This thing just released sometime last week to little or zero fanfare and honestly looks like a Bambu killer to me. It’s priced under anything that Bambu offers in the class with way better specs.
I had a Kobra Neo for like 4 years? And it drove me bonkers. It was somehow MORE jank than the random kit I got off aliexpress like a decade ago and I constantly had to retighten/tension everything and it somehow burned through three different nozzles.
On the one hand? Enclosures and core xy solve like 90% of the problems 3d printers have by controlling environment and minimizing stress on the parts. On the other hand? You need quality parts and construction to begin with
And if you are spending that much on a printer+multiple material system (that I will always argue home users don’t need and are just buying to subsidize it for print farms)? Check out the Qidi Q2. Even cheaper and it is telling that the vast majority of complaints about the Qidis are just “the exterior case is plastic and feels cheap”. Which is a death sentence for youtubers who can’t run a tool for a thousand hours during the one week review window but is also a hallmark of ACTUAL prosumer devices. Why use expensive aluminum for a part that has no functionality?
Bambu has completely corrupted the space of YouTubers.
But these poopy filament switchers will be quickly surpassed by multiple toolhead printers. Too much waste.
I’m waiting to see what the Voron option will look like for the Bondtech INDX toolchanger before making a final decision, but I’m building a Voron 2.4R2 with the goal of converting it later on. Filament multiplexing is a nice option, but far more wasteful than I can stand
If you have more than one toolhead you’re not limited to just ramming different colors of the same material in there, either. You can run otherwise incompatible filaments that even require different temperatures from each other in the same print. Plus the ram-cut-and-purge brigade rarely work well with soft materials like TPU.
Multiple toolheads is the way to go if you actually want to get work done and not just slowly poop out multicolored low poly Pikachus, or whatever.
After having had an Anycubic printer, I would be extremely hesitant to buy one based on the quality of the one I have.
Which one? I have an i3 mega s (I think that’s the name) and it’s pretty basic and slow, but built relatively well. After however many hours of printing some of the bearings have failed, but they were easy and cheap to replace.
Kobra neo, a cheap printer to begin with. The y axis rail is extruded aluminum. Where they drilled the holes in the middle to attach it to the frame it pushed the aluminum out by a few thousands. Adjusting the carriage is either really tight in the middle of the rail or loose on the ends. The bed was also bent when I got it (common issue). I bent it back and added bed adjusters because otherwise the auto need leveling just couldn’t compensate. It broke a y belt (common issue). It still has issues printing. I cannot get it to print petg at all even though the same roll of filament will work fine on another printer. All in all I wish I never bought the thing due to their poor quality control. It still prints PLA good enough so I keep it around because I wouldn’t get anything if I try to sell it.
These are preorders. They don’t ship till April i believe. They send a voucher offer a couple weeks ago. I have 1 ordered. Fingers crossed they are decent.
