Maybe something you learned the hard way, or something you found out right before making a huge mistake.
E.g., for audiophiles: don’t buy subwoofers from speaker companies, and don’t buy speakers from subwoofer companies.
Maybe something you learned the hard way, or something you found out right before making a huge mistake.
E.g., for audiophiles: don’t buy subwoofers from speaker companies, and don’t buy speakers from subwoofer companies.
Sovol has been generally decent in my experience (SV08), but they’re kinda positioned between the “tinker” and “turnkey” markets. What wall are you running into?
Bambu would have been my recommendation before they tried to lock people into the cloud connection. They’ve reversed course (for now) due to the backlash, but they’ll do it again when they think they can get away with it.
At this point I’d probably say Prusa, but I don’t have firsthand experience with them so that’s based solely on what I’ve read. If you’re looking for something that will “just work” you’re going to need to search for what’s in your price range and then read everything you can about the models in question on support forums and reddit (ew). You can also learn a lot by watching YouTube videos but you have to be really careful to see past the “they gave me this for free/paid for the video so I’m going to minimize the negatives” crap.
Right now I have bunch of settings saved that results in a pretty decent PLA print, but it takes ages. (Layer of .15, print speed 50-100, gyroid infill 15%. Bed 60* nozzle 210). And I tried to print a tube to put coins in and it’s 5 hours. And the threads didn’t come out great.
Overhangs get me usually, but sometime later adhesion if I dare use the ultimate presets like “course”, even if I adjust the temp.
Also I tried updating utlimaker to the latest version, rather than the one it comes with, and then was a disaster that lead me down a rabbit hole to Orca.
Which was another rabbit hole that my partner had to emotionally support me through as the equivalents of “PCLOADLETTER” would trash my prints on a whim. Usually 3/4 of the way through.
I bought this printer to print dust collector fittings and adaptors for power tools (I lead a construction team and I’m pro-safety) and I can usually get a print strong enough for the job, if not pretty.
But I’d like pretty…I’d like to be able to fine tune a print so it’s sexy and strong and also didn’t take 16 hours… Boaty takes 20 minutes and o Looks good every time I print so I just don’t get why something not as complex and the same size takes over an hour and doesn’t come out as clean.
It’s possible that you’re going too slow. It sounds nuts, but I’ve seen degradation of print quality on my homebuilt ANET A8 by going with lower speeds and trying to play around with flow rates.
What I ended up doing with that machine was printing a series of temperature columns, flow rate columns, and speed columns to zero in on the smoothest print. I did all that with my most commonly used PLA and then PETG. I’ve had to make very small tweaks for some variants (for example, matte PLA requires about 4% more flow rate than my baseline).
It’s been years so I don’t remember exactly, but I think I went through three loops of the towers: Find best temp (five degree steps between 180-220C), use that temp to find best flow rate, use those two to test speed. Loop back and do each test again using the best result from the prior two and adjusting each floor of the tower in smaller increments. I think I only had to do temp twice. My profile for that machine and my bulk 3DMARS PLA filament is 208C at 105mm/s and 103% flow rate.
The SV08 that I’ve been using recently is a completely different animal (corexy vs bedslinger). I haven’t had to tweak much at all to get ridiculously fast and good quality prints. I’m actually about to install the enclosure kit and try out ABS for the first time. Since I set up this machine I haven’t even powered on the A8.
Also, have been using Orca exclusively without issue so I can’t really lend advice there.
Good luck!