2015 3D printer guide
- Thread starter bigseb
- Start date
The Zortrax M200 came in at 1st place in the Plug and Play division. One of the Cons in the review was limited filament type, but they just released two more (Z-HIPS and Z-Glass) in addition to Z-ABS and Z-Ultrat that they've been selling for a while now. Based on your experience with HIPS, I'm ordering some of that soon.
It looks like the Flashforge slicer has a lot more options than Zortrax's proprietary slicer. Do you tend to fiddle with slicer settings a lot depending on the project or do you have a couple of favorite parameter selections that suffice for most of your work?
Mike
It looks like the Flashforge slicer has a lot more options than Zortrax's proprietary slicer. Do you tend to fiddle with slicer settings a lot depending on the project or do you have a couple of favorite parameter selections that suffice for most of your work?
Mike
bigseb
Alibre Super User
Yeah HIPS is a great material to work with. Nice finish too. More importantly you can get a food-grade HIPS which is handy. What size filament do you use? If its 1.75mm or 3mm can't you just use a non-Zortrax brand?MikeHenry said:
MikeHenry said:
FlashForge use MakerWare Desktop. RepG also works but that is way outdated and nobody uses it to slice. RepG is handy for updating firmware though. Anyway MakerWare Desktop has a ton of options. What I did is create a variety of profiles that are fine-tuned to the filament used and the desired layer height. Then I just pick a profile and set things like support structure, infill density, etc. Currently my custom profile list looks like this:
- ABS 0.05mm
- ABS 0.1mm
- ABS 0.2mm
- ABS 0.3mm
- PLA 0.05mm
- PLA 0.1mm
- PLA 0.2mm
- PLA 0.3mm
- HIPS 0.05mm
- HIPS 0.1mm
- HIPS 0.2mm
- HIPS 0.3mm
Here is a list of MakerWare Destop settings (there is a bit of overlap):
Attachments
bigseb said:
The Zortrax uses 1.75 mm filament and their warranty is invalidated if you use someone else's filament. There's no way for them to tell, of course, unless you own up to it somewhere, but the extruder profiles are hardcoded in the slicer for each Zortrax filament and can't be changed, though one owner is working on an add-on that would let you change extruder temperature manually. The Zortrax filament seems to be cheaper by weight than most 3rd party offerinsgs. ABS is $US20 per 800 g net, but shipping from China adds about $US10/spool to that. That still seems to be cheaper than others and there are now some USA Zortrax distributors so overall cost may come down a bit. Their HIPS filament is $US50, plus shipping and I haven't cost compared that yet with other brands.
bigseb said:
That offers a whole lot more customization than Zortrax's slicer, but Zortrax seems to be servicing the casual user that doesn't want to get bogged down in trial and erroring a lot of parameters. There are downsides to that approach, but on the whole, I'm very happy with the printer, hopefully more so with HIPS and Z-Glass available now.
Mike
bigseb
Alibre Super User
Its a shame that they aren't allowing users to create custom profiles. The Cube range of printers has the same problem from what I've heard. Custom profiles not only allow you to better control the quality of the print but also the time taken, material used and the load on the bot...MikeHenry said:
EDIT: ... and you can custom your bot to your needs. Something I have been getting more and more into lately...
bigseb said:
I think that they have decided to cater to the user that mostly wants to load a model and print without tweaking too many parameters. So far, I've had pretty good luck with that approach, except for large footprint models, and the new filaments and slicer/firmware techniques are supposed to help quite a bit in that area. Zortrax just sent me a free spool of Z-Glass transparent filament and that should be fun to play with. The HIPS will be here next week, too.