Go to homepage
3D Printing
3D Printing Service
FDM SLA/DLP SLS MJF DMLS/SLM Material Jetting
CNC Machining
CNC Machining Service
CNC Milling CNC Turning Surface Finishing Part Marking
Injection Molding
Sheet Metal Fabrication
Resources
3D Printing Guide CNC Machining Guide Injection Molding Guide Metal 3D Printing Guide Knowledge Base Webinars Help Center
Get instant quote
May 2015
12 / 17
Jun 2015
Jun 2015
TypeR
May '15

I bought my Mankati printer about a month ago. The reasons for doing so was that I was looking for a reasonably priced printer that was able to printer somewhat larger volume prints and had the capability to print with two colors. After making a long list of available printers, the Mankati Fullscale XT seemed to fit the bill. It has been busy printing every day so I wanted to share some of my experiences.

First, the Mankati is a very solidly build printer, but I did have some startup problems.

The connectors on the stepper motors are very small and fragile. It is easy to break them. These were outsource by Mankati off course, but I would have like them to be a bit more solid.

Second, the spool holder on the back could have been placed apart somewhat more.

I’ve already had filament getting caught when using full 1 kg spools.

After about two weeks of printing I suddenly started to experiences severe offsets in my prints in the Y-axis. After searching and looking, I found one of the screws holding one of the drive wheels to the axis was lost. It was easily replaced, but nevertheless, it took me two days before I figured out what the problems was. This of course could have happened to any printer.

The printing bed with the attached heating platform is not 100% flat. This seems to be a common problem, but it makes calibrating your nozzle distance very important.

I would have liked the LCD display to have been a bit bigger to display more information and possibly in a different color. This is however a minor thing and not very important.

The push-turn knob works ok, but it the screw loosened itself recently so it had to be tightened again.

Although the printer can print at speeds up to 150 mm/s, I rarely go beyond 45 mm/s. Especially for small and detailed prints I often go down to 30 mm/s or even lower.

I also rarely print at 0.10 mm or smaller. It seems the quality of the print does not really increase with such small layers and does not justify the doubled printing time.

Other than this, the Mankati proved to be relatively problem free so far.
It seems it’s not a very popular printer but so far, I’ve found it to be very dependable.

  • created

    May '15

  • last reply

    Jun '15
  • 16

    replies

  • 2.5k

    views

  • 7

    users

  • 3

    links

  • 2
Jordi_Belda
May '15

Hi, I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING you comment. Perhaps the biggest problem I’ve found is in the part of the cooler fan, I work with a slightly elevated temperature and the piece was deformed. The solution was to print a new piece in ABS and ready. Best regards.

dnksystems
May '15

We found and our customers very similar issues, many replace the bed with a new thicker glass or aluminium, also you can mod the feeders to help increase the flow into the nozzles with less feeder clicking. We also sell ours with a modified head cooling system, it has a light which helps with levelling and such but also cools the Teflon tube in the peeks which reduces the deformation of the Teflon and reduces blockages on the feeders in the heads. And allow better cooling for abs and pla. Also try other slicers you will find that cura is good but other slicers can give you more control on aspects of cooling, ooze control and such.

Regards

dave

TypeR
May '15

Hi Jordy,

So far, I have not had any real problems with printing PLA. But when printing ABS, Nylon or Bronzefill, I simply leave the cooling fan off.
I have found than often when printing at temperatures about 230 degrees, the nozzle temp temperature can drop significantly during a print and with the higher temp filaments, this will ruin your print. So, for such prints, I do not select the Fan option in the MankatiUM.

TypeR
May '15

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your reply. How can you replace the bed with a glass plate when the bed is fixed to the heater and also to the Z-axis with four screws?.
Personally I have had no problem with the feeders, nor with feeder clicking. But the printing bed is something to think about.

Now, when I calibrate, I don not only calibrate at the four corners, but also in the middle.

It would have been nice if the backplate of the printer would have been had a white band so it would be easier to spot the nozzle gap. I still plan to put a piece of white tape there for better contrast.

