Transcript:
Hi, my name is. AJ. And today we’re gonna be doing an extensive review of the Kitty Tech X Pro 3d printer. I’m gonna go ahead and get everything unboxed here and we’ll jump right into it. Alright, so here’s everything that comes with this 3d printer. Just start us off. We have two rolls of PLA filament. These are our 1.75 millimeter in diameter and 1 kilogram Mckee apiece. This is really nice because you can get started to printing right off. The bat, with this filament comes with two spool holders. These screw into the back and hold these guys on a turbo fan baffle with the accompanying screws, an ethernet cable power cable, the two acrylic panels for the size of this printer. The acrylic top 2 filament guide tubes, another flexible magnetic bill plate well. Get back to this in a minute. This is really neat, a special piece of paper for leveling the bed. One of the best guides. I’ve ever seen for setting up a 3d printer. This is a full-color guide with arrows and red and circled items showing you exactly how to set up this printer, but we don’t need this. This is what I’m here for. Lastly, we have this really cool tool kit. That has all the tools that you need to set up this 3d printer inside this tool kit. It comes with a 16 gigabyte thumb, drive, a putty knife, a couple odds and ends in this box. It looks like we have two extra extruder nozzles, some fuses, couple tools and a flathead here. We are going to now move on to setting up this 3d printer. The first thing you want to do? This printer is cut off all the zip ties that hold on the carriage. Now they lower this build plate onto this piece of foam for protection, but what we’re not going to do is come in here and just pull this plate up and pull out this foam. Go ahead and plug your printer on. We’re gonna turn the printer on, and we’re going to move this bed up off of that foam and remove it, so start the printer and then we’re going to go into tools. Go to manual and then start raising the Z. All right now we can remove this film and look at that. It also comes with a glue stick as I mentioned before. This printer comes with tools for assembling this. But as you know, these things aren’t really awesome. So I’m going to be using my eye fixer driver to some bliss printer. The first thing is to get this dual extruder and unscrew the two screws that are already in these holes. There are 2.5 millimeters and they come out really easily. Now we’re going to orient the dual nozzles with the fans forward and we’re just going to drop it into the carriage. Now we’re going to go up from the bottom, and we’re going to put these screws back in. This might be a little tricky to find the holes, but you’ll get it. Let’s install the turbofan baffle to do this. We begin by loosening the screws on the turbofan once the screws have been loosened. You can take the baffle, push it through the railing, twist it around and then we’re going to clip it into the turbo fan. Once it’s been clicked into the turbo fan. Push the baffle up against the plastic until it clicks in place. And then we can go ahead and screw the turbo fan back on now. We need to put in one of those little screws. That was shown earlier into the bottom of the Turbo fan baffle. Alright, that’s installed. We can move on to the next step, walking around to the back of the printer and we can now install the filament for the left filament role. You want the filament to be unwinding this way? Simply place the spool holder through the center of the filament and screw it in the hole on the back of the printer. You can see our filament is coming out this way for the opposing filament roll, make sure that the filament comes out the opposite direction. We can now install the filament tubes by sliding it down through the little holders to about one inch past the last clip and push the clips. Close these clips going to be a little bit difficult as they use zip ties to hold on these clips, so the zip ties kind of get in the way. But you can just use your fingernail to push them out and you should be good. Take your filament and actually, this is a great example. See how bad this filament is? We want a nice filament. It’s not bent, so I’m gonna unreal us a little bit until it is nice, straight, smooth, cut that off and I’m gonna feed it up through the tube until it comes out. The other end. Repeat the process on the other side, with both the filament reels installed on the back of the printer, and the feed tubes installed with filament running through them. It is now time to load the filament into the extruder to do this. We first need to plug the printer on apply power and hop into the menu before we feed the filament into the extruders. We need them warmed up first to do that. Go into tools, preheating and turn on the left and right extruders we’re going to wait for those to get up to 10 now that our nozzles have been primed, we can begin to load the filament in. There are two little levers on either side that allow you to press a filament into the extruder, however, don’t just press these levers down what you’re gonna do? Is you’re going to stress the entire system? If you do that, place your hand under the printhead and then press into your own hands, be careful of the nozzles because they are extremely hot and will burn you. Now we can press the lever down and begin to feed our filament into the hole, simply feed the filament into the hole with the lever pressed and keep pressing until it reaches the extruder once it is in the extruder, you can take the feed tube and press it in the same hole. Now that we have film that loaded into our preheated extruders, we can go into tools filament and press the down arrow on one of the extruders to begin extruding material extreme for about five seconds into you see, a nice, constant flow of filament You can stop and then start on the other side. Take note when you press on the extrude filament it will continue to extrude film it until you press the stop button to finish the installation of this printer. We just need to pop on these acrylic panels. They’ve got