AnkerMake M5 3D Printer: This is One Fast Printer!

hello this is Irv Shapiro with make with tech and today I'm going to do a very interesting review not just because it's quite a good printer 3D printer I'm reviewing but also because of the nature of the manufacturer you see this 3D printer the anchor mate M5 is made by the same company that makes the phone charger the wireless phone charger anchor that I use every night the same company that makes these headphones that I use quite often the same company that makes security systems and AI based robotic vacuum cleaners and large capacity Power Systems and solar cell driven rechargeable camping batteries and coolers electronic coolers very interesting company you see anchor Innovations is a 1.5 larger than a 1.5 billion dollar company they were 1.5 billion dollars a couple years ago in the Bloomberg review I recently read and they may be the largest manufacturer in terms of overall sales volume on Amazon so many people know them they're a 10 year old company with deep roots in building well-rated Consumer Electronic and prosumer electronic devices that's very different from most of the companies who make 3D printers today most of them have been started by engineers and enthusiasts such as prusa being a very good example that build very good machines but those machines were not built by companies that truly had a history in manufacturing so when I look at the anchor mate M5 and I compare it to my prusa MK3 yes there's a prusa MK4 out today and even comparing it to what I've seen of that machine I haven't touched it or I compare it to one of my creality machines or I compared to this solvo machine that's right behind me fit the finish the manufacturing the packaging it's just different this is manufactured as a consumer friendly machine and that has advantages and disadvantages that we're going to talk about because this machine while being very very good is not perfect so if you want to learn more about the anchor mate M5 then stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] I want to start by thanking everyone who helped support this YouTube channel and all of the Endeavors here at Maaco Tech where we strive to teach people how to use desktop Technologies 3D printers laser engravers and Cutters a little bit of woodworking a little bit of electronics a little bit of software how to use these things to make things and one of the ways we support this channel is with our new product which is models.makewatech.com at models.makewoodtech.com you can download models in order to print them on your 3D printer or to cut patterns in your laser engraver and what's unique about it is you can customize those models right on screen so it's completely free we have over 5 000 people using that product today completely free but you also can subscribe to that product to get Advanced features and those subscriptions help support this channel so thank you to both our free users our subscribers and to all my viewers now I want to disclose right up front that anchor mate sent me this printer two reels of filament some spare parts that I'm going to use as part of this video all completely free in exchange for a review but it's not a guaranteed review because in the terms and conditions I send anyone sending me Product I tell them I can decline to review your product happy to send your product back in this case I'm actually honestly impressed with this product because as I mentioned it's different and in general it's better let's start with the basics this is not an inexpensive machine the price on the anchor mate site is eight hundred dollars now it's currently being discounted on that site you can get it for that same discounted price on Amazon now that makes a lot of sense in fact you can get it from Amazon next day which is very interesting and one of the advantages that Anker has is they're one of the largest manufacturers Distributing on Amazon so they have that logistic Channel which will allow them to send product all over the world very quickly currently most of the spare parts for this product are not yet available on Amazon but they are available directly on a store on the anchor mate site because one of the things I look for when I review a 3D printer is whether products are available parts are available for this printer okay I'm going to move this stuff out of the way so I don't break it and now let's walk through this printer to start with the build volume is pretty typical 235 by 235 by 250. it uses an excellent removable print surface I've never had to use any glue on this print surface and it sticks very firmly these are quite strong magnets and all my prints come off without a scraper of any type now I'll tell you my secret though now a lot of people forget that these print surfaces are designed to grab prints when they're hot and release them when they're cool now what is cool cool I found is generally below 19 to 20 degrees Celsius that's cool that's room temperature cool it's not slightly warm it's not hot and if you don't wait for it to cool off your prints are going to be stuck now I'm not a very patient guy so I have a very simple trick and the trick is a fan when a print completes I turn my fan on high I turn the printer off I blow cool air on the printed part for about three to five minutes and the prints will just literally lift off you'll see I've printed quite a number of prints there's no scarring at all on this print surface now one thing you should know is that this printer will print a purge line at the back of the print bed and so I was a little nervous it was really close to the back Edge so I've started putting the print surface back about two or three millimeters from the front just to give it a little more clearance the next thing you'll note about this printer is there are dual belts on the y-axis this printer is one of the bed Slinger style printers where the y-axis moves back and forth that's the same as the prusa MK3 MK4 it is different than the bamboo labs p1p which is another printer that compares to this