Ankermake M5C Review and Getting Started Tutorial

hi this is Irv Shapiro with make with tech and for the past four and a half years or so that I've been making videos about using technology to be a Creator a maker for DIY projects where I've covered well over a dozen maybe close to 20 different variations of 3D printers I've been looking for that ideal 3D printer that's very easy to get started with but would grow with you easily and well I found some remarkable products that allow you to get there they often require Advanced modifications replacing major components So today we're going to look at a 3D printer that is exceptionally easy to use yet has the potential to print very complicated models using a variety of materials that are normally not approachable with entry-level printers so if you want to learn more about the new anchor mate 5c stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] here at Maywood Tech we help people learn about technology in everyday language without a bunch of complicated stuff I've done a lot of videos on 3D printing a little bit on electronics a little bit on software a little bit on woodworking and today we're going to look at a product that might really have the chance of changing the world of entry-level hobby is focused and really small business educationally focused 3D printing and part of the reason is that anchor mate the manufacturer of this product is the division of anchor Innovations technology and many of you might know about anchor because as an example I have a spare battery for my phone that they made well they also have a number of other brands I was surprised to learn that the headphones that I use are also made by Anker so anchor mate is a large company a 1.5 billion dollar or larger company now why is that relevant the majority of 3D printers are made by manufacturers that were created to make 3D printers two names people may recognize if you've been in the market for 3D printers are prusa and creole both started for the purpose of creating 3D printers well anchor is different anchor is a billion dollar plus consumer electronics company that means a number of things it means they have very deep engineering expertise they have a very good distribution Network that means the ability to sell their products around the world they've had to deal with consumer support for a long time and in fact I reviewed their first 3D printer oh I don't know how long it was three four five maybe six months ago which was the anchor mate M5 now the Anchorman N5 if you look back at my review I thought was a very good printer a little bit pricey for what you got but really an excellent printer and to be honest it's the printer I use every day now when my grandchildren come over and they want something quickly I use my anchor mate N5 so I was intrigued when anchor reached out to me to do a review of the m5c and at the time I didn't really know where it was going to fit the review is being done under NDA so I'm filming portions of this before the printer has even been released to the public and this unit here is a pre-release model that means some things might not be identical to what you'll see if you buy one in the future it's also interesting that this is an entry-level 3D printer meaning it's targeting beginners yet it has many many things in common with you can actually see over my shoulder here the M5 overall many of these things are slight reductions in capabilities it's slightly smaller it has a single belt driving the bed back and forth that's called the y-axis but at the same time it has things that are a significant Improvement this has an all metal hot end what that means is it can be used for both traditional consumer grade filaments pla but it can also be used for more industrial filaments such as petg because this hot end can go to 300 degrees Celsius whereas the original M5 was rated to 260 degrees Celsius and to be honest folks had some trouble when they were pushing that temperature now we're going to take a look at the anchor mate m5c and answer the question of should this be your first 3D printer now before I get started with the overall characteristics the specifications of this printer I want to disclose that anchor mate sent me this printer at no charge along with a couple reels of anchor mate filament in order to facilitate this review let's begin with some specifications and if you're new to 3D printing some of this stuff won't make sense to you at first but it's sort of something you have to start every review with so as I mentioned the list price of this printer is going to be 399 it has a intro pricing of 359. and just like its Big Brother it will be available via a number of distribution networks here in the ish you can buy one of these on Amazon and get it the next day you also can buy some of the consumables the nozzles and the Silicon sleeves some of the parts not all the parts but some of the parts if you need them for this printer print area of 220 millimeters by 220 millimeters by 250 millimeters that's slightly smaller than the M5 it is blindingly fast it can print at a slightly reduced quality at up to 500 millimeters per second let me put that on in perspective the standard print speed of a creality ender three even the Ender 3s1 starts at about 50 millimeters per second that's 10 times faster in general you can print a 250 millimeters per second with very very good quality it uses standard size nozzles and standard size filament that means the filament is 1.75 millimeters in diameter and the nozzle is 0.4 millimeters you can use other nozzles for this printer what's a bit remarkable is that in this price range it has a number of relatively Advanced features it has Auto bed leveling where the nozzle is used to sense imperfections in the bed so that your print will stick properly it