these handy-dandy little magnetic tabs, which will snap into place on the printer. I’m gonna press the home button to home all the axes and make sure that all the end stops are properly working. [MUSIC] Awesome. Before we level our printbed, we want to clean off the nozzle and get any PLA. That might be stuck on there. Sometimes it’s as easy as pulling it off, but make sure that you don’t burn your hands on the hot tip on your printer. Go to tools leveling and then click the start arrow. Now that the printer is in the proper position. Take your leveling paper and slide it under the nozzle as you can notice here. I can’t even get my paper into the nozzle. So what I’m gonna do is I’m going to turn the knob clockwise to lower the bed until I can slide the paper under you. Want it to have very slight resistance as you pull it and push it now that I’m comfortable with that side, I’m gonna hit next on leveling wizard. The 3d printer will move the head to the opposite side of the bed and we’re going to repeat this process once. I’ve leveled the right side. I’m going to hit! Next is going to take it all the way to the back, and we’re gonna level the back. Once you’ve finished with all three corners, you can hit next on your leveling wizard, and you are ready to 3d print. Let’s talk about the features of this. Kitty Tech X Pro. I figured we do this kind of like a pro con style, so let’s start with the pros. Firstly, it let’s talk about the cons of this printer. Let’s go over the pros and the features of this 3d printer. It is an FDA machine as you can tell, and it’s built out of some pretty solid aluminum. It’s decently heavy, but it has these nice carrying handles, which make it really easy for transport. These rubber feet on the bottom, allow air flow to come in under the printer and cool electronics and the power supply that is mounted underneath the printer for mounting filament. It has two spool holders that screw into the back of the printer. This printer has a female. USB port and an Ethernet port on the right side of the printer. This allows you to print directly from a USB thumb drive as opposed to the traditional SD card. This printer features a 4.3 inch resistive touchscreen navigation is fairly easy and the graphics are quite nice moving to the inside of the printer. It features a 230 by 150 by 150 millimeter print area. The build plate is quite special. It is magnetic and is also spring still with a surface similar to bill tack on it, There is an LED strip on the top of this printer, which adds for some nice lighting effect all. The wires are within cable chain or within wire sheathing, so there are no stray wires hanging around. This looks like a truly professional product. The print bed of this printer is heated and it has a maximum temperature of 110 degrees. Celsius there is a single Z screw with two slider rods, which support this bed very well. There is little to no slop and that goes for the XY carriers as well. There are a large knobs on the bottom of the build plate that help you level and are easy to turn. This printer has a bed leveling wizard, which lets you easily level the bed. However, there is no z height sensor. This printer features dual direct drive. Extruders each has its own fan and heatsink. They are also calibrated straight from the factory. So you don’t have to worry about calibrating the height of each printhead. The nozzles have a diameter of zero point four millimeters, and they have a Teflon tube that extends up into the assembly to help with the easy feeding of filament. The extruders can reach a maximum temperature of 240 degrees C. This printer can print PLA ptg TPU and ABS with no problems. The really cool turbo fan design on this printer cools the part from all angles. The z-axis has a precision of zero point zero zero to 5 microns and the layer height ranges from 0.05 millimeters to zero point four millimeters printing speeds on this printer range from thirty millimeters per second to a hundred and fifty millimeters per second. This 3d printer comes with its own slicing software, which offers you full control over almost every parameter you can possibly think of. It also works with your favorite slicers such as simplify 3d and to end our list of features for this printer it has. Wi-fi support. So you can print over Wi-fi also? If you want to buy some more build plates or you mess up a nozzle, you can go visit the kitty. Amazon store and buy replacement parts for this printer. Let’s talk about some of the cons of this printer. Unfortunately, there are a few and I need to cover them. In order to give this a fair review as I mentioned previously, the filament holders on the back were great for a filament that the printer comes with. However, If you’re buying filament like I do from MG chemicals, you’re out of luck. Because the spool holders are too large to fit through this hole that can be solved with 3d printing on here, some new filament holders. I’ll probably upload some filament holders for you guys. Just in case you don’t want to waste the time designing any the touch screen on this printer is resistive, not capacitive, so you have to apply a little bit of weight for it to register your touches, changing the values of the hot end and the heated bed or the fan or the print speed can be a little bit cumbersome. When you select something, it doesn’t highlight the entire filled. It just starts adding numbers to what’s already there. So if you say you want to change from 195 C to 205 C, you have to delete everything and then type in 205 you can’t just tap on the thing to change the setting and type in 205 prop security on the main construction of this 3d printer. However, the front panel is a little bit weak. It’s made out of plastic that doesn’t really matter, but what does matter is that the back of the? LCD screen has exposed electronics to the printbed. What if you’re printing with conductor 3d filament or if you happen to leave your spackle tool inside there? I’ve not done that while they’re acrylic panels that come with the 3d printer are easy for installation