I bought my first 3D printer, a Pulse XE 443S, in early 2021. I ordered it with a 32 bit Smoothie board and Mosquito hot-end with an Olson Ruby nozzle. It came stock with a magentic build plate with a number of removable build surfaces and a Bltouch. My favourite build surfaces were BuildTak, which I used mostly for PLA and Garolite for PETG. Although slow by today's standards, it is a good printer, and it still works fine.
I bought my second printer, a Snapmaker J1s, around mid 2023. I like this printer very much. The biggest benefit for me with an IDEX printer is printing with a support material. I was totally blown away with how easy the support material could be removed. Compared to trying to do supports with a single filament the resulting interface area is a lot smoother.
Having a direct drive extruder is really nice as well. Not so much tinkering to reduce stringing. You still have to get the retraction and filament temps correct and a proper setting for linear advance makes a big difference.
The J1s is solid and comes completely assembled, except for attaching the rear fan. It comes with a glass build plate with PEI on one side. Bed levelling, nozzle and z-offset calibration are somewhat different on this printer. All calibration is done with the glass plate removed from the printer. Trying any calibration with the glass bed installed will, more than likely, damage the printer.
Bed levelling reIies on adjusting the heights of the front two corners when instructed to by the calibration wizard. To adjust the height of the right extruder a wizard guides you through a loosening, adjusting and tightening process. The nozzle alignment to each other is handle by another wizard. This time without user intervention. I do not calibrate very often and when I do there is little or no adjustments to make.
On the J1s, I print mostly at 65c on the PEI side of the built plate. This temperature makes PLA stick well and easy to take off after it cools to 30c. I tried printing on a spare glass plate with Build Tak on the glass side and and found it difficult to remove medium to large parts. That wasn't a problem on my first printer that had a flexible build plate. I have tried the thermal shock method of removing parts from the built Tak plate, and it does work (either cool the part rapidly while still hot, or cool the part and plate in the fridge or freezer and then rapidly heating the part). So now, I use the Build Tak plate for parts that have low build plate surface area and I don't want to use a brim.
A number of people have had some difficulty printing with the J1s, myself included. The extruder stalls and filament stops extruding, sometimes causing the filament run-out sensor to suspend the print. There are a fair number of theories as to why. Most focused on heat creep caused by the construction of the heat-break. Others, the filament path is causing the extruder to stall or to grind the filament. And still others, about flow of filament through the nozzle.
I never had any issues printing with the Snapmaker PLA that came with
the printer or with Creality Hyper PLA. I had trouble on longer prints
with other filaments. One, of which, I have quite a few spools of. So, I really wanted to get the J1s to print with
that specific filament. I had some 16 hour prints with that filament on the Pulse XE.
I started with the filament path, changing the reverse Bowden ptfe to a ptfe with an inner diameter of 3mm and replacing the 90 degree filament guide at the top of the extruder, with straight guide. Next, I added more thermal paste to the heat-break on both hot-ends. Neither of my hot-ends had enough thermal paste on them (actually all 4 because I have a spare set of high temperature hot-ends as well). Finally I replaced the nozzles on the low temperature hot-ends with Haldis 3D Mk8 nickel on copper.
After all those changes, I built a removable top hat to raise the lid of the printer and added some venting. Overall, it was a fun project. The printer now works quite well. I have yet to do any high temperature printing, just mostly enjoying printing with PLA. There is more about it here.
Snapmaker acknowledges there is a problem and are working on changes to the hot-end design. Snapmaker is sending me a free set of the fixed, all metal hot-ends with hardened nozzles.. They are constructed as a complete unit, so the nozzles can't be changed. If they work I don't care, otherwise I have my existing hot-ends. Can't wait to try them out.
The filaments I use are:
- FOOD Safe PLA from filaments.ca. - this I like to use this for kids toys.
- Creality Hyper PLA. - a great filament.
- eSun Silk Magic PLA. - a great filament.
- Bambu Labs Silk PLA. - a good filament, I used Gold and Silver Silk PLA.
- Snapmaker PLA - a good filament, don't like the color of the Black, very limited colors availble.
- Sakata 870 PLA. - a good filament, it is more like a PLA+.
I have an older small form factor Windows 10 Pro machine that sits next to my J1s. This system has Lu0ban, Cura and Prusa slicers on it. It also runs Blender and acts as an OctoPrint server. The camera on the printer connects to this system through USB. I routinely remote desktop into this machine for modelling, slicing and printing. I can also monitor printing from my desktop, laptop or ipad.
To see some of what I have printed, you can click on the Blog button at the top right of this page.