Transcript:
The Tevo Tarantula Dual was my first multi material printer that I owned so far. I got some really nice looking. Multi color prints and dissolvable support structure models out of it and was quite shocked by some things, especially one horrible safety issue. Stick around for the review and an introduction to multi nozzle 3D printing I’m Stefan and welcome to CNC Kitchen. Gearbest sent me This printer a couple of months ago for a review free of charge, but all the opinions I will express in this video are my own. The printer comes at a price of currently around $350 and is delivered as a kit which we assembled on a live stream a while back. It took us a good 5 hours to get it printing, so definitely way more work than other, almost ready to print units. On first glance, the delivered manual looks very professional and is very usable for the first two pages. Then often, the images don’’t match up with the text and everything gets a little confusing. There are a couple of detailed assembly videos on Youtube. You can use as a reference if you are stuck somewhere. Mine came with the Big Printbed That is advertised with a print volume 200x280x200mm but I was only able to somehow use 250mm in the Y-direction. You also need to consider that the dual head will cost you around 20mm of print space in the X-direction if you only print with one nozzle and almost 40mm when you use dual extrusion. The heated bed has a buildTak like printing surface applied to it on which the prints stick very well, actually, even too good on some occations. The frame is made from V-slot aluminum extrusions on which also the rollers are running on. Unfortunately, they didn’’t use proper connectors, which makes the frame quite wobbly. If you are not using additional reinforcement, I also spent quite some time to get all of the axes square. For the rest of the construction, lots of laser cut acrylic parts have been used which work but often are just not sturdy enough and might require replacing some with 3D printed parts. The good thing is that the Tevo Tarantula has a huge community, which have already created fixes for probably most of the issues that the printer comes with. The wiring is a huge mess, and there is probably a reason why they don’’t show any of the cables in their promo pictures. They just haven’’t put any thought in how to properly route the wires on this machine. So you have to figure something out on your own. Now comes the biggest flaw in my opinion, and this is why I can’’t recommend this printer to anyone who doesn’’t want to fiddle around with mains voltage. The PSU comes without any wires attached, so you have to connect mains wiring and also the 12V to your machine on your own. This is one thing that can lead to fatal accidents and there is no enclosure or protection on the power supply, besides a small plastic flap that prevents you from touching mains and electrocuting yourself. This is in my opinion. A no-go these days. So if you still get one of these machines, be sure what you are doing and protect the screw terminals in some way to make it less dangerous. So everything I told you so far is totally similar to the $250 single extruder Tevo Tarantula, Then. What are you getting for the additional $100 dollars that the Dual Extruder model costs more? So, as the name suggests, this model has an E3D Chimera style hotend, where two separate nozzles are mounted next to each other. An additional Bowden Tube and feeder motor allows you create 3D prints with either two colors or even two separate materials like soluble. Pva supports or even crazy combinations like nylon and PLA. The package came with 3 different types of feeders: two normal ones, two so called flex extruders and one E3D titan clone Extruder. I used the Titan Extruder for the first nozzle and a normal feeder for the second one. Other than suggested I mounted the feeders on the top of the frame, which allowed me to shorten the Bowden tubes by around 1/3 for better retraction performance and makes feeding the materials way easier. The printer doesn’’t come with any spool holders, so I directly printed from my filament wall mount or out of my dry box. Since the standard electronics board, the Tarantulas come with is already prepared for a second extruder, the electronics of the single and dual extruder version. Stay completely the same. I checked the prices for a Knock-off Chimera hotend and a knock-off titan extruder on Aliextpress and you would probably be able to source the upgrade parts for around $50 or spend a little more and buy genuine E3D parts directly from their shop. This means that you are paying quite a high premium for the dual nozzle version and need to decide on your own. If you want to buy the bundle or if you buy a normal Tarantula and source the upgrade parts on your own. Before I get into details on how I set up dual extrusion. And how the prints look another thing that I just can’’t, get into my head. Why doesn’t this printer? Come with a part cooling fan Sorry. I don’’t get it. This thing is basically unusable for PLA in stock configuration. It would only require a cheap printed fan, shroud and fan to have a perfectly working printer, but no there isn’t any included even in the $100 dual Extrusion upgrade. Since there, weren’t any fan shrouds for the dual nozzle Tarantula available, I used Fusion 360 