The research group I work with ordered a MakerGear M2 back in November, and it finally arrived yesterday. My lab-mates and I took the afternoon to pull it out of the box and become acquainted with it. We ordered the pre-assembled package, so this was mostly a plug-and-play operation.
I arrived in the lab shortly after the unboxing, so I can’t describe the packaging in great detail. I’m told that the box was covered in “fragile” labels, and that the zip ties on the printer were color coded; red for ties that should come off and black for those that are permanent. MakerGear uses high-end chocolates are for packing inspection tokens. I can say from experience that those are very good. Before shipping the assembled printer, the folks at MakerGear printed two test patterns, a bracelet and a gorilla head; both were shipped with the printer.
We started by fiddling with the motion on the head and the bed. Before printing anything, we brought the head and the bed up to printing temps (185 C and 60 C respectively, for PLA) and ran some filament to clean the head. Finding the right calibration settings took three or four attempts at printing something. Somewhere in the process of learning how to manipulate the machine, we managed to move the bed to the positive limit in Y and the power/sensor cables snagged on the frame. The power connector simply unplugged. Unfortunately, the sensor wire snapped at the solder connection inside its connector. After half an hour of negotiating with the connector housing, we were able to extract the metal contact and re-solder the connection. One more round of leveling and we began printing a Companion Cube. We’ve apparently got some issues with our configuration for the skirt, and I think we probably need to adjust the head clearance, but our first printing looks pretty reasonable.
I’m certain I’ll have more to say about our printer in the coming days/weeks. It’s an interesting device, and I expect it to be a good toy (or distraction).
How is the makergear M2 doing? Looking for an update?
Does it require a lot of tweaking to “get right” and re-tweaking between prints to stay right?
Very interested in using printing to make possibly sellable items. How is the quality out of the box and when tweaked? How much after processing is needed – sanding? acetone wash for ABS? etc?
> How is the makergear M2 doing? Looking for an update?
Quite well actually. We’ve been able to run off some pretty impressive stuff, though we still hit a snag now and then. I’m not in the lab anymore since I graduated, but I’ll put together one more post about it.
> Does it require a lot of tweaking to “get right” and re-tweaking between
> prints to stay right?
We have done quite a bit of tuning. We have to watch the bed leveling closely, especially when we’re printing with very low layer heights. We also have spent a fair amount of time trying to find the ideal settings for the different filaments that we’ve got. Overall, the print quality has been steadily improving.
> Very interested in using printing to make possibly sellable items. How is the
> quality out of the box and when tweaked? How much after processing is
> needed – sanding? acetone wash for ABS? etc?
The prints from this post were straight out of the box with no tweaking. The initial quality was certainly good enough to sell. We’ve printed a few gear cubes (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10483); they apparently sell well.
As far as finishing, I guess that depends on what you’re making. For most things, there may be a few burs to slice off, but other than that, they’re pretty good. We haven’t done any sanding and we’re only printing PLA, so we haven’t tried acetone.
Edit: formatting
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I’ve had a horrible time with the M2. If the first layer sticks then the filament jams. If the filament flows, then the corners warp. If the corners are fine, then something shifts during printing and there’s a ridge half way up the object. In the 3 or 4 months that I’ve had the printer, I’ve only gotten a handful of successful prints. I have a whole box of failed prints. The leveling and the z-axis do not stay set from one print to the next. The leveling screws sometimes come loose. The z-axis screw is in a horrible location. I’ve tried Kapton tape, painter’s tape, quick-dry hair spray, aqua net hair spray, ABS glue . . . none of them work consistently. I have a particularly bad time with large, flat prints like the littlebits crayon lathe.
That being said, I’m not sure that any of the other consumer-level printers are any better. If I had chosen one of the other printers, I’m sure that they have the same issues.
If you’re not willing to spend dozens . . . no, hundreds of hours tweaking, adjusting, re-printing, and troubleshooting, then do NOT buy a consumer 3-D printer.
We’ve spent a lot of time tuning our M2. It’s certainly not a plug-and-play operation. I haven’t been in the lab much since last May (I graduated), but I still communicate with folks in the lab and stop in every now and then. They’ve gotten it to a point were it’s printing at a high-quality consistently.
I know they’ve had a few maintenance problems. The power connections to the bed became disconnected a couple of times (at least once required soldering to reconnect). It’s also melted a couple of screw terminals. The hot-end jammed at least once while I still worked in the lab, I think it’s jammed at least once since then.
3D-printing is still too young to be plug-and-play. I suspect most printers will require a fair amount of tweaking. I don’t know about the high-end, but low-cost 3D printing is still maturing.
We have spent a great deal of time tweaking our MakerGear M2 as well but the results seem to be better than other printers. You are right in the fact that low-cost 3D printing is still mature. I won’t complain about some tweaking to utilize the technology in my own home, however.