is a direct extruder that means that even though it has this tube here connecting to the filament it's actually a set of Gears inside this casing here that pull the filament through that's a direct extruder and it's an all metal hot end that means it can print it up to 300 degrees Celsius it actually has two CPUs inside one running the Marlin firmware which is sort of the traditional firmware that's often used on printers of the style and a different one running the communications because something that's very unique on this printer that's different than the M5 is you'll notice there's no touch screen there's no screen at all how do you communicate with this printer well you communicate with this printer either from your computer or from your phone but in fact you must use a smartphone perhaps you can use a tablet also in order to set up the Sprinter now at first that might strike you as inconvenient but the user interface available on a smartphone today is vastly superior to what you've seen on the front panels on 3D printers and I at the end of the day found it even better more convenient than using a touch screen or a knob or some other control there is one big button right here I'll move this back so you can see it easier that you can program for single Taps double Taps long Taps to do a variety of things I haven't really used that much I just have been using my phone which works great the print surface is the same material as the M5 it's a Pei coated sheet it's a textured sheet it works really well every print I've printed to this has stuck I was concerned that when I was printing these Advanced Materials petg would stick to well and pull some of the coating off so I used what's called a bed adhesive from a company called Magic goo which I really like I use the PA variant all that means is it's sort of a liquid you spread on the bed that both helps your prints adhere to the bed but also creates a separation barrier so when they cool down this is a special stuff that's sticky when it's hot and not when it's cold so when it cools down it releases the print so to set up this printer you take the anchor mate application you download it from your store that's appropriate for your phone the first thing you're going to do need to do is create an account I'll prompt you through creating an account and one of the interesting things about creating an account and you can create the account either from the anchor mate application or you can go to the Anchor met website and download their slicer the component that prepares prints for the printer and created from there when you create an account it asks you for a region and actually displays a message that is addressing one of the issues people have with Wi-Fi connected devices and while in the past in full disclosure they've had some challenges now they put up a message saying that they'll be storing your data in your region as a way to address those concerns this printer is not usable without a Wi-Fi connection at least for that for the initial setup once it's set up you can use the button on the front and a USB key in order to print because what will happen is when you press this button it just prints the latest file on this key but to set this up you will have to create an account at anchor mate now as part of the setup there are two ways the app can find the printer supposed to be able to find it via Bluetooth or by scanning a QR code that's on the back I wasn't able to get the Bluetooth to work remember this is a pre-release version but the scanning of the QR code worked seamlessly now the next thing you're going to need to do is you're going to need to load filament into this printer and the filament connects from the top on a reel to a tube here and for those of you familiar with 3D printers it looks like a Bowden tube it's not it's just a guide tube I'm not even sure why it's there maybe to keep the filament from tangling so what you do is you push the filament into year till it gets to the end then you pull this little lever back and you push it a little more then you go into your application and while you will not and I'm actually going to turn on my printer now so that I can go into the application and follow the screens that I'm chatting about them and you'll be able to hear the sound of the printer the fans are actually a bit quieter than they were on the M5 but there's still you'll hear them on the other hand it's about all you hear now that beep told me the printer is fully on so now I can go into my application and since I already added the printer I have a control panel right here in the application and you can see that on the screen well there is no load filament option here but there is a retract and extrude option so if I click on extrude I'm actually going to get a message saying I have to heat up the nozzle first and it will heat it up to 200 degrees Celsius that's great for printing with the standard acram anchor mate pla Plus or any other pla but if you want to print with more exotic filaments then you should say no at that point and you can literally click on the word nozzle that has a temperature above it and you can put on your own temperature and you'll see that right here now once you've loaded the temperature and it's come up to temperature you then can use the extrude function from the application but what if it doesn't work what if it feels like it's jammed and I guarantee you one day or another you will have filament jammed in your nozzle well that was one of the most pleasant surprises about this printer I'm going to turn this here so it's a little closer this little plastic cover comes right up it just snaps right up once you've listed the cover up it makes it very easy to pull this little guide tube out you press down on the filament guide here and you can pull the guide