Transcript:
Hey, guys, back today with yet. Another unique printer review this time, it’s of the brand new JG maker artist D. Dual Extruder. This printer’s Kickstarter just launched. So make sure you check out the progress link to down below while you watch me Unbox and set this beast up ill. Go over the specs. This printer has a large build volume of 310 millimeters by 310 millimeters by 350 millimeters, which along with its dual extruders makes the build on this printer quite big. The x-axis is held on via a strong linear rail and the z-axis is moved up via two lead screws meaning. The frame on this is very sturdy. The setup is easy because every step and part is labeled with a number to help, and the instructions are pretty clear to understand the thing that sets this printer apart and makes it unique from others. Are those two independent direct drive extruders? I have never actually got to play around with the printer like this before, but I’m excited because this is the way you want to do. Dual extrusion. Every single printer. I have tried that offers. Dual extrusion out of a single nozzle has given me nothing but headaches to the point. I honestly don’t think printers like that. Have any use at all other than just single extrusion printing? The fact each extruder has its own hot end, along with the fact they are both direct drive. Extruder’s rather than Bowden will allow for a lot easier printing while using both of the extruders. I will be sure to show you. Some dissolvable support tests before the end of this video? The printer also has filament runout detection for both extruders has a removable magnetic build plate ribbons connecting all of the wires and has a lot of other cool, unique features. You will see throughout the testing of this video. The early bird special on this printer is going for just 339 dollars, which seems far too low in my opinion, but goes all the way up to the MSRP of 599 depending on how quickly you decide to back the project, you should always be hesitant of Kickstarter projects, but since these guys actually have a finalized product for me to review, this should hopefully be less of a gamble but always proceed with caution when backing something on Kickstarter. Alright, now that the printer is all built and I’ve made sure that the power supply is set to 115 volt living in America. It’s time to turn it on the first thing I notice and honestly, one of the very few negatives that I find on this machine, and that’s the old eprom screen. These screens work just fine and normally offer all of the same features of the newer UI designs, but they just aren’t quite as user friendly as the ones I’ve seen as of recently. This is what I’m used to, so it’s hard to say. If it’s a direct negative, you should just know that the printers coming out have often upgraded this JG maker. Actually, just let me know that they’ve heard this note and they plan on upgrading the screen to be more user friendly, so that’s definitely worth mentioning You may receive a printer with a better screen than I have. The other quick note is that you won’t be able to tell over camera is that the fans are really loud. This boasts a 32-bit Silent Stepper drive chip. So the movements on this printer should be very quiet, but the fans are definitely louder than the average machine. This is another thing that JG maker. Let me know that they will be fixing by the time you receive a unit. They heard mine and other’s complaints on this noisy fan, and they look to fix it. Pretty cool. They’re actually listening to us. Reviewers and our tips, but after those very minor annoyances, I’m starting to really like what I’m seeing. This is a beast of a printer that stood zero chance fitting on my rack, so make sure you have the space designated before purchasing. Not only does it take up a lot of surface area due to a large build volume with two separate hot ends, It also goes quite high due to the fact that both spools are held on top of the machine. Make sure you really follow the instructions since attempting to move or load filament when the printer isn’t parked in the correct position can lead to the hot ends, bumping into each other, which did happen to me a couple of times before figuring out what I was doing wrong. You will also notice that each hot end has its own purge bucket. A great addition to a printer like this. Unfortunately, the right purge bucket is a little too high up on my printer and it caused the right hotend to bump into it and not allow it to move. I had to loosen this screw holding on that purge bucket so that it hung a bit lower and prevented that from happening. The left purge bucket was just fine where it was after fixing this. I never had the issue again. It’s just worth mentioning for any of you out there, setting up your machine when loading the filament you just push it directly into the extruder. At first, I thought there wasn’t even an idler, but this large screw on the side actually works as an idler. I wanted to see what was going on with this extruder so you could see me take it apart here. It seems to be a pretty basic non-geared extruder something similar to what you would have seen on an old Makerbot rep2, though it seems slightly tweaked. The wires also plug into this mini board and allow for that cable usage. I would assume this would make modifications a little difficult. Though luckily, this printer likely won’t need any setting up. Cura was simple to do because of their instruction booklet. I’m happy. This included this since it could be a bit confusing, slicing and setting up for a print with this machine. Without these tips, they tell you exactly what to enter. When choosing a custom FFF printer in Cura, my first print is a standard benchy printed only using a single nozzle, the quality on this first benchy leaves a lot to be desired. But it’s what I expect from a first print without any tweaking. This is when I first noticed that