Quote Originally Posted by cliffgi View Post
Definitely understand the rational, but don't agree. I feel that if f they can't produce quality parts for the extruder, MakerFarm should sub out to an injecion mold service, and adjust their price upward. The buyer has to foot the bill for the reproduction now anyway, and when you account for frustration and time, I think they would come out well ahead. It is nice to be able to build replacement parts, but it shouldn't be a means to quality operation from the get go. I bought it to build other stuff. That being said, I'm sure like you and so many others, I know I'll get beyond this initial disappointment. I absolutely love your your paint job, and thought about doing it myself, but got too excited about the output phase. Perhaps I'll retro in the future, but for sure, I'm using wire sleeves now. Also going to install a pwr switch for the 12v30A power supply. I don't think this power supply (recommended) comes with one built in. I could be wrong.
I just got my 10" kit built this week and had the same concerns as you about the fit of the gears. Turned out to be a non issue. While I thought the gear mesh was extremely tight (could barely get the motor bolts in, very difficult) by the time I had finished a couple of test boxes it was running very smooth. After thinking about it a bit I'm thinking it will allow for a 0 lash (which is important) adjustment as the gears wear over time for a longer period with that much adjustment room available. I would think just build it as is and enjoy for a bit before making changes. It may seem like there is no way to bolt the motor in at first, at least it did for me, just start the one bolt farthest from the center of the extruder and hold enough pressure to get the others started. I agree that the adjustment holes could have been a bit longer out of the box, but it did work just fine after assembled. I'm not saying the extruder parts are quality 3D printing since my replacements came out much better, but they do work well after the difficult assembly.

A couple things I did find that were a bit irritating to me. One was the software link for the drivers would not work for me on Win 8.1. Could not communicate with Pronterface, would not connect, access denied. Went to an Arduino site to get drivers for the Mega 2560 v3 and these work great. This driver is the 1.0.5 release version, although they have a 1.5.7 beta available which I haven't tried. Here is the link from Arduino.cc if you have the same issue I did installing the drivers in the build PDF link. Wasted about 2 hours of perfectly good drinking time on this one that I will never get back : )

http://arduino.googlecode.com/files/...r2-windows.exe

Another issue is the spool holder. Not great and was too narrow to fit the ABS spool I purchased from Makerfarm with my kit. Poorly done IMO, I could understand if I bought the ABS elsewhere, but this came with my kit and should have worked. My PLA spool fits, but even then it does not work smoothly it jerks a bit at a time and I can't help thinking this is detrimental to good print quality. I have made my own holder with bearings, but this really needs to be addressed.

The Z endstop is much too fiddly to get fine adjustment on the Z axis without a lot of perseverance and luck. I printed the MiniMadRyan endstop from Thingiverse and problem solved. Why isn't this or something like it in the kit? The original design is a fail I think and should have been addressed long ago. I had to use the stock endstop before I could print the MiniMadRyan version which gave me a really good perspective on how good the new endstop is and how bad the original endstop was. This would not be hard or expensive to fix by Makerfarm, and they need to.

No control knob for the LCD? Why? Too expensive? I don't think so and it should have been part of the kit since it makes navigating the menu system so much easier. Get one from Thingiverse pronto.

A couple of the build videos Colin does something wrong and then later has to undo it. Well I was following the video and pausing to do the build only to later find out I had made the same mistake and had to undo it too. WTF? Why not at least put a text edit in to warn not to do this in the video. Not a big deal, and I understand not wanting to reshoot the video, but would have been nice to note it.

The build deck information is wrong in my firmware I guess. I tried to print out my spool holder which is a length of 6.75" and it could not print it with the X and Y bed values set at 250x250mm in Slic3r. It would only print to the 200x200mm borders. After resetting to a 200x200mm bed in Slic3r it re-centered the print and it printed fine. I haven't addressed this yet, but it is next on my project list. I don't know for sure, but I think this is probably a firmware issue. Maybe this just didn't get updated from a i3V 8" firmware before sending out and is a unique issue, I would be interested to hear if anyone else has run across this.

I am not unhappy with the i3V at all, and am very impressed with how it is operating. I just think the above items could have been easily resolved and made for a much better build out of the box.