Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2016
This printer arrived on 1-Dec-2016. It was well packed. This review is more an evaluation of build difficulty, since the product seems to work well. I am a complete newb to 3D printing, have never used a 3D printer of any kind.
Based on prepurchase research and my own mechanical experience I decided that platform stiffness was probably the foundation on which print quality rests, and without that no amount of component upgrades or tweaks could rescue quality problems. Because of that I decided I did not want an acrylic printer frame. An MDF frame would be quite stable, but at the cost of size and weight. So I limited my search to metal framed printers. Looking at the mechanics of printers, the delta printers look really cool when printing, but the submillimeter repeatability for good printing would require high precision joints in the carriage, something which I was not confident of receiving in a low price Chinese printer. The printers that print on a descending build platform, suspended from one end on the Z axis sliders instinctively felt to me that printing larger or denser models would tend to cause flex that would make an inconsistent level in the Y axis, so I settled on a Prusa style Cartesian machine.
I was looking at the Geeetech aluminum, which was around $350 when I put it in my cart, it had a glass build surface, which from my research I wanted, but it had generic threaded rod Z axis elevators, which I figured would be the first thing I would have to modify. I was waiting until Cyber Monday, hoping for a price drop, but when I went to buy it it had gone up $50 instead. So I went looking again, ended up on this JGAurora metal framed Prusa clone for $351. It does not have the glass bed, but does have lead screw Z axis elevators, and a borosilicate glass plate is cheaper than buying lead screws and modifying the Geetech anyway.
As far as skill level for the assembly, I am trying to correlate to non 3D printing mechanical tasks that are similar. Probably in the car world similar to a carburetor rebuild, somewhere above the level of installing a car stereo and below the level of milling out custom parts for a robot project. A basic electronics knowledge will add confidence but really isn't required for assembly. If there are problems electronics knowledge would help with troubleshooting, but I didn't have any problems. Some bits of the build do need good fine motor skills, sometimes including improvising a third hand (belt installation comes to mind). I have a pretty good mechanical background, been building and servicing every device, vehicle, appliance in the house since I was a preteen, so for about 40 years. I printed my first test print about 6 hours after opening the box, and it was a successful print.
Assembly instructions come on an SD card with the printer (which also includes a USB SD card reader if your computer doesn't have an SD slot) The primary instructions are a series of videos with no audio but with captioning explaining the steps. Fairly easy to follow if you make liberal use of the pause button to keep up. There were a couple differences between the printer in the videos and this one, primarily the video printer was using steppers coupled to threaded rod instead of the integrated steppers with lead screws in the kit, but I didn't have any problems applying the instructions to the task at hand. There are also some pictures and a PDF on the SD drive that have labeling and exploded drawings to clear up any confusion about what is what.
On the topic of confusion the documentation, starting with the packing list, are in what I affectionately call Chinglish, obviously written by someone with a very elementary grasp of English. Take this humorously, it doesn't imply that the people building this kit didn't understand what they were doing, they just don't convey it in the most efficient manner in a foreign (to them) language. For instance on the packing list they call the spiral wrap used to bundle wires a "winding pipe" and keep referring to washers as "shims". Once you get through the translation issues it is pretty clear. However it was severe enough that I gave up attempting to go through the packing list before I started, because I couldn't figure out what all the items referred to until I saw them in the video.
The small hardware is all sorted into individual labeled zipper bags, so you don't need to measure screws to figure out which is which. There are a bunch of leftover pieces when you are finished, so don't look at the leftovers and despair that you must have done everything wrong. I had 30+ screws nuts and washers left over.
The wires are all at least long enough, and they all end up different lengths in the side of the printer where the controller board is, so it will be a rat's nest when you cram it all in to put the cover on. To fix that properly you would have to buy the right connectors and cut and reterminate wires to the appropriate length. It works fine as is, but modifications and improvements would be a lot easier if it wasn't so cluttered in there.
The controller board appears to have traces and pads for the components necessary to control a second extruder, but you would need to purchase the necessary components, heat sinks, and connectors and solder them to the board. You would also have to fabricate a bracket to mount two extruders and buy another extruder/hotend. I am just guessing here, but I think if you did that and then made what ever firmware changes were needed to activate a second extruder this printer would do that. Interestingly the controller board in the instruction video has the missing components, but there is no heat sink on the added stepper motor controller, as if it had indeed been added after the fact.
This printer has a MK8 style hot end, various places online using them claim they will print things like nylon, but other places claim they won't because of PTFE tubing in the extruder. It also appears to have PTFE insulators on the thermistor wire, and the very bottom edge of nylon temperatures appears to be at the very upper end of allowable PTFE temperatures, so I am planning on a hot end swap to something like an all metal V6 style end before I print things that require higher temperatures than ABS.
I do not have enough experience to actually judge print quality, the test print I did is a simple cube, which came out very cubellke when I measured it with a digital caliper. Actual measurements on the 3 axes of the cube ranged from 20.09mm to 20.37mm, which I though was pretty good for a machine which I did not make a measurement or check anything for square or parallel while building, and did no motor step to linear motion calibration. Once the machine is in its permanent home I am very curious how accurate it can be tweaked. I am also curious how much variation is introduced by the very nature of cooling plastic, which could not be improved on by mechanical adjustments, but might be able to be improved by enclosing the printer so the ambient temperature and room airflow is isolated.
The printer is pretty quite in operation, did the original test print in the middle of the living room floor with family members watching TV and it was not intrusive. Lots quieter than an old school dot matrix printer, less annoying than some ceiling fans I have experienced.
I personally can not smell due to an accident, but family members said it does not give off any noticeable aroma when printing the PLA
sample filament that came with the printer, I won't have anything else to print for a couple days, so I can't speak to other brands or types of plastic.
There was one inconsistency which might be a stumbling block for someone who doesn't already possess a good understanding of elctronic control systems. There are two thermistors in this system, one monitors hot end temperature, and one monitors heated bed temperature. Either the labels on the controller board or the assignments in the firmware are swapped on my printer. If it is the board labels I assume they would be the same for everyone with this controller board, if it is the firmware it may change again if I upgrade or change firmware revisions. Either way when I fired it up for the first time the temperature on the heated be went up pretty quickly while the hot end was heating much slower. The bed temperature zoomed right on past the set point and quickly cause a bed exceeded max temp error. Since the bed obviously was not overly hot, I could touch it and it was just slightly above ambient, and the monitor on the LCD had it higher than 60 degrees C I came to the conclusion that the thermistors were swapped, so I plugged them into the board the "wrong" way and then all the temperatures made sense. Without a fundamental knowledge of electronic control systems I could see this being more of a stumbling block. Even with a device to measure the hot end and bed temperatures it might be confusing because the hot end would be heating up forever trying to reach 180 degrees while watching the temperature on the bed, while the bed would be shutting down the heater trying to control the temperature of the hot end, which would just keep increasing. I am not sure if the excessive temperature on the bed actually shut down all the heaters or not, but if it didn't the hot end would just get as hot as it could, only ending when the heating element burned out or the house burned down.
All in all, this kit had all the pieces necessary to build and use the printer. Even included a USB cable. As it sits it looks to be a capable printer for PLA and ABS and other low temperature plastics, and it looks to be a good foundation to build a custom rig than can print as good as any Prusa style printer out there, including printers that cost two or three times a much.
