Back in the shed again. Kind of. A little. I’ve been cleaning the space up, but I haven’t had the time or resources to attack it properly so it’s far from the vision I have for the ultimate making set. But it’s better than it was. And now that the weather has gone from “sweltering” to just “hot” (welcome to Southern Utah) I may film a little more out there.
In putting together this video’s score chart, I decided to revisit my scoring system for all the 3D printers I’ve rated so far. I made the price rating a little less subjective, matching the score to hard numbers, but on a logarithmic-ish scale. Then I calculated the area of the triangle created by the radar chart of Price, Capability and Ease of Use, and used that area to rank all the printers I’ve ever reviewed. Not that this is any sort of definitive way to rank 3D printers. Let alone the fact that Capability and Ease of Use have no rubric assigned to them, these are based on my experience. And maybe ease of use isn’t important to you, you only want something cheap and capable. Fair. But still, it’s a ranking, and it’s interesting to see where all the printers fall. honestly, I was surprised to see the Duplicator 6 ranking so high. I wish I had kept that one.
Calculating the area of a trangle generated with this method, from 3 radii measurements, seemed tricky until I realized that this was just 3 triangles, of which I knew two sides already. Now, to be fair, I fudged the area calculation a little so I didn’t have to use cosine, but I fudged it consistently, so the ranking is at least fair.
I truly hate giving negative reviews. But I’m also not one to pussyfoot around the issue. If a printer is bad, it’s bad, and if no one is willing to say that it’s bad, then it’ll never get better. And Zortrax has really got something here. If they could just fix their build plate, they’d have an amazing and highly recommendable 3D printer. But alas, accuracy and reliability don’t mean nothing if you can’t get the darn print out of the machine. But it wasn’t just that. The lead up to getting that first print was so frustrating. I mentioned the build plate dropping on my head while I was plugging in the Z-Axis cable. What I didn’t mention was how hard that cable was connect on the other end. They claim this build plate is removable, but that connector says something different. It says “you’re with me for life”. A removable build plate, like a simple, flexible, removable build plate, is exactly what this printer needs.
Oh, and the bed leveling. I didn’t want the video to drag on and become too negative, but leveling the bed on the M200 was a singular experience.
You know… I didn’t think I would ever hate bed leveling. I mean, I don’t love it, and I’ve had a few printers where the nobs were hard to turn and hurt my fingers, and I really didn’t love that. but I didn’t think I would hate it. Then along comes the Zortrax M200. It’s got those tiny screws that hurt your fingers, one of which is so tight I had to get a pair of pliers to turn it (after which it moved well, but still), and an auto level sensor. The auto level sensor goes to a spot and says “turn the back right screw anti-clockwise 147 degree (0.4 of a turn)” So I do, carefully moving it so that when I hit my 0.4 of a turn and it tells me I hit the right spot that I won’t overturn it when it tells me to stop. Because I’m expecting it to tell me to stop like the Weedo F192 does. That was one of the things that I liked about the Weedo F192. Only the Zortrax doesn’t tell me to stop. Just to be sure, I over turn it on purpose. But it doesn’t tell me to stop at all. Well, now I have no idea if I’m anywhere close to the 0.4 of a turn that they wanted. So I turn it back thinking “Aw, man, I messed it up. I’ll never know if I got it right.” However, it ran another check and this time said:
Turn the back right screw clockwise 15 degrees (0.2 of a turn)”. OK, I over turned it. So I make an adjustment.
“Turn the back right screw clockwise 5 degrees (0.1 of a turn)”. Apparently, I didn’t compensate enough.
“5 degrees anti clockwise” Oh, too much.
“Back left 0.1 anti clockwise” Back left? Your sensor isn’t even over that one! Okay. Back left…
“Back right 0.1 clockwise” Back to he back right now? Okay.
This went on for minutes. Back and forth, round and round, never right and never telling me when I got it right. And by the end, I hated leveling. They did it. Zortrax made me hate leveling the bed.
Disappointing. That’s the best word to describe this printer. Disappointing. Except it’s not even objectively disappointing, if that’s even a thing. If I had gone into this thinking “A 3D printer, the same price and volume of an Ultimaker 2, and yet promises super accuracy and reliability? There’s got to be a catch”, then when all these little catches came up, and the big one with the build plate, I could have been like “Ah, that’s what I was looking for” and I wouldn’t have been so downtrodden about this.
Funny thing about this printer is I kept comparing it to the FlashForge Creator Pro, a $400 3D printer, that in my opinion outperformed it in every way except for the accuracy rating, and it is only slightly behind it in that regard. A $400 3D printer nearly outperformed a $2000 3D printer in every way that mattered. That’s not good.