For calibrating I now use a feeler gauge, it works better and more accurate than a simple business card. I mostly print at a layer height of 0.20 mm and set the nozzle distance to around 0.25 and 0.30 mm.

TypeR
May '15

In addition to what I have stated first, it seems that no matter what kind of printer you buy, you will always find something that could be better or improved upon. The (minor) issues I have had with the Mankati could easily have happened also (and do happen) if I had bought an Ultimaker 2 or any other of the now populair printers.

dnksystems
May '15

The glass type is borosilicate it’s flat and designed for heat applications. Just design it up and get it made. Its basically a square plate with 4 holes so they aren’t that expensive, or use aluminium that will do the same trick as well. The heater is just stuck on so you can carefully peel it off or just buy a spare one. It’s not too hard to remove and re-stick. The bed will take longer to heat but much flatter and usually gets better initial layers for finer prints.

Regs

dave

Tinglaver
May '15

I have one since July 14, and is very satisfied, except from the support team’s responce time and quality.

ie. I need some new nozzels for the extruder. They never responded, and had made some my self.

thinglaver

TypeR
May '15

Looks very nice :slight_smile:

What settings do you use for an 80 micron print?

So far, I mostly print at 0,20mm (200 micron) because I didn’t see any quality difference between 100 micron and 200 micron.

Do you change the nozzle-to-bed distance to do that? How fast do you print at 80 microns?

Am very interested in improving my print quality, especially for small prints.

gabriela3d3D Hubs Employees
Jun '15

Hey @awhv, every now and then we ask a community member to share his printing settings for printing a Marvin on a certain printer. Would you be willing to start a new post with your Marvin 2, while also adding an image of it as well? It’s a really nice Marvin and this will help other Mankati owners nail their initial reviews when joining the platform. Thanks

TypeR
Jun '15

That’s a bit strange. When I had the problems with the Y-axis offset I took some pictures and sent them to Mankati support. Of course it was at night over there, but the next morning I had good reply and spent some time exchanging emails.

Luckily, I was able to find the source of my problem myself and solve it quickly, but their replies were rather prompt.

dnksystems
Jun '15

Hi Gabriella3d

The 80micron print wasn’t the Marvin it the other image labelled 80micron print (Marvin was done on our dnk enhanced machine apologies for the confusion) however I found that it was more the process than the machine so these would be the things that I feel made the difference for a fairly clean print abs Marvin.

My thoughts on printing the Marvin with ABS

  • Nozzle size I printed 0.2mm but 0.3 on the mankati would be fine and work just as well.
  • Keep the printing temp low I printed at 230 but each machine will change so test this. too cool will delaminate the part layers.
  • Cool air over the part to assist in bridging, this is ok for small parts but a big no no for large ones or thin walls with ABS. the fan also helps in cooling the layers to give more consistent layer forming and reduce layer spillage.
  • Bed level it really well or if you are too busy just print a raft, this helps compensate for bed levelling issues if you want to just print fast and get it done. this is esp true when printing fine layers.
  • A good base like buildtak helps heaps as well. its also means that the bed temp can be tuned down.
  • I use different slicing applications for different tasks so learn heaps about all sorts of slicing applications you will be paid off in results. for this part I used cura. however im trailing other slicers now and getting slightly better results again. (on my dnk machine that is)
  • Speed: as your printing with low temps with a tighter nozzle print speeds need to come down considerably.
  • infill you need good infill but not 100% as we are cooling the part infill will help heaps with the ABS cooling.

So apologies for any confusions but we have several machines we use. but personally there is no reason why you cant get the Mankati to print to the same levels. We use our mankati heaps.

Regards

Dave

gabriela3d3D Hubs Employees
Jun '15

Thanks so much for the clarification and for taking the time to reply. Would it be ok with you to share these settings in a separate thread 4, i.e. ‘Tips on Printing Marvin on a Mankati with ABS’? The reason I’m asking is that sometimes valuable information tends to get lost in comment threads, while a stand-alone post is by far easier to find. If anything, I can start a new thread 4 on your behalf.

Thanks again for this. Much appreciated!

27 days later