Month: May 2017

MP Select Mini v2 Early Impressions

I ordered a Monoprice Select Mini v2 shortly after it came out, and received it yesterday. Here are my first-day impressions.Some brief background: I’ve owned a Prusa i3 MK2 for a year, and am quite familiar with 3D printing now. I bought a Monoprice Maker Select Plus a few weeks ago, but had problems getting the bed to level, so I returned it. I liked that the Select Mini was cheaper and smaller, and figured a small bed would be easier to level, so I bought it.The out-of-the-box experience is good. The low cost shows, with the printer packed plainly but securely in a form-fitting two-part styrofoam shell, and minimal accessories (a small length of transparent PLA, an SD card, USB cable, plastic scraper, and power adapter, and hex wrench for bed adjustment), but no assembly was required, and the printer was ready to go within a couple minutes.The build quality of the printer seems very good. The construction is all sheet metal, and the printer is heavy for its size. The LCD isn’t amazing quality, but easily viewable from typical angles, and obviously blows away the character LCD on the MK2 (though it exposes less functionality through its on-screen interface).Following the guide, I leveled the bed using a sheet of paper and the included hex wrench, which I preferred to the thumb screws on the Maker Select Plus. The bed seemed to be higher in the center than at the edges, but I got it as level as I could.Only one sample gcode file was included on the SD card, a cat. An initial attempt at this print was cut short by the print losing adhesion, but the quality up to that point was very good. I looked up the settings for Cura, entered them in, and did my first test print: a phone stand with a couple of print-in-place hinged parts, at 100um, 60mm/s.On the first layer, some lines ‘cut corners’ and ended up in the wrong spot, but the print corrected itself by the second layer, and this was rectified with some part cleanup afterward. The printer has been making fairly irritating and loud rattling noises during most of its printing time so far. This stops when I put some pressure on the X-arm in a certain direction. I bent the thin rod for the Z-axis a bit and the noise subsided briefly, but came back. Despite the noise, the phone stand completed successfully, with impressive quality overall. The print-in-place hinges functioned perfectly.Overall, I’m happy with this printer so far. The build area is small, and the bed leveling is not perfect, but once a print gets going, it seems to do very well. I can see it having difficulty with bed adhesion on certain parts, but any parts on which a raft is acceptable should work fine. For the price, it so far seems to be a great piece of hardware, for either a 3D printing beginner or veteran. http://ift.tt/2pVkY5M