but is a core XY printer a box style printer with a different architecture a lot of people claim that on a bed Slinger you can never get great prints on the other hand pruce has been using them for a long time and the complaint is that you get a little bit of ghosting anytime you print really fast on any printer you're likely to get a little bit of ghosting ghosting is caused by vibrations one of the reasons I did not see any noticeable ghosting and we'll look at some prints together and I'll show you larger versions of these prints photographs of them is this print is quite heavy for its size it has a very solid base and you'll notice that the Z axis and their dual motors on the z-axis the z-axis rods the screw rods are fully enclosed now that adds both structural integrity and this appears to be all aluminum this is a solid machine it adds both structural integrity and probably helps reduce vibration so you have a wide and solid base and these structural components here that I think help reduce vibration anchor mate also highlights that the stepper motor on this y-axis is a bit stronger it's a heavy duty stepper motor so you have dual Z dual y-axis belt and the Z the x-axis is a traditional wheel based x-axis very similar to all of the creality printers now one of the things you'll notice when you first turn this printer on and you home it is there are no end stops so let me show you that this printer takes a bit of time to boot to power on and the fan is a little noisy now I'll suppress the fan noise a bit in the video but the fan is a little bit noisy it takes a little longer to boot because there are actually two CPU boards in this printer one that's running Marlin firmware that b told me it's connected to Wi-Fi and a second one that's running the camera and the AI software we'll talk about in a few minutes when I go to the front panel and the front panel is a touch screen it works great that's actually one of the differences between this and let's say the p1p from bamboo which does not have a touch screen on their lower end models that compete with this this touch screen um has the ability to do all the things you're normally used to they're very well labeled I'm going to take and do a home on this printer so you can see what that does you may not be able to hear it but you actually hear the printer sort of running into the end of its range and when you watch the z-axis when you've dual z-axis motors you need a way to make sure those Motors are stepper Motors are in alignment and this uses the same approach that prusa uses which it aligns each one by hitting the end individually you'll see it do that little jiggle there at the end so that's what homing does on this printer this printer has built-in Auto bed leveling there are no manual leveling screws at all I'm going to turn this off just so you can hear me a little better however it is important to note that under the print bed there are four screws that hold the magnetic surface down some people have reported mine were not that those are sometimes loose so a recommendation that's bouncing around the discussion groups is to loosen those four screws and re-tighten them opposite corners to ensure that's tight another thing you want to do when you take this printer out of the box is you want to make sure the wheels that use an eccentric nut once again very similar in that case to creality are tight and that you've tightened the belts now anchor mate has really good instructions on their website actual videos that tell you how to do that so I didn't go through the assembly which is basically consists of putting this onto the base the Gantry onto the base and bolting in the Reel holder which can go in multiple orientations because those videos are really excellent now this printer uses standard 1.75 millimeter filament and in fact anchor mate sent me two reels of their pla Plus they claim their pla plus is optimized for high-speed printing is stronger than traditional pla now I printed quite a number of prints on their pla Pro Plus I've also printed a number of prints in matter hackers build pla which is a uh sort of a premium while still entry level pla there are such a thing as premium and entry level but it's a very consistent pla that I've used for a long time and I find shows less layer lines than other filaments but the prints that I made with the anchor mate filament were a little better let's say that these were a minus quality prints and these were a prints um I really can barely see the layer lines at all on these prints and I think I had a bit less stringing on the pla plus prints than the matter hacker build pla we'll get back to the prints in a moment the hot end is rated up to 260 degrees Celsius now that's a bit interesting and the reason is you can see here on this hot end that there is a Teflon tube that goes into the hot end and it goes all the way down to the nozzle that's sort of the creality style the advantage of that is you get a lot less stringing the disadvantage of that is many people say you shouldn't print above 220 230 degrees if you have one of these Teflon tubes because they can emit gases above those temperatures now this is a blue tube it's not sort of the white low end ones I don't know who makes this for them I don't do know that Capricorn makes a Teflon tube that can go up to higher temperatures so I don't have confirmation of that but I've had no trouble with this and their slicer does something very interesting it prints the first layer at 260 degrees Celsius then it drops the printer down to 200 degrees Celsius for the rest of the of the print so that's somewhat unique about the hot end as long as we're talking about the hot end another thing that is unique is the heating element is larger than normal and when you buy a hot end and you can buy these for about 35 replacement hot ends so it's worth limiting a spare around it does look like the thermistor and the heating element or sort of glued in somehow the he hot part of this hot end is connected to the fins that cool the hot end with two screws