I will disagree with this being a bottom of the barrel knock off. This printer is the best for its price you can get. Mine prints just as good or better than a maker not and I have used a maker it before. Needless to say I did some mods that make the printer substantially better but it was all printed with the same printer so to me that is a win win. I printed a better extruded block, y pillow block, glass bed, filament guide and sailfish no nozzle calibration with s3d. With those mods I can set it and forget it with confidence that it will print. So again, this is. Great printer that just needs minor mods that you can print yourself and make it better it just as good as a maker bot. At the end of the day calibration and tuning for every model is essential for good prints. The more you print the more you know what works and what does not. Also according to how the models print you can tell what needs to be tuned to make the model better. This comes with experience though. We are all happy to help and I think you made a good choice in printer.
Hi Eduardo, when I search that it comes up with a small round model … And instructions for prof tweaks.
nowhere on the page is it clear what you actually need to do, what do you do? Print the model? In the link? Measure what? It doesn’t make any sense to me, the chap who made the model in the link said he followed the instructions, what instructions is he on about. I really don’t understand. And I can’t seem to find percentage multipliers in prof tweaks either!
OK, lets all just take a step back and get to be friends again. CTC is an copy of an open source design, they took from flashforge. CTC as a company does not have the best reputation, in my opinion ( i don’t want to be threatened by another employee of CTC with litigation ). If you look at the 3dhubs results, from past years, you will see people being very happy with the output of the printer but lacking quality control from the factory. My printer came from the factory with un-insulated wiring to the heater cores, blowing up my motherboard. As to being the bottom of the barrel in the rep 1 clone world, well there is the monoprice version that has no heated bed, but this printer has not kept up with the advances of either flashforge or Wanhao. The current crop of clones now come with all metal Z stages, improved filament pusher drives, more durable 4x2 ptfe liners, not to mention mighty-boards equipped with 2560 processor, led drivers, extra cooling fan mosfet installed. You even said yourself that you had to do all these “mods” to get it to work. With all that being said, its a fine printer that once you really get to know it, and how it works you will be very happy with it. After owning mine for about 2 years it is the plug and play machine that I anticipated buying, but it was definitely a frustrating journey.
What are you slicing with? makerbot has become more and more hostile to the clones and burying settings deep inside makerware. I don’t personally use it, I use S3d, so I can give you and advice there. I have read reports of needed up open python eggs and recompile them to change some things. If you would like a copy of makerware 2.4, the last version to contain an update pertinent to our machines email me at adamcooksatgmaildotcom and I will send you a link, its a free dropbox account so i wont post that link publicly.
This is essentially the 3d printing bible. Please follow the calibration steps there. the 20mm 100% infill cube is the proper way to calibrate these machines.
A good rule of thumb for setting filament temps, hotter prints will come glossy, cooler prints will be matte. for high detail PLA printing you will want less of a sheen then appears in your pictures.
