My trusty Kossel died last Friday, and I just picked this Artillery Sidewinder X3 Plus without much consideration. The features I knew I wanted were direct drive extrusion (not Bowden) and 32-bit microcontroller (smoothieboard). And once I picked a printer, the feature that excited me the most is PETG. My specific complaint about years with the Kossel is that PLA turns brittle after a few years, whether it sees sun and water or not. In fact, that's what killed my Kossel.
This printer cost me $169 shipped. I think the price is so low partly because there is an insane race to the bottom on price, and also because it is last year's model? The QC triangle says 2023-11-02. So I guess this has been sitting in a warehouse for a year waiting to be sold? The price is absolutely absurd.
Anyways it is already here!
I assembled it according to the instructions in the Youtube video. I wish it had been clearer about how to get the thing out of the box...but basically you remove everything except the base, including the gantry. And then you put your fingers under the base without removing any more foam, and lift the entire base up with a couple pieces of foam still on it. Then it is easy to remove those pieces of foam.
It is packed very well. UPS made a deep cut a full inch into the box in one corner, but hit nothing but foam. And UPS also made a big dent from strapping the box, also to no effect.
It took me an hour and a half to assemble it. I took my time about it, but I did not like take the base apart to check for loose connectors.
Then I selected auto bed levelling from the menu. Then I took the small sample of white "HS PLA" filament that came with it, and hung it on the spool holder, and passed it through the filament detector, and then into the back of the end effector. And I turned it on and went through the menus to set the temperature to 200C and then through the filament change menu asked it to feed it 10mm at a time until some started coming out. It seems like it was about 70mm to get all the way through the extruder. There was some black filament that I guess they used to test it at the factory, but it soon fed through to the new white filament.
Then I inserted the microSD card with it and picked a model called "3DBenchy-18.g". And it simply printed a benchy! As easy as that!
It printed very quickly in my opinion. Seemed faster than my old printer. But looking at the details, the model says it was about 3m of filament, which in my old printer would take roughly 30 minutes at 0.2mm layer height or 15 minutes at 0.5mm layer height. It appears to be 0.25mm layer height, so it is definitely an improvement but not like twice as fast or anything.
The benchy is "perfect" compared to expectations from my previous printer... Specifically the towers and roof are a big improvement. My old printer did not have a fan to cool the work (and its hot end couldn't keep up if you used an area fan), and it also had so much Bowden hysteresis! But looking closely, this benchy is full of flaws. The top and bottom layers are both underextruded, and the tower and overhang both show flaws on one specific corner (presumably on the wrong side of the cooling fan). And the hull has a subtle wrinkle in it that is actually a total stumper and could represent a fatal flaw with the printer for all I know. There is some mild stringing. And the most pathological overhang failed, with one strand of spaghetti.
But mostly I think they just used stupid slicer settings for this benchy, and I think I will do much better.
The most impressive thing is, I didn't do anything for the bed...and once it was printed, I simply lifted it off with my fingers (not touching the bed of course). And the object was already cool the moment it was done printing, so it definitely has a good fan pointing at the work!
I also tried to use my USB G-code terminal program, and it didn't work. The Marlin with my old printer wanted a checksum every line, but this one rejects that same checksum. So I need to hack that a little bit, if I am even going to use it. Maybe just to copy files onto the microSD card? Is that possible??
I have two complaints so far... The USB connector on the front means the cable is going to be in an awkward spot on my workbench...which maybe doesn't matter so much because the whole thing is just fantastically huge. I got the large Plus because it was the only one in stock for immediate shipment. Really, I simply need to clear off an even larger space on my workbench for it.
I guess another complaint is that the end effector is so bulky that I can't see it extruding. So that may make it hard to diagnose some problems? And it will certainly blunt my relationship with my slicer somewhat.
So I need to clean up my workbench, adapt the G-code terminal, and figure out Slic3r settings for PLA and PETG. And then I can get right back to the project I was working on when my old one broke!
I am still just completely in awe of the price of this thing. I last shopped for 3D printers in 2014, and back then you would struggle to find anything for less than about $500...and this just has absolutely everything, and covers all of the details. They even sent me some (very crappy) diagonal wire cutters!