that a lot of people on the web say they've had trouble with because they snap fairly easily so you'll want to be careful about that the nozzles in this hot end are not quite standard while the thread is standard they're a little bit longer than standard so as of right now you have to get them from anchor the limitation is that while anchor has nozzles from 0.2 millimeters to 0.8 they only have brass nozzles right now they don't have hardened steel nozzle so if you want to use an abrasive material you may have to use a non-standard nozzle and I'm not sure how well that's going to work the leveling on this system is completely automatic the bed is fixed and it levels seven points by seven points so 49 points all together that takes a long time it takes about 10 minutes at the beginning of each print however it does sort of a quick test of three points across the middle which happens very very quickly now for some of the more interesting features this printer has a camera right here in the base of the or in the bracket of the x-axis so it moves up and down with the print you can use that to take time lapses to take recordings or to do live monitoring time lapses and recordings are a 1080p live monitoring is at 720p but there's more anchor is a long history with AI because of their security products and their robotic vacuums other products in their product line they've used that expertise to build AI into this printer now the reviews on the AI are mixed so far but it's all software based and they keep releasing updates on a regular Cadence the AI today will detect if your print first layer is failing it didn't stick or if the print is failing somewhere as it goes up when you have the AI on the first couple layers print much slower because it actually moves the printhead out of the way so it can take a picture of the first layer and compare it to what it should look like that comparison happens because the anchor mate slicer sends both your g code to the printer and a special AI file so the AI features only work with the anchor mate slicer now with the anchor mate slicer sends a file to the printer it first talks to the cloud hosted at AWS to determine where your printer is it finds your printer then it makes a direct connection to the printer to spend the send the files locally at high speed once the files are transmitted to the printer you can exit from the slicer you don't have to leave it running on your machine so it's a wonderful feature now while that print is running the whole time you can monitor the print from your phone from anywhere because that does go through the cloud that takes us really to the software side of the anchor mate and there are two parts to the software side there's a phone application and the slicer we've already spoken about the phone application is absolutely required it's the only way you can set up this printer so it will be on a Wi-Fi network now you can print locally with a USB C style Drive key whatever you call your USB storage but USBC style keys are not as common as USB a but they're readily available now but to set up the Wi-Fi you must use the app so you download the app to either your iOS device or your Android device when you first start the app one of the things that's interesting is it asks you for a region as I mentioned anchor had some problems with the security community so they're very careful in this application in the slicer to make everything region based so it asks you for a reason you create a user and password and then you have to have Bluetooth turned on on your phone so it uses Bluetooth to communicate with the printer and to add your Wi-Fi to that printer that is an excellent design much better than having to connect to a hotspot in the printer which saves the manufacturer a little bit of money because they don't need the Bluetooth logic in the device but it's much harder for the consumer the Wi-Fi configuration on this printer was seamless it was excellent it was very very easy then you have your printer listed on here anytime you're doing a print you can monitor that print either with a graphic that shows you the percent complete you can stop a print you can restart a print and you can start a recording or you can configure your printer to do time lapses for every print those time lapses are actually listed right on your phone so they're under the me key it says me down here in the corner you click on time lapse and you'll see all the time lapses now the heavy lifting in software is done by the slicer so let's turn to the screen for a minute and look at the anchor mate slicer when it first starts you'll see it says slicer with a big beta tag now that's ironic because you can only use some of the features like AI if you're using their slicer the anchor mate M5 does have profiles available for Cura and prusa I haven't verified on proof that I verified on Cura that the profile is in this current version of Kira otherwise you can get those profiles on the anchor mate website so there are three sections there's the slicer there's the preview and that also controls the starting of a print and the AI and then you can actually watch a printer so if you go to the slicer it comes up in what's called easy mode now overall this has a feel that it's somewhat Cura based and I believe the underlying engine is curl but it may be a hybrid in some ways because you'll see in a minute many of the parameters are labeled differently and function a bit different this slicer is clearly a version one slicer so it doesn't have good control over support it doesn't have good vase mode currently so if those features are critical for a print I'd recommend using Cura or prusa but you'll give up on the AI feature the slicer is highly tuned to optimize the speed of this these prints so you'll see here we started in Easy Mode I'm going to actually load a model here okay now you can see the the kickstarter test up close I'm going to show you this actual print in a minute and you can see just the basic features you can click on an object then you can move it