Transcript:
This is the Cheney Tech X+, a large, very large, fully enclosed 3d printer with the ability to 3d print in PLA. ABS carbon filled nylon from factory bus at over twice the price of larger a three star competitors. Is this the machine for you? Well, let’s get started. The X+ is huge and comes well packaged in a massive cardboard box with tons of foam to protect it in transit. This particular unit was provided by gearbest for purpose of review through their Australian warehouse and arrived actually, within a week with no issues, It’s a well polished design with the majority of components being sheet metal or injection molded plastic to give it this microwave from a spaceship kind of vibe. The X+ is the bigger brother to the X maker, a small but capable 3d printer. I reviewed last year. GT Tech has always been somewhat of an underdog in the 3d printing space, but the company has a pretty solid history for well designed hardware. The ex maker clearly had an educational aimed at kids feel with its gaudy GT education, slicer and color scheme. But there’s no that to see here. This machine looks and feels quite professional in the box. You’ll get quite a lot of stuff, including a starter guide tools, this little bed leveling sheet scraper blade and a few spare parts and nozzles as well as a full 1 kilo spool of PLA to get you started. You also get an entire spare extruder designed for high temperatures and abrasive filaments due to an all-metal design And the use of what I think is a hardened steel nozzle. This bad boy will go to 300 degrees Celsius for all your high temperature printing needs and it should come with every machine shipped currently, but I’m unsure will happen in future, so be sure to check. But at this price point, it should be included Standard now 2 specs. The X+ is the second largest in GD. Tech’s line up with a 270 by 200 by 200 millimeter print volume. It’s not the largest on the market by far, but considering a fact its fully enclosed design and the better supported on two sides with no less than four linear rods and two acme screws. It only moves in the Z-axis. It’s it’s pretty nice. If you need larger, the X Max expands that print volume to 300 by 250 by 300 in the Z, and it appears largely comparable to the X, plus regarding its features. Going back to the print bed. However, high-temperature extruders are pointless if the bed can’t keep hop, but luckily, this thing can, In fact, the removable magnetic plate provided is among the best. I’ve used it’s like a plastic coated spring steel sheet with a rough, textured surface reminiscent of powder coated Pei and it snaps down to ring magnets on the bed with such force. That you really have to watch your fingers. It’s the same design as on the X maker for considering the bed as much larger here. The whole dent force is so much higher. I had no issues with a sustained 110 degree Celsius printing temperature on the bed, though for absolutely monstrous prints, you might want to employ the suggested. Bulldog clips on the corners for cheap insurance against lifting There is no better print service. In my opinion than one you can remove. Once the print is cool and flex prints off and it does this perfectly. They claim on the website. You can use the reverse smooth side for nylon and polycarbonate, but I’m a bit iffy about scuffing both sides up, so I only printed on the textured side. I really think the printer needs to come with. At least one more sheet or at least make purchasing the second sheet possible as they will wear out in time. I kept mine. Clean with methylated spirits and use small amounts of the glue stick provided to make sure things adhered to it. At all. Times, connectivity is through USB Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and the color touchscreen interface is intuitive and fairly responsive. It’s not the best I’ve used. But it’s far from the worst, the built-in routines for filament loading and unloading work well, as does the bed leveling and Z offset options. The bed is manually leveled. It helps assist you, but that’s about it, but it does seem to hold level quite well. Then off set, however, is pretty important as the thick aluminium plate actually expands quite a lot, depending on your printing temperatures, so be sure to adjust it as required. Mine was a good 0.3 0.4 mm meters closer to the nozzle when heated to 110 degrees Celsius compared to the 50 or so degrees for PLA going along with the enclosed design, The machine also has an air purification fan and filter for safer printing. Yes, it has a fan. No, it does nothing to filter a purify. The air, it’s literally just a bit of foam printing, smelly filaments, such as ABS or p om. Yes, I tried horn. That later was still very noticeable in terms of the odor less, so I suppose than an open frame printer, That’s only because it’s got this cute little hat, Keeping the heat and fumes contained for slicing. I stayed within the chilly tech ecosystem and used their own GD slicer. This is actually just Kira, but I have no idea what version because it’s been reskin to with an inch of its life, They’ve actually done a fairly decent job, though to be fair, selecting which machine you have is simple enough and the material presets are accessible for a newbie, but if you want to use more advanced settings, you can toggle their visibility just like regular. Kira, the other advantage of using their slicer is the