How far you imagine, how much you will get.

That could mean anything, and anything could be in this box. It’s meant to be the JGaurora A5 3d printer but there could also be a pain in the arse, packed in a cardboard, Styrofoam and this amazingly soft, green tint plastic.

It’s just so soft.

You get the usual thing, a small spool of PLA, a spool holder which clamps onto the machine which itself comes in to halves.

Pretty similar set up in the box as with the smaller version. There’s no pliers or scrapers or gloves. You do get a USB pen, cabling, Allen keys and a spare nozzle. A bit of plastic to do you levelling and some nuts and bolts.

Again it’s a Maker Base.

Ok that’s a good improvement the terminal for the heated bed is actually underneath so nothing will get caught. The cabling is all hidden.

That hasn’t been glued on that well.

I can see the letter b written there, sorta marker pen.

So the first thing to make a point of is the couplers look a lot better than the previous version. I think that was a one off and when it was put together it must have been yanked. And obviously these are not the sort of machines  you can send back, you have to get the replacement and repair it yourself. You have to really ask yourself whether that’s something you want to do before you make the decision to buy something like this.

It’s got quite a bit of wobble. This is still by far the most rigid one of this style. So considering it’s made out of sheet metal it still feels quite wobbly. It’s got a limit switch here but there isn’t one on this side. Anycubic i3 Mega you have one on both sides so you could set the gantry parallel to the bed by adjusting some machine screws under here.

Some PLA that I bought some time ago and I didn’t pay attention to what condition it was in. Look at that bit there. I bet it’s going to cause me problems. I’m just pre-heating. I have to admit these machine are really quiet. I don’t know if it’s coz they are using under powered stepper motors or the drivers are… niiiice.

To whom it may concern. Warm Tips. The product you purchase is a DIY kit machine based on responsible attitude for customers. We have done lots of test for delivery. The joint of main body and base as well as nozzle has slight aberration. We stress this is normal phenomenon. Wont affect the printing accuracy and artistic appearance. Please excuse this trouble. Thanks very much. Thanks for the warm tip.

I’m now running through the assisted bed levelling programme. It’s exactly the same as the JGarurora A3s, after which I attempted by first print.

I feel like it’s missing something. There should be something to hold the wire up because at the moment it’s just resting on the hot bed.

I’m going to do this a few times.

I was having trouble with the print sticking to the bed so I tried cleaning it with methylated spirit and checking if the gantry was square on either side.

I also ran the assisted bed levelling programme several times but with little luck.

Ok the problem I had was the setting on the cura jason file had the hot bed turning off during a PLA print, I had to put those numbers in. The initial layer hot bed temperature is 55c and as it prints it drops down to 50c. Lets do this again.

I think what the problem is is it’s lifting up as it’s extruding. Lets see if I can find… Ok it’s still not printing well and I just pulled this off and I think the problem is it’s hopping or lifting between layers a little bit too height.

I eventually gave up and printed a nozzle upgrade on the A3s, which did improved thing a little. Obviously if you only have one printed you are probably going to loose your nut trying to print a new fan nozzle on a bed that doesn’t stick.

However in retrospect even though the nozzle upgrade did help, part of my problem was more to do with software and how I had set up the start code. Too much filament seemed to ooze out at first and curl up sticking to the nozzle itself. There’s probably better nozzles out there too. I’ll write the start code and end code in the description bellow.

Ok it’s still not sticking.

Anyway I printed one cube which came out pretty well but then I decided to print five calibration cubes distributed across the bed. Two at the furthest corners, one in the centre and then two at the foremost corners.

Ok I wanted to test the large bed by printing five test cubes roughly in the position where the bed levelling or the assisted bed levelling occurs. I decided to let this carry on printing and I noticed something unusual about the x axis along here. And it feels like all the cubes have a gradual sway to the left (like me) which is a bit unusual. What I noticed when I assembled this and the A3S is the motor for the x axis is quite small and I suspect it’s under powered and struggling to print for whatever reason – moving this cable around and the trunking. It could be anything so this has been a partial success. I’ve been able to attach all the cubes across the five points of the large heat bed but there’s an additional problem where the x axis motor is under powered and struggling to print – missing steps.

The Z and Y axes seemed pretty good but the X looked really wobbly. The stepper motor for this is a little smaller than the others, so it might be underpowered. I opened up the machine which wasn’t easy and twizzled the driver potentiometer. I took voltage reading from each driver as I was doing this so I could set the correct voltage specified for the axes.

So it’s kind hard to film but what I am doing is going over the stepper motors, sorry the drivers and checking the voltage. So this is the extruder and that’s 0.48. This is the z axis and that’s 0.82

So I’m now going to print the cubes again.

So that was a vast improvement, but it was also a real faff to do. The cabling in the 3D printer was quite compact and it was quite challenging to open without pulling things apart. That said it’s nice to have a large bed to print, but it’s a shame that while the machine looks the dogs bollocks it also wobbles like one.

If you want to see how this printer fits into my ever changing list of Top 3D printers that I have used, check out the link in the description. Also keep an eye out on my Instagram page as I will be doing a heavily staged giveaway soon. Thanks again for watching.