something? I can't see the slice because it is inside the machine. Maybe it is something in the firmware? The support tech wanted to know what version firmware I was on, and I have read that there have been a LOT of firmware updates on these things.

[American 3D Printing]

Oh and for the benefit of the doubt, maybe the build quality is better?



Please forgive the point and shoot image quality, the good Nikon's at home, but trust me, it is absolutely impossible to distinguish which one was made on the Rep 2 and which one was made on the 5th Gen. Remember, not only does the actual build take 4 times longer, but you have that 15 minute Z-height and warmup procedure before the timer starts ticking.

A couple other random observations that i hadn't mentioned before...

The 5th Gen is noticeably louder than the Rep 2. In fact it is now our 2nd loudest machine after the Z-Morph, which is in a class by itself. But then, the Z-Morph is about 5 times faster and every bit as good. The stepper motors are really musical though, second only to our plywood Type A machines Series 1.

[American 3D Printing]

This rook from Thingiverse takes about 56 minutes to build on the Rep 2. One hour 44 minutes on the 5th Gen, not including that 15 minute pre-print overhead.



As with the stretchlet, the one from the Rep 2 is indistinguishable from the one from the 5th Gen that took twice as long to build.



Right around now the guy that owns the 5th Gen saunters into the store and I explain what I've found so far. He almost started crying. I showed him the stretchlets and the rooks and asked if he could tell them apart. The closest thing he could find was the arch over the door of the rook that the Rep 2 built had a little dangly artifact, which was quickly scraped off with an Xacto knife.

[American 3D Printing]

Another random observation - we can't figure out how to see what the camera sees. The printer's owner told me he stumbled on it once but can't remember what to click to make it visible on the host's screen. I'll have to do a little research on that, unless someone reading this can post up with the answer?

Anyway, here's another standard object we make. This is just a test object I designed that we use to help dial in the slice and temperature settings for new materials on various printers. It normally takes about 36 minutes on the Rep 2. As you can see, it took 58 minutes on the 5th Gen.



As before, you can not tell any difference from the Rep 2 version.

[American 3D Printing]

Next up is another standard test object we make, a dodecahedron from Thingiverse.

As you can see below, it is big enough that the non-level build plate is causing issues. The back stuck and the front didn't, of course the front of the build plate is too low. We aborted the build after snapping this picture.

[American 3D Printing]

So we resliced it with a raft, which worked successfully. This object takes 2 hours and 40 minutes (with raft) on the Rep 2. On the 5th Gen it took 4 hours 37 minutes, plus the 15 minutes start-up overhead.



BTW, in each of these side by side pictures, the 5th Gen build is on the left and the Rep 2 build is on the right. The only way I could keep them straight, as that is the way the machines are sitting on the fixture as seen at the beginning of this thread.

[American 3D Printing]

We have a pile of objects we give out as free samples, and the barbie-pink stretchlets are always popular with little girls, so I put on a batch of 5 to run overnight. It was also a test to see if building multiple objects went any faster than the sum of individual objects, other than only having to go through the 15 minute prep cycle at the beginning of the build. Below, you can see how the non-level bed is affecting the first layer. One nice thing is that we didn't get a filament jam from having the extruder tip shoved so hard onto the tape that nothing could come out.



You can see what happened to this one where it had the opposite problem, too much Z-height zero. I expect this will be fixed once we get the bed leveling issue squared away. I'm giving Makerbot the benefit of the doubt that the new extruder may have some kind of chance of affecting the bed leveling. No who am I kidding. I just need to go through the exercise so when I call them back they can get a clue that not every 5th Gen issue is either a bad extruder or old firmware. Oh and I did check the firmware, it is indeed the latest, 1.2.112. That's done through the host software, Makerbot for Desktop. I had really been holding out hope that one of these magic firmware updates would somehow speed up these build times.



Unfortunately, building multiple objects does NOT speed up the build time any, it is simply the sum of the build times individually.

[American 3D Printing]

I'm out of time for today, but next up will be a really cool design approach I discovered, and then some more A-B head to head builds with the 5th Gen and the Rep 2. Again, please feel free to post up any comments or questions. I don't know how long I get to borrow this machine but I know I'll have it until at least some time next week.