As impressive a feat as doing a print while reviewing the printer is, when should the quietness of a 3D printer matter in your decision to buy it? You’re not supposed to be near open frame 3D printers when their printing anyways, right? Well, if you’re a young person in a small apartment where your choices 3D print and are risk the unknown with nozzle fumes or don’t 3D print, then some people are going to choose to 3D print, and in that case it might be nice to have 3D printer that doesn’t interfere with your zoom calls.
I’ll be honest, this printer earned it’s somewhat pretentious moniker. After all, this is all I really want when reviewing a 3D printer. Open it up, test it, not have any major issues with, and then pass on to a friend to maybe revisit in March Madmess. Thank you Artillery for a bargain priced printer that didn’t take a part of my soul to review.
If only it had some filament and a few test prints on the USB stick.
I know I mentioned this in the video, but I didn’t say why Artillery should include some test prints. And, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. maybe they’ve got it right. Maybe by making people buy their own filament and learn how a slicer works before they can print, they either get the scrubs educated, or eliminate them before they become support tickets. And, in a way, that is also genius, but it’s crossed over to evil genius.
This lack of a first-time user experience out of the box prompted me to add a new metric to my grading scale (which I will do a big reveal on in March) just so I could knock this printer down a few rungs. Well, not actually for that reason, but that was the ultimate effect. Before considering first time experience, this printer was my #3 overall printer. After adding that metric, it dropped it to #6 (which isn’t bad). But if they would just add some sample filament and a test print to the thumb stick (without raising the price), I kid you not, it would be #1 overall. And that’s without even having wifi.
There’s a Behind the Scenes video for my patreon backers. Just thought I’d mention that. I also thought I’d mention that the crap thumbnail I threw together for it feels like it’s a better thumbnail than the thumbnail for this video. The videos themselves are appropriate for their audience (that is to say the BTS has crap audio and isn’t edited), but this is a very clickable thumb, I think.
So what’s to do when a print fails and wraps itself around the nozzle, as I had happen (twice!) with this printer? Fortunately it’s not difficult. Safety warning, try not to touch the nozzle while it’s heated, as it is… hot:
- Start by heating up the nozzle
- Let it melt the plastic around it
- Pull it off gently, being careful not to damage the wires of the temperature sensor or heater element
- Use needle nosed pliers to remove any extra plastic stuck on the nozzle
If you’re using PLA you can actually drop the temperature to about 100C to remove the last remnants and it will peel off cleanly, super satisfyingly. With ABS, cool the nozzle all the way, and the remnants will shrink and pull themselves off cleanly, but that’s only because that’s what it was designed for with injection molding.
In editing this video, I decided to give it a weekend before finalizing the edit and uploading it. This isn’t normally something I do, it’s not normally something I feel I have the luxury of doing. But I finished the first pass on Saturday, right after uploading the last video, so I felt I had some time. The first pass was pretty raw. Then, after thinking about it a bit, I added a few Cymon asides to cover some of the things I forgot because I don’t use a script, and it got better. Then I added some more “Woosh” zooms, and it got more watchable. Then I added some text overlays to cover more things I forgot in the script I didn’t write, and it got better. This certainly isn’t the “best” video I’ve ever uploaded (not sure what that would be) but I think it illustrates the point that the more time you give a thing to develop, the better it gets.
