thats cool do you have any pics of your build?
I threw together a shared album. I couldn’t find any photos of the entire printer – I’ll take a couple and upload them tonight.
The extruder pictured is a direct drive extruder for an e3d Chimera hotend. I had to make a plate to mount it to which I did in OnShape and just now pushed to thingiverse.
About how much time did you have in the build? Would you do it again?
It’s hard to say how much time I put into the build – I purchased parts a little at a time and built it as I got parts. I would guess I put the whole printer together and calibrated it in the equivalent of 3 days of focused work.
My biggest annoyance with the gMax design is that an 18x18 print bed is a very large and heavy bed to be moving back and forth. When doing infill on small areas, the bed moves back and forth very quickly causing lots of vibration. Even if you stiffen up the y-axis (the 1.5+ does this), the bed itself is on springs to make leveling easier and prevent head crashes from doing as much damage. The springs will pick up the movements and translate it to vibration on the print bed.
My second printer is a combination between a D-Bot and a Triple C-Bot and because I can’t leave anything alone I have my own modifications as well. The print bed only moves vertically in small increments (your layer height). At speeds that would cause significantly reduced print quality on my gMax, I am getting very smooth prints on the new printer. Plus it has a heated bed. My biggest problem so far has been stringing from using a Bowden setup, but I’ll get that ironed out. Picture attached of a Marvin printed at 80mm/s with 0% infill at 0.1mm layer height printed on the new printer.
Edit: grr, my phone camera won’t focus on the Marvin very well so it’s hard to see just how good the quality is. Plus it’d be nice to see a comparison with one printed on my gMax with similar settings (minus the speed). I’ll see if I can remember to take those photos tonight with a better camera when I get home.
“My biggest annoyance with the gMax design is that an 18x18 print bed is a very large and heavy bed to be moving back and forth. When doing infill on small areas, the bed moves back and forth very quickly causing lots of vibration. Even if you stiffen up the y-axis (the 1.5+ does this), the bed itself is on springs to make leveling easier and prevent head crashes from doing as much damage. The springs will pick up the movements and translate it to vibration on the print bed.”
Interesting, is this typical of large bed printers where the bed moves in the X,Y or both as opposed to the extruder moving or is it something about there design.
It would be typical of large bed printers. Their design actually does a great job of mitigating it, but I’ve found that it’s always a factor.
Is there a term for this? Just curious I want to upgrade to a large bed printer and it would help my research
I am not sure if there is a specific term. There will always be effects from all the movement going on. Changes in design can move or reduce it to mitigate the impact to the print, but often at a cost in another way.
AlNYC
29
I bought a gCreate GMax 1.5 + for over 3K and got a lemon. My printer has not produced a single good quality items even though I have followed all the instructions and spent many hours trying doing so.
The delivery was quite difficult to coordinate and the package arrived damaged, so some of the problems may be the fault of the shipper.
However, gCreate dropped the ball on the support. They reply late or not at all to emails (once they have received the payment); don’t have a phone number; and were not at the address that they specified (Industry City Sunset Park).
After spending over 3K on this printer I now only use my XYZ printer ($349) and my Prusa i3 ($300 kit) and have yet to hear back from gCreate.
I highly recommend that you try their forums if you haven’t already. There is some official support there and there are also experienced users who are very helpful.
Looks like the new CR-10 printer in getting close to the size of the gMax at fraction of the cost. gCreate better bring their prices down or they will be passed by.
