Transcript:
Hello, Youtube and welcome to your first geek trip today. We’ll be strolling down the 3d printer lane, with my review of the monoprice maker select an inexpensive 3d printer with tons of features. But is it too good to be true? Take the trip with me trip and find out. So I’m sure most of you have heard of or seen a 3d printer by now, but for those who haven’t 3d printing is an additive manufacturing process. The maker select is part of the most popular and cost-effective 3d printers known as F F F or F DM, which basically means it melts plastic and layers it on top of each other to make a 3d printed object. What’s really cool is that you can think an open-source community known as the Reprap Community for bringing these really Low-cost 3d printers to the market because before that, it was really only aimed towards business because the pricing was up there. You know, fifty hundred thousand dollar machine. It was because of the Reprap community that you can now buy a consumer much much lower cost 3d printer nicely enough. The maker select is actually based off of one of these printers known as the perusal. I three so one to the maker select itself. The design is pretty much a reskin of the way. And how duplicator I three. The maker select comes preassembled and is constructed out of steel as opposed to the much weaker and prone to warping acrylic of other entry-level. I threes. The select also comes with a decent build volume of roughly eight inches by eight inches by 7 inches or 200 by 200 by 180 millimeters for our metric friends. It also includes a heated build platform to lower warping on high temperature plastics and all of this is for assemble three hundred and fifty dollars with free shipping in the US. I know what you’re thinking. This thing sucks for three hundred and fifty bucks, huh? Well rhyming aside, not necessarily with price in mind. It really is quite an impressive Reiner. It isn’t going to print perfectly right out-of-the-box. You definitely need to do quite a bit of tinkering to get the build platform. Just right, you’re going to have to do it more than once every few prints and thanks to the screws. You’ve got to hold the top while turning the nut or the whole screw turns with it doing nothing in the process, but once you’ve done that if you’re printing in PLA, the prints are going to come out excellent with that, said, I interjected the whole If printing and PLA part for unfortunately, there were two things I had to do to get it working with higher temperature plastics like PE tea. For starters, I had to switch out the hot in because the original MK 10 with the PTFE tubing couldn’t go past 230 degrees Celsius. Luckily, there’s a very simple, upgraded hot end by micro Swiss that makes your MK 10 all-metal for higher temperatures, a link to that in the description below. Sadly, that wasn’t the only problem with high temperature prints after replacing the hot end and beginning a print with PE T. I found parts of the layers not sticking properly, so there’d be tons of streams randomly curling up to top it off blobs would periodically get dispensed in the print, which just made no sense to me. I tried asking around, but I couldn’t find much. I eventually chalked it up to PE T being difficult to print, but one day it hit me. I remembered seeing the LCD display the temperature fluctuating quite a bit during one of the prints, it would shoot up around 10 degrees in a split second and right back down the next. I didn’t think much of it. At the time because fluctuations can’t occur, but it’s usually only a degree or two. Either way it all made sense. During my realisation at times, the extruder was getting too low of a temperature because it thought it was much higher. This led to extruding material to cold, so it would do one of two things, either not fuse well to the lower layer or not allow any to extrude for a few seconds until the temperature went back up and caused the ball of materials to come out so now. I knew my cause, but what was the answer? I quickly found this to be a pretty big issue for many after calibrating the pit. I realized it wasn’t that so after further looking well pages later on the same thread, that is that it was actually the grounding of the extruder from the board. They suggested two different locations to solder new points to the power’s ground. I eventually got it open into the first suggestion of soldering the extruder to the negative power line as seen here and to my surprise. It greatly dropped the influx from ten degrees to about five. I was told the second solder would lower it even more, but I wanted to try with the smaller in flux before messing with the board any more and it worked. It was a small enough difference and it moved back and forth much quicker. The influx of five four. It was about four degrees. It moved much quicker up and down up and down up and down, so it corrected the temperature fast enough that it didn’t lower the temp too far. It was printing beautifully another gripe. I have is with the board itself. I fully understand. This particular board was used to cut costs, But please be aware that without switching the board out, you’re not going to be making many upgrades. The board is called a Mitsu board and it’s really just made to give you exactly what you need and not much more, so maybe all of that was along when this printer can print with some of the best of them, but don’t expect plug-and-play in this price range. It just isn’t going to happen. Buy it for $350 This is definitely an excellent option that most of you should certainly look at.