BIGGER 3D Printer for LESS $$?! - Elegoo Neptune 3 Max Review

hey folks alamandik mandic really here behold the Brilliant Blue Behemoth here perhaps the top Titanic 3D printer under 500 bucks but it has a hefty hiccup let's keenly critique and compare the eligue Neptune 3 Max [Music] with the alliteration out of the way let's discuss the elegoo Neptune 3 Max perhaps the prettiest priced printer printing prodigiously large I'm sorry I can't help it at this point in this video we will review this machine and compare it to the last big machine I reviewed the any cubic Cobra Max but let's get a quick disclosure out of the way eligu did provide this machine to me free of charge for the purpose of this review however no money is changed hands they are not seeing this video before you folks are seeing it and all of the opinions presented here are my own from using this machine and my own alone let's dive into the specs of this 3D printer because on paper this is really compelling this machine on elugu's website as of filming this video is 470 USD that's less than half the price of similarly size machines that have come out after this and approximately a hundred dollars less than the any cubic Cobra Max I previously reviewed of course the headline feature of the max is the build volume the z-axis is rated at 500 millimeters High the X and the Y are rated at 420 millimeters though I think that's for the memes I say that because in my measurement the bed measures 430 millimeters by 430 millimeters I know a lot of companies underrate the size of their machines but for 20 by 420 feels like a choice on the tool head of this machine we have a Cylon looking shroud I am inside of that shroud are dual 4010 Park cooling fans on either side of the direct drive extruder that uses a pancake stepper motor with dual Gear