tube out now why would you want to do that well by pushing the filament in by hand pulling back this nozzle and pushing the filament in by and where you can get better pressure on it than pushing in from here if it's not already through the gears you can often clear a jam so to summarize that just cut off a piece of filament put it directly into the hot end pull the lever back heat this up and press it through to clear out any jams or get it loaded now once that's in place you can just slide this tube back in we can slide the cover down and it would be easier if I was in front of the printer instead of off to the side Slide the cover down put the clip back together and we are all set and one of my concerns often with having a direct extruded printer for beginners is it's hard to clear the nozzle if it gets jammed you have to unscrew a bunch of stuff so having this cover that slides off is a big plus now how do we go about starting a print well once again you go to your application and you have a couple options you can click on explore and you'll actually see some models from anchor mate if you click on those and print they'll just start it'll heat up the nozzle to the right temperature they'll just start they are all configured to print in pla though I have a more exotic filament in here right now left over from my last print so I would have to manually set the temperature the other way you can print is you can slice a model and we'll talk about slicing models in a minute you can place it on the USBC key plug that in and then you can start that from the application and you'll see in the three panels to the right in this on this slide you'll see the crystal generator listed twice and that's because it was produced on a Mac and Max put an extra file out there but there's a g code file that's what you select then you'll see a preview of The Print you click print you'll see it's loading and you're ready to go so you do it all directly from this device now while you're printing you also monitor it from your smartphone what if you get a model off the internet and it's not sliced already how do you prepare it well anchor mate supplies you with a proprietary slicer that's based on some open source software and their own modifications but they also give you instructions if you're a more advanced user on their website for how to use the prusa slicer or ultimaker Kira I actually thought the anchor mate slicer was very very good the current version of it appears to be Cura based there's some discussion in the internet that they might be changing that in the future but I found it very very easy to use and complete for the majority of use cases so you just go to the software area on the anchor made site you download it for your appropriate operating system now let me walk you through a couple of the steps here so when you load in a model this is what it looks like the graphic presentation is really nice on the right hand side you'll see we're in Easy Mode if you click on easy mode you have an a option to go to advanced mode and there you'll get most of the types of parameters that you're used to seeing in the cura slicer if you're a more advanced user when you load a model you just select the filament type you want you should start with pla they have pla plus listed but you can also use that for regular PLA and that's the anchor mate supplied filament which I found to be very very good but I also use this printer with filaments from other manufacturers and it worked equally well once you've selected those basic parameters you click on slice and then you'll see this variant and I've changed the colors a little bit to make it easier to see on the screen here normally the print itself is in Orange you'll see this rendering and by using the scroll bars on the right and the bottom you can look at individual layers of your print so this is what it looks like when you're looking at a layer of the print you can also look at the print itself versus supports now what are supports well if you look at this print you'll see there's some places where there's filaments sort of hanging from his chin some other places that's because 3D printers are not very good at printing in thin air if there's a layer underneath you're printing a layer on top they do a great job they can print a little short distance that's just a span but if that span is too great the molten filament will start to droop and you'll end up with artifacts that look like this to solve that you turn on a feature in the easy mode it's called Global supports in the more advanced mode you have the standard settings that you would have in Cura in fact you can see here what this model with supports holding up those areas that my troop would look like now when you're ready to print you either say export and you save it onto one of these USB keys and it can be any USBC key it's not a particular brand or you click on print if you click on print the slicer will go out to your network and find your printer you select your printer I have two on my network you click print and it will go that's all there is to it now this is the print you saw being sliced in that particular example it's a really beautiful print the surface looks excellent it's very difficult to see the layer lines but there is a bit of stringing where this print needed supports and I did not print it with supports let's look at some other prints that I printed with this the first thing I printed was this rose that was in the application so I actually found it in the application on the phone it's a very very nice print the quality is good there's a little bit of very fine stringing what is stringing stringing is where you see fuzz or strings hanging from your print which are caused by your printer moving its nozzle over an area where it's not extruding filament