with these magnets on it. It doesn’t sit flush, and sometimes if you’re working around the printer, a Simple Touch on them will knock them off, so they could have done a little bit better job of recessing that into the printer so that it holds a little bit better. Another gripe that I have about this printer Is that the filament tubes don’t. Stay very well in the holes. I’ve had them come out several times on me before while printing. If you’re printing objects that are only one to two layers high. Be a little bit careful with this build plate because sometimes that PLA or ptg can literally get infused with whatever coatings on here and the only way that I’ve been able to get it off was with the razor blade, but if you use a razor blade, you can accidentally cut off the material on here, so just be careful of that. I know you’re not supposed to use a razor blade on this kind of stuff, but like I said. If you print one or two layer lines, sometimes they’ll get like molded into whatever this material is, so just be careful. While the software that comes with, this printer does a great job of slicing objects, and it offers you a large range of capabilities and parameters that you can change moving objects on the bed can get a little bit difficult. They give you these circles that you have to drag, and you can’t always get them at the right angle that you want. It could definitely be better. Also, an interesting thing about the software is that it freezes up comm ports. So say, you have two printers and one you’re printing via USB, or you’re trying to program an Arduino or something? If you have the kitty tech software open, it occupy those comm ports in such a way that it will disallow you to use them in other software that software will not allow me to print over USB to another printer or upload code tomorrow. Do we know which is a huge problem? Because when I can’t upload code to my Arduino, I get grouchy now. My last complaint about this printer is how loud the power supply is the fan that cools it is pretty loud and compared to other 3d printer power supplies. It could definitely be quieter. Now that we’ve gotten through the pros and the cons of this printer, Let’s actually print some stuff on it and see how well, it prints, and this is all gonna be with stock settings in the X Pro. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna load up a few torture test models for this printer. I’m gonna slice them with the kitty tech software. I’m not gonna change anything. Put this printer to work and see how well it handles those all right now. It is time for my favorite part of this video where we are gonna torture. Test This Kitty Tech. X Pro see what it can handle. I’ve got here a two-pound steel pipe. I’ve got some power tools a shovel. I figured let’s just jump right into lets. See how it handles the circular saw. What are you doing? What, dude, that’s not what he meant by torture test. You just want to see how well it prayin. Come on, man, like this, man. I was really looking forward to this. He said torture test the printer. This is a borrowed printer, man. You can’t report this thing. I know I said earlier. I was going to try to do some torture test with stock settings, however, that failed epically as you can see here. The stock settings just weren’t gonna cut it for these cubes, So I went ahead and printed the file That was included on the flash drive. It is just a long rectangle, and it came out really nicely. There layer lines were really put together. There was only one little string here at the back. It snapped right off the board like I was expecting. Then I tweaked the settings a little bit more, and I printed a Groot head, and this came out amazing. I printed this at 0.1 millimeter layer height and just a detail of the group bus is just amazing. I was very impressed. With this printer, there was no support structure printed on model. So you can see a little bit of fuzziness going on under his chin. But you know, everyone hates that peach fuzz. So here is the lattice that I wanted to printing it didn’t. Come out, amazing! I did tweak a lot of settings, but it was just I never did get it to the point where I really really liked it. And then I printed a two-color frog, which was really, really cool. I did have to do a lot of settings. Tweak egde to get this to go through. But the end result was phenomenal. I was really happy with the way that the dual nozzles was printing on the same object. I mean, just look at the Frog. It’s super cool You can see. I’m having some issues with stringing there, but that can be solved. The Katy tech software has some settings to help you eliminate stringing that I haven’t quite gotten to, and then here are just some dual color lattices that I tried printing out These settings. Were the same as the Frog. So you can see. We still have that stringing issue and then the red! I know I printed it a little bit too. High of a temperature on accident. I just didn’t want spend too much time trying to get this right. It does take a while. You will be spending a lot of time in the software trying to tweak everything. Just right to get prints like these to print nicely. This is a very difficult print for a printer as you can see. We’ve got very small objects that are printed at wicked angles with no support, so it just makes it a little difficult for that printer overall. I was very impressed with the print quality of this printer. The layer lines look phenomenal. The surface finish was great. There was no boogers or anything like that going on the outside. I know I’ve been talking for a long time, so let’s go ahead and get this video wrapped up. I want to give a huge shout out to my friends who helped me make this video possible from Julia for lending me a high definition camera to my friend Mac, who hooked me up with some microphones with some lighting to my friend. Alan’s let me steal his 3d printer for a couple days, so I can make a review on it anyways. I hope this is the first video in a longer series to come on my channel. I will see you back here for the next review.