As my Quad is constantly under tests, I felt the urge more and more to have something… less experimental… and just work. No offense, the Crane Quad is a great machine, but hard to control. The Crane community on Facebook is creating mods left and right to fix various design flaws, like heat and torque problems. I will be getting new community build motor somewhere in the next 2 months. Until then, I don’t think I will bother to much with the crane because…. I got a second printer and officially have a printer farm now. 🙂
And what a unit it is… Meet the Creality Ender 5 Plus. With 350x350x400 printing dimension I should also be able to create somewhat bigger prints. It barely fits on my desk… (You can see I don’t have a clean desk policy at home…) I decided to go for this one because of the difference in size and the good reviews. Then I will have a smaller bed with multi color and a big single color printer. I can use the combination for a lot of different prints.
Setup
Setting the printer up was quite easy. Building the “kit” took me about an hour and getting it level another hour in total I think. Luckily, I have learned a lot from all my troubleshooting with the Crane. But the leveling and testing all went fairly straight through.
When researching this machine, I read about a few important upgrades / mods. I started with the easiest by replacing the plastic extruder with a metal version. Also switched the PTFE with the Capricorn tubing.
The next one will be replacing the mainboard, as the stepper drivers are seriously load on the stock one. I will be switching to crealities 2.2.1 spec when it’s back in stock.
Maybe afterwards, I will go hero me gen 5 so I can use two side fans for cooling the prints as that can cause problems on bigger prints as I read.
First print
I started, after leveling, with a Marvin model. I used that on the Crane as well, so it will be a good comparisson.
The first print failed. The Ender has a glass bed and I forgot to add some adhessive. (Crane doesn’t need it) After applying the print was smooth.
First comparisson
On the left then Ender version, last Crane version on the right. Note that the layer height on the crane was 0.1 vs the 0.2 on the ender.
Conclusion
So far, the Ender has amazed me. I will be doing a lot of printing on it, at least until the new crane motors arive. I will be doing more comparisons when the crane is stable again.
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