because that filament still hot some might droop out of the nozzle so there's a little bit of minor stringing here but overall this is a beautiful print next I went ahead and printed a very difficult print this is a print that fails on most entry level printers and it printed really well on this printer it succeeded now you'll notice one of these towers is broken off I broke that off when I went to grab it and I wasn't careful enough the only defect you'll see is some really thin cotton candy like stringy on these top Towers now these top Towers because they're so thin are very difficult for a 3D printer to print in addition you'll see there are holes down here well these holes are actually pins that come out that are printed in the middle of the holes not touching the walls with variance various tolerances that range from 0.2 to 0.5 millimeters all of the pins came out finally you can actually measure the size of these towers here to verify they're correct and they are very very good and you can check here and you can check over here to see if when you're doing bridging that's printing the filament over an open area whether droops this is one of the best versions of this print this Kickstarter quality print that I've printed but then I wanted to do both some standard things and some things that were more interesting so I printed a 3D Benji that I sliced and it came out extremely well you'll see these as common prints on many printers then I switched to petg now I used two different types of petg filament the first and this isn't a baggie because petg filament is very sensitive to moisture in the air if you leave it exposed for a long period of time it will not print well so this is uh from a cup manufacturer called Sun loo s-u-n-l-u and I purchased this right on Amazon and this next petg filament is from colorfab and it's specifically it's the colorfab XT filament which is one of my favorites now what's the difference between PLA and petg and why is it important to me to have a printer that can print in petg well p-e-t-g prints at a higher temperature that also means that it's glass transition temperature is higher what is glass transition temperature it's the temperature at which a material turns into like a rubbery consistency it starts bending easily well pla generally prints at 200 degrees Celsius and it's glass transition temperature is depending on the pla can be as low as 50 60 maybe 70 degrees Celsius that means if you print something this happens to be a phone holder that goes into the cup holder in a car so you can have your phone sitting next to you well if I print this in pla and I leave it in a hot car now this summer there are a lot of cities that got very hot in all likelihood this will begin to droop or melt now it won't turn into a puddle of plastic your car is not going to get that hot but if this was let's say some type of bracket holding something up it would probably Bend and release the object petg prints at about 240 to 260 degrees Celsius so much higher temperature and its glass transition temperature is also much higher so it's a better material to use for things that have to be in warm environments it's also stronger but its strength can mean a couple things in Plastics you have to look at the force at which it begins to bend and the force at which it breaks so petg is stronger than pla in general there are new plas that are special that might be as strong but as stronger in general but once it gets to the point where it's gonna break it doesn't really Bend at all it snaps pla does have the advantage that sort of bends before it breaks but it will not handle as much weight so p is a wonderful thing to be able to use for a lot of use cases most consumer grade 3D printers can't print them because they're limited to about 230 degrees or lower and that's really not warm enough to print a print like this for my car or I wanted a stronger hinge or I wanted something that was relatively clear really translucent and one of the advantages of the colorfab XT filament is that this filament and in fact petg across the board is available in clear now depending on your infill and exactly how you your geometry is set up meaning how the object is defined it won't print clear but it will absolutely be translucent so what's my conclusion when I first heard that they were going to have a new 3D printer with an all metal hotend I thought that would be a higher end 3D printer then I heard it wasn't going to have an LCD screen it only had a single y-axis belt it was going to be smaller and I thought I'm not sure where this fits then I learned that it was going to sell for under 400 I thought well maybe then I used it and I will tell you the phone-based user interface the integrated slicer the ability to print in petg makes this one of my favorite entry-level 3D printers so if you can afford approaching four hundred dollars this printer will do things those other printers will not and so I have no trouble at all recommending this printer as a good first printer a good printer to use in an educational setting in a library in a small business folks thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this video and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 2,015

Keywords: 3d printing for beginners 2023, 3d printing for beginners, ankermake m5c 3d printer, ankermake m5c review, ankermake m5c, 3d printing, 3d printer, ankermake 3d printer, ankermake m5, 3d printer for beginners, fast 3d printer, ankermake m5 3d printer, ankermake m5 review, ankermake m5 setup, best 3d printer 2023, ankermake m5 m5c, ankermake m5 3d printer review, best beginner 3d printer, ankermake m5c printer, ankermake m5 test, anker make m5, 3d printers for beginners

Id: oYaoPF1gyfU

Length: 30min 49sec (1849 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2023