the parts can be a little difficult to get off even when using the removable magnetic build plate. Luckily, it is removable, so you can easily work on removing any difficult part, but PLA definitely sticks better than I would have thought now that that first test is done, it’s time to actually try using these two extruders one great feature that you can accomplish when having different hot ends for each extruder is that you can print two of the same items at the exact same time going. The duplication route has some simple instructions to follow in the booklet but allows you to print two of the same models up to 110 millimeters by 310 millimeters by 350 millimeters at the same exact time. This means that if you try to print a lot of the same model over and over again, this printer can allow you to accomplish it. In half the time this isn’t a feature that I would use often, but I can definitely think of times when I would want it and can imagine situations where a lot of you can get a lot of use out of this as well. These two benches printed right next to each other at the same time and both came out. Good still improvements to settings that can be made, but the printer itself functioned great. The next thing you could do with this Dual Extruder hotend setup is you can print a single model in two different colors. If you’ve watched any of my previous videos on this, though, you will already know that I find this feature pretty useless. I’ve never needed to print something just in two separate colors other than for these review videos, anything requiring specific colors. I just prefer to paint That said there may be some of you out there. That would use this feature, so I give it a go with a dragon print that I also tested on the lot. Max, recently and well. It came out as good as I can hope. Even though I never use this, The fact it came out with zero clogging and more importantly, zero wasted purge towers is a great feature You see, when you use a single nozzle to print multiple colors or materials, you will need to build up a purge tower or purge brims, which are just wasted material and wasted time for each print since this never mixes materials in the same end. The only thing that’s needed is a very, very minor purge that is wiped off as the extruder leaves the purge bucket wasted material on this is essentially zero, while these two tests were great. It’s now time for me to test out my arch nemesis breakaway and dissolvable supports. Before doing that? I wanted to show off a really cool feature on these hot ends. That is very unique to this printer. This button that allows you to easily. Remove the nozzle. You could do this hot with the same precautions like you see me. Doing or at room temperature, allowing for the most easy nozzle removal I’ve ever seen. If you ever have a clog, this little button should make your life a lot more easy. It does seem that the hotend isn’t all metal. Due to the fact, you see this Teflon tube going all the way to the nozzle, so keep that in mind. The nozzle looks clean and unclogged, so I just put it back in and get to poly support testing. Personally, I’m not a huge proponent of breakaway supports. Since I have my PLA parent support settings pretty dialed in. But this does allow you to only use breakaway supports on the support interface. This means you can use pla for the entirety of your print and only use breakaway support materials for the interface from my testing along with poly support. Pet G seems to work well as breakaway supports for PLA. I use poly supports for this test and the first one came out, okay. This is very encouraging. Though, because I’ve had so much issues with dual material printing in the past, there does seem to be a section that the poly support had difficulty as you see, but the rest laid out just as it should. This is my first test without tweaking support settings at all when dealing with different material types, you really need to change the support interface density to around 75 in a grid pattern since this allows for the materials to stick together better. When you deal with different material types, it is a very common occurrence that the two materials Just don’t want to stick together ill. Go over this a bit more when I show you those dissolvable results and this time around, I actually had a decent amount of difficulty, removing this breakaway support. So along with the fact I have my PLA support. Settings dialed in this. Isn’t that useful to me? Let’s get to the dissolvable tests. I will start off now. I haven’t gotten a successful PLA in dissolvable print to succeed before this. And if I have, they’re really small prints, if you watched my mosaic palette dissolvable support video, You will have noticed that I had nothing but failures. It was near impossible for me to get the dissolvable supports to stick to the PLA. Along with the fact I kept having to deal with nozzle clogs. And would you look at this? The very first test I do. That has a difficult sphere inside a cube. The print finished perfectly. I keep it so that The Solvable supports our only support interface and it came out exactly as I’d hoped zero wasted purge material and no need to use the more expensive polydissolve anywhere, but the support interface since polydissolve doesn’t stick perfectly to PLA. This actually just worked as breakaway supports and actually worked a little bit better than the poly supports in that regard. The underside of the sphere still isn’t good looking, but I can’t express how difficult this would have been for me to succeed with a single nozzle dual extrusion printer. I actually just kind of gave up on using dissolvable supports because I didn’t have a printer that could print it successfully. So this really excites me the test. I just did, though doesn’t show off. The benefits of dissolvable supports since that print is actually doable with normal parent support material. So let’s show off a print