to create a simple one that can be easily used for the upgraded version. Since I anyway had to upgrade the firmware due to the higher amount of steps per mm that are needed for the Titan Extruder. I directly went for the latest version of Marlin. That is currently available. Jimbrown provides a very good pre-configured version on his Github. I can highly recommend. Totally easy to flash, and this doesn’’t only give you the latest safety functions but also gives you features like linear advance 1.5 that makes fast prints look really nice and also reduces the required retractions, at least on my machine to only around 3mm. Using dual extrusion with the chimera, hotend is not the most simple thing, and if you are mostly printing with a single nozzle can even cause print quality issues because the idle nozzle can rub over the already printed surface and leave marks on the perimeter. In order to set it up, there are two things you need to make sure: First. The nozzles need to be on the same height. Make sure that your bed is level home the z-axis and drop the hot nozzles on the printbed by simply undoing. The grub screws on the side. Make sure the nozzles were clean before you did that. And if you purchase a knock-off chimera for another project, make sure that the screws are on the side and not on the back to even make this process possible. Tighten the screws again and you are done with this step. Next, the distance between the two nozzles needs to be calibrated that the printed parts of a multi material model perfectly match up. In your slicer, An initial offset can be set by simply measuring the distance with a ruler. In order to perform the fine tuning, a pattern with lines is printed with the two different nozzles. Each pair of lines is an additional 50 microns offset. By checking which one’s line up you can adjust the nozzle offset in x and y to get perfect print results. I started using Simplify3D for my first dual extrusion tests, but wasn’’t really happy with the print results. I got because some settings were missing in my opinion. Since the Ultimaker 3 is on the market, CURA got some really awesome, Multi nozzle printing features, so I tried out the version 3.2.1. There isn’’t a profile available for the Tevo Tarantula Dual, so I just chose another multi nozzle printer in the list and then just changed some minor print settings. Cura has some pretty neat functions like decreasing the temperature of the hotend that is idle to reduce oozing. I tweaked the settings a little and my multi color prints came out very nice. Even though, using prime towers and a ooze shield didn’’t get totally rid of material oozing out of the unused nozzle. But all in all, I was pretty impressed. Not only does dual extrusion work quite well. Even the general print quality was very impressive. Only the z-banding from the wobbly single motor z-axi’s bothered me a bit. The 3D Benchy looked nice and also the multi-color. Steamboat came out very pretty. At some point, I added a piece of mirror on the print platform to get it more level, but this caused the whole print bed, shaking loose overnight when I tried to print my first multi color, hairy lion. But still, the quality of the beheaded lion was very nice in the end. Taking a close look at the bed carrier showed that the acrylic construction is just way too flimsy and even though you can get replacement beds. I’’ll be optimizing one for minimum weight and then use my new CNC router to make one out of aluminum. Besides multi color prints, the Taratula Dual also handles soluable supports very well. I have been using AprintaPro’’s PVA-M for a couple of models, and the results looked very nice. For the Soluable support settings, I just copied the ones from the Ultimaker 3 because these do work very well. Let’’s get to a conclusion. So unfortunately, the frame of the printer is not the most sturdy wiring wasn’’t really thought through and things like a missing part. Cooling fan are just stupid. The PSU is horribly dangerous and you are paying quite a premium for the second nozzle. This is not a printer that will nicely work out of the box and will require some modifications. Still, after You’’ve been fixing the major bugs with the help of the huge community, the printer is able to produce really nice print results. After calibrating the dual nozzles, I didn’’t have any issues, printing, lots of different mutli-color and multi-material models. Soluable support structures really opens you up the possibility to finally print almost anything because even supported surfaces end up with a perfect finish after you remove the PVA. So should you buy this printer? I’’m a little torn. Because the power supply should actually be a no-go criterion, but if want to risk it and are prepared to spend some time on upgrades then. It’’s not a bad deal. Please share your thoughts and questions on this printer and multi nozzle printing in general in the comments and don’’t forget to leave a like. You can find links to the models and the print profiles down in the description. If you want to buy one of these printers and support the channel, then take a look at the links also down in the description. If you want to support the creation of these videos, then consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks for watching auf wiedersehen and I’’ll See you in the next one.