you can scale it you can ensure it's on the print bed you can rotate it and you can mirror it there are no features for cutting a model apart into pieces or those more advanced features they're no multi-color settings like you see in the prusa slicer however there's a product called the V6 add-on which is a multi-color add-on for this printer that will add six additional colors it's a palette style multi-color setup so it actually Cuts pieces of filament and melds together segments of filament so you end up with in essence a multi-color segment of filament that's just right for your multi-color print it will include a new hot end so if you upgrade to the V6 you'll get a new hot end in addition to the Carousel and the splicing component when they do that obviously they're going to have to upgrade this slicer right now we're in Easy Mode so all you see is speed normal or fast they're both fast normal sets the base speed at about 250 millimeters per second fast sets it at 500 and increases the acceleration and jerk values in general I found that this printer is two to three times faster then let's say an Ender 3 S1 Pro or an Ender 5 S1 and my Ender 5s1 I run at about 80 millimeters per second but the effective speed is I'm printing things in much less than a half sometimes a third of the time as I see on other printers so it's very fast and you have standard settings here Global support doesn't mean support from them it means ad supports if I switch to expert mode you'll see a whole bunch of other settings that look very similar to Cura but it starts with this anchor made fdm settings section um some of these are familiar to me some are not so using their printer to fine tune things is going to take a little bit of time because you have to learn about their particular setup here's the good news I didn't change any parameters except for one print I told it not to print the top and no fill I'll explain how I printed this vase all the other prints I either printed in normal or in fast depending on the quality I was looking for so you do get theoretically better quality in normal mode you'll get less ghosting as an example because it's not moving as fast when you slice an object you get a preview like all modern slicers and you can see here the layer by layer preview I'm just scrolling through it down here very cure like it is a very clear display you can see all the different line types that are displayed here and you'll see this model would print in a little over two hours this is a four to five ma hour model on any other printer I own except for the FL Sun V 400 which is a very fast Delta printer you can see here that you have the option of creating an AI file that does take a little bit of extra time to download to the printer but it's still very very quick when you click on print it will generate the AI file and then it will look for your printer so I'm actually going to turn on this printer again and once again you'll notice that the fans are quite noisy now that fan appears to be the power supply fan now anchor knows something about power splice they've been in that business for 10 years so there must be a reason they use a continuous fan you'll see it's found my printer oops there we go now it's found the printer and I can start the print by just clicking on print it's now downloading the file to the printer and then once it starts printing once it comes up to temperature it will show me the percent complete over here this image is still not working in this Beta release however I can go to my phone now and I can go to device and I can see on my phone exactly where it's at including a percent completed and I can click on real time and actually see a picture from that camera that's built in okay I'm gonna actually stop this print and turn that off so that it's a little quieter so what is one of the unique features is this is an integrated system while this printer is not perfect today the fans are too loud there are limitations to their slicer if you use another slicer you don't get the AI features some people have been concerned with ghosting I haven't seen that I can tell you this printer is very fast and has been very reliable for me now let's look at some prints I have a variety of prints here one of the reasons was the printer so fast and it was so consistent that I had no trouble printing a bunch of samples now I didn't realize when I first got started that the sample prints are under the explore tab in the phone app they're not in the slicer so I looked at the slicer I didn't see any sample prints so I just started printing so on my own so I started with a very simple print which is a calibration cat I'll show you pictures of all these as we go and the idea here is to check for stringing to check for overhangs and to check for Dimensions this is a really nice print there's a little bit of fuzz sort of fuzzy stringing that you can pull off with your fingers down here but nothing really to speak of this was printed using the anchor mate pla and I will tell you now I'm an old guy 67 years old so maybe my eyes aren't very good but I can't see the layer lines in this print at all so let's check the dimension so I'm going to take a caliper here let's reset it to zero and let's see how big this is now this comes up as 20.06 so ideally it'd be 20 6 hundredths of an inch of a millimeter um I think that's just fine so this is pretty good in that Dimension let's try the other dimension and this is 20.13 this is an excellent excellent print next I printed a print that's hard to print I this is the kickstarter sort of torture test for 3D printers it's a really hard print to print and in particular it's hard to find printers that will print all of these little mini towers that end in a very fine point accurately this might be the best Kickstarter print I've ever gotten off a printer it's better than the original prusa it's better than my Ender S1 printers and in particular this shows you some of the advantage of having the Teflon lined hot end so I know you can't print as hot when you have