that is impossible without it. This small gear print requires the support to be dissolvable in order for the print to succeed. Since you can’t just remove it like normal. And with my very first attempt, the print succeeds once again and remember, this is with zero wasted purge material. I then went ahead and started soaking it in warm water. This works far far faster with moving warm material. So if your main part is in a higher temp material than pla, you can actually just throw the part into boiling water to speed this process up. I decided just to move it around every so often. So I left it in for quite a few hours. It’s definitely goopy and requires a bit of rinsing to get it all off, but I mean, it worked Here is a part that would be physically impossible to print without dissolvable supports printed on this JG maker. Perfectly on the first try, I spent likely 30 hours of testing just on the palette attempting to get a single success that this JG maker gave me on the first try. This is a big deal to me and something I’m stoked to do further testing on there are, of course, other printers that have this similar function, having two separate hot ends for each extruder. But I don’t think any of those options come anywhere near the price point of this machine. I’ll now go over my full list of pros and cons, followed by my final thoughts. Let’s start with the pros the price, I mean, this is a Kickstarter, so always proceed with caution, But the flash sale price of 339 dollars for the first 500 units sold is absurdly low so low that I don’t think JG. Maker is gonna actually make a profit on them. The MSRP of 599 makes a lot more sense in my opinion, and I actually still think that’s a good price. The build volume. Well over 300 millimeters cubed mean that you can accomplish almost any 3d printing task that you have the dual direct drive, extruders and hot end setup. This means it’s extremely easy to print two duplicate parts simultaneously print two different colors in the same model or go even further by using dissolvable supports. This dual setup actually worked first. Try each of my dissolvable! Sports came out great easy to build something that anyone can do, especially since the instructions were pretty well laid out. It has two filament run out sensors that are actually placed in a section of the printer that makes them both useful. Usually I don’t use these sensors because they cause feeding filament difficulty, but not with this printer, a very strong frame, along with the linear rail for the x-axis. The purge buckets are a great addition to make sure there’s no stringy material left on the print. When swapping extruders, there is a strong magnetic removable build plate, A silent stepper driver means the motor movements are a lot quieter than printers of the past, and finally there is a great and simple way to remove the nozzle and swap or clean out any clogs and now for the cons. The eeprom is an old style screen setup. There isn’t really anything limiting on this. It’s just not quite as user friendly as the new screens. I see keep in mind that JG maker. Let me know they plan on improving this. By the time you receive your printer. The fans are very loud while the motor movements are quiet, the same can’t be said for the fans while the printer is just sitting idle. This is another thing that JJ maker. Let me know they are planning on fixing the hot end. Doesn’t seem to be all metal, meaning it will be difficult or even impossible to print. At temperatures 250 degrees Celsius and higher, the extruders don’t have any gear ratio or dual drive, while the build volume is great. The overall size of this printer is massive and very heavy. You likely can’t. Put this printer in a standard rack. It seems it may be a bit difficult to do upgrades or tweaks. It isn’t the fastest printer I’ve used when it comes to heating, though it’ll definitely work the right purge bucket on my machine needed, tweaking in order to allow the extruder to actually move. I noticed some odd things where one of the extruder wasn’t printing at the set temperature and was actually about 5 degrees less. And I’m not exactly sure what caused it. And well, that’s all I can think of. Let’s put it this way. If you can actually get this printer at 339 dollars, you can ignore every single one of those cons. Since I can’t expect a printer to have all of these features for that price, remember that this is actually about the same price as the original CR-10, which doesn’t have any of the features that this printer is offers. They estimate shipping to be November 2020 which honestly is a great turnaround time for Kickstarter. Just remember that there have been failed, Kickstarter 3d printers in the past, where people lost their money. I’m assuming this won’t be the case with JG maker considering. I already have a really good working unit before the Kickstarter has even been launched. But it’s something I always say to be cautious with, but if they do ship in November, and you get this for 339 dollars. I think you got a wonderful deal. I’m thinking of making a full dissolvable support tutorial video over the next couple of weeks since this actually worked so well, so stay tuned for that. Let me know what you guys think. In the comments down below, I’m interested to see what you think of this unique machine. Thank you all for watching, and I will see you soon with further reviews, tutorials and fun prints. Stay safe out there. Are you new to 3d printing or would like to get some more information? The brand new 2020 edition of my book 3d printing failures is now available on Amazon. This 2020 edition has had every chapter rewritten and updated and there are even six brand new chapters. One of these chapters is a detailed explanation of material science and 3d printing by Nicholas Tokotou, a polymaker, which I think makes this book worth it on its own check out now linked in the description down below.