built-in. Wi-fi, send interface my Cho. 3d printer is set up on the network. You can connect and send g-code to it wirelessly. It actually works great, sends fast and stores on the USB on the machine. Should you want to print the same file again later? Now the small feature. I appreciate is the preview image of each g-code file. If you print as many random things as me, it’s super easy to forget what filename means. What model? So the image here really helps. Alright, let’s get onto some prints. This expanding mechanism was the first model. I printed after they’re really weird. Circle squared test model in their read provided PLA. Now it might just be my incredible 3d modeling skills, but it works perfectly. The parts are super clean. You can see on the underside that texture left by the printing surface. I’m a pretty big fan. Honestly, I like the matte texture. The white on this model is from lithium grease. By the way you can expect to see a deep, deep dive on this and similar mechanisms on the channel in future. This fox alized octopus print does a pretty good job Assessing the machine’s ability to reproduce fine details with nice sharp edges and each voxel, which is a 3d pixel is clear and well-defined. I’m not going to say it’s a challenging print, but the texture is awesome and I just wanted one something. A little more challenging, however, is the famous 3d benches so here it is at 0.16 millimeter layer Heights, which is the fine config default in the slicer. I mean, come on. There is so little to complain about this bench. II, I mean, maybe a few layer inconsistencies at best and is a few tiny Dags, but it’s got decent bridging and the chimney is so sharp. It really is one of the better benches. I’ve ever printed so that was unexpected. So how about clearances well? I was only able to get down to 0.3 millimeter gaps in my clearance and tolerance gauge, but I think it’s like more to do with how poorly the first layer was laid down. I generally print printing place models with a raft. To make sure the first layer is correct, but it might have actually hindered it here rather than help the rafts in Carrara, hiddenness this roller clutch, however, worked perfectly, so it’s certainly possible and with a few slice of tweaks. I reckon I’d get it down. 2.2 millimeter clearances. At least I reckon that’s more than doable. This wind-up boat model is super cool and all the mechanical parts work well together. I put it the hull at this super extreme angle with supports to maximize print ability and surface finish. And while I’m not a fan of how Cura does supports? The print worked really well. I didn’t notice this weird service on the spring, but I’m 99% Sure that’s a slice of setting. So if any of you guys know what’s causing that if it’s like the coast at the end to reduce stringing? I think it might be that. Let me know, but it’s weird, but it’s definitely the slicer, Not the machine itself, finally after a cube lattice at the poor thing, and while it did complete the results less than perfect, but it’s got four cooling ducts, right, well, sort of I discovered that the scroll fan on the side it’s actually only connected to two of them. Yeah, check this out. The vents on the left, literally. Go nowhere why who designed this? I have no words. If cooling was better, then the PLA quality would probably be the best I’ve ever seen co’s hearing the Benzi result, so that’s a massive fail anyway. With that other way, let’s move on to some trickier filaments that don’t really need strong cooling. Pgg will work fine, but make sure it’s dry tgd because this stuff had string for days, but it did still print fine. I recently printed this slider 3d in Orange ABS and the part quality was less than optimal, and in fact, some of them were actually unusable, So I went back and tried a different brand of ABS to see if it was just the filament and yes, the new prints in the new ABS, fantastic really clean, so I guess the orange ABS I used was just crap filament, but if were sign to push the temperatures up, let’s just swap to the big boys extruder as mentioned. This machine comes with a high temperature, extruder capable of 300 degrees Celsius, extrusion temps and a harder nozzle to handle abrasive filaments. The slicer has a few presets already for these materials and the nylon profile worked great in this test of very wet nylon, so I popped open a roll of fresh material and went ahead to print this boat hull and not only is the surface finish amazing for nylon, It’s completely indestructible. As a result, nylon is just an incredible filament when it comes to having to move between extrusion pass. However, there is some somewhat unavoidable stringing and I tried tuning settings as much as possible, but nylon absorbs moisture so quickly, it’s really difficult to keep dry and it’s really difficult to remove these little Dags that occur when you’re printing with it. But if you get a Stanley knife in, they do cut away really easily, and you end up with parts like this, and there’s no denying that these parts are incredibly tough and with a nice, healthy brim. The parts tucked down to the bed, 110 degrees C without any fail, no warping, which was incredibly impressive. So I decided to push my luck here and I tried a roll of P om, which is polyoxymethylene, which is poly Famiglia hide which I’ve never been out of print. Not only does this material have an incredibly high shrinkage ratio, but it also releases nasty formaldehyde gas while printing even at the lower of its printing range. You can still smell it and I just couldn’t get it to work. You need to stick at all was challenging. But then you know, stopping it from. Just glue ting up. Nah, it was just stinking the workshop up, and I hate this filament so to be fair to you. Tech didn’t say you could print it. I thought try anyway at this point. I’ve abandoned the attempt. It’s not a filament. You want to be printing on any hop healing machine? I don’t think so, what do I like about this machine? Well, the removable, flexible print surface rocks. It really should come with a spare. But so far, it’s held up to all my high-temperature abuse for that issue and it’s proving really durable. The Wi-Fi connectivity works well through their own slicer, though there’s nothing stopping you using a nother slicer and the USB stick storage media and I’m really impressed with its capabilities of printing high temperature materials without warping, thanks to its fully enclosed design and hat, though I did take the hole in the back up while putting these difficult materials and I didn’t experience any overheating issues during the process, which is good, The interface is nice and intuitive with small touches like the proper filament retract routine. You know where it extrudes a bit and then retracts, Small touches like that. Make the experience a lot nicer things. I don’t like as much though. We have to talk about the spool holder solutions. You can mount spools externally with this. Ya luggage handle thing with the X maker also had or internally both approaches are really poorly implemented. Honestly, the clips on the external holder have already broken for me. The survivors came off. There’s nothing really guiding the filament off the roll so I can easily derail. If it’s a full spool and the internal spool, holder is a literal nightmare to use the threaded. Nob is wonkey from the factory and the filament path look. I think it’s meant to go up through it like this tube of the back, and then into the hot end. It’s incredible that the filament didn’t bind up the extruder head, taking such a sharp path, But I think I’ll do is replace the short tube with a much longer. Ptfe guide all the way to the head, but I’m unsure if it’ll interfere with the very fragile-looking flex cable that connects the extruder and hotend to the rest of the machine and something really, really weird did happen. I need to address on one print. I tried changing print speeds on the fly and the entire unit locked up and vibrated violently like the steppers. We’re losing steps here. I want to change the speeds, lets. Go in and change my speed there. You go, let’s change it. Back to 100 Change the speed and go. [MUSIC] It ruined the print, and I have no idea what caused it. It was totally repeatable at the time. I filmed it, but after being powered off for a day and restarted, I couldn’t reproduce it so it could have just been a one time glitch related to the g-code. I was printing but worth mentioning regardless, but you can’t just go into the firmware and check things because well. This machine is completely closed. Yeah, Trudi. Tech printers runchy to 3d print controllers, which are 32-bit, which is awesome, but it’s a closed source control board. You can’t do anything to the firmware, except maybe update it, but you’ll have to email them directly to get the firmware update because their website just doesn’t seem to have any. In fact, the websites used to be devoid of any actual firmware for any printers. I know some people won’t care about this. But for many this closed ecosystem is a deal breaker, especially if they’re brazen enough to modify the heck out of Kirra. An open-source project for their slicer. Hmm, anyway, just a small thing as well. I expected there to be a little Wi-Fi camera in here concerning the X maker came with one It doesn’t, which is odd for the price, so that’s a strange oversight. Spool holder and firmware aside, though this machine really is a beast at printing challenging materials. I’ve had some of these carbon filled nylon rolls for ages as I’ve been unable to print them, but a fully enclosed machine really does make the difference, keeping that high ambient temperature required to stop them warping and couple that with a print bed you can take off the end and flex the parts off. You’ve got a pretty attractive machine for printing of functional and use parts, although the X+ can print. Pla quite well. I mean, look at the bench, E! If that’s all you’re looking to 3d print, you’ll find better value elsewhere, but the X+ is currently on flash sale on gearbest for around 850 US, which is a pretty damn good price for a carbon fiber nylon capable machine. At least that’s what. I’ll be using this unit for I big. Thanks to give us for saying this machine across on behalf of cheetah tech for purpose of a review. This machine was provided free of charge. But my opinions are my own and node. Money has changed hands. If you’d like to pick one up, There’s a link in the video description below, and if you are struggling to find the perfect 3d printer, you watching these revision Like what what wishing should I go for? I actually have made a video course called my 3d printing purchasing guide, which helps equip you for the knowledge to make the perfect choice, which you can also find in the video description. So thanks for watching guy’s bye.