that Teflon tube in there but you get less stringing there is some of this sort of peach fuzz style stringing on here I don't think you can see it it's very very fine and it looks a little bit like cotton candy it'd be trivial to pull off with my fingers the dimensional accuracy of this print is excellent because all of these holes all of these pins came out perfectly the overhangs are very very clean and this is an area where you look for ringing now once again old eyes and so I'll sort of try to make sure I'm focused in there I don't see any ringing there is one overhang right over here where there's one string of filament that drooped down now when I created this print I was thinking well maybe it's that pla plus from anchor mate maybe the printer is not so good the filament's great so I printed the same print using matter hackers build pla a pla that I get very good results from and the results were almost identical there's a little bit more stringing and maybe I can see the layer lines slightly more but everything else was identical still just a remarkably good print so I wanted to do something a little bit more complex something that would have taken a really long time to print on most of my other printers so I printed the Statue of Liberty now initially I turned on supports but there are no selective supports in their slicer I ended up with sports all over the place it was terrible so I turned off supports I said okay we'll see what happens I expected the crown here to be a problem you'll see in the close-up this is a really beautiful beautiful print and one of the things that's so nice that you see on all these prints you can see it on the blue even better is this textured print surface creates a really nice finish on these prints and even this large print when I put the fan on I called it to below 20 degrees Celsius I lifted it right off so this is an outstanding outstanding print now then I wanted to try something else that needed dimensional Integrity so I printed two things this is actually for a piece of sandpaper to make a little sanding stick but what's interesting about it is it has two screws here very small screws and I wanted to make sure those threads would fit properly and they fit perfectly they fit perfectly and then this is a lot of fun this sort of fidget toy and you can find this fidget toy at models.makewoodtech.com just search for rings and what's nice about this fidget toil models that make with tech.com is you're not limited to this size if you want to make a big one to try to make like a bracelet or something or something fun you can set the dimensions for this so this is really a lot of fun now one of the challenges with printing vases is that when you print them in vase mode they're generally not water type they print very fast but they're not watertight if you print them in a traditional mode they take a long time now you can print them by extelling your printer to print multiple walls no infill no top they print somewhere in between the two types this vase printed here let me see here I have it written down here in two hours and six minutes this is printed with three walls I filled it with water it's completely watertight I have three walls and three layers on the base you can hear this is this is a solid vase now this vase has an advantage because of the ribbing there's a place for the slicer to hide the seam because when you print in Phase mode you're printing a continuous line you're printing in traditional mode you're printing a layer going up printing a layer each time you go up you get a seam if you look at this really carefully I can't find my way I can find one right here you can see that the slicer did a pretty good job of hiding the seam along these ribs in sort of random places here it looks like there's another scene so if you had a completely smooth object you would see this theme using this approach but this printer is capable of printing Hollow objects that are very strong very very quickly so now let's put that in perspective so I slice the same vase with the same settings on my Ender 5 for my Ender 5 S1 it took as I said two hours and nine minutes here it would have taken five hours and 40 minutes at least on the Ender five so that just gives you an idea of how much faster this printer is than many other printers well folks I hope you learned something today what's my overall impression this is a really good machine it is expensive so this is basically an 800 machine there are some limitations the software is still evolving it's a very big company supporting this I expect it will get better but the software's still evolving the fan in the power supply is very loud and there have been reports from a lot of people about quality issues their prints are failing when they first get their printer generally these devices now mine didn't require this but generally all 3D printers when I get them I check that all of the belts all of the wheels everything is screwed and tightened down in fact this the belts on here I can tell by moving this manually are set very tight now because of that I ended up with excellent excellent print quality well folks thanks for watching if you can afford eight hundred dollars for a 3D printer this is a really good choice um there are other printers that are lower priced for more casual use this is a printer that I would consider in a true small business prosumer setting and one of the things that makes that so possible is Parts like this hot end are reasonably priced so if you need to replace them periodically you can thanks for watching this video I hoped you learned something if you did give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel go to models.makewoodtech.com and download and customize some models go to forum.makewittech.com to show me pictures of what you're making have a great day and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 8,668

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Id: hIQh23Ha9uE

Length: 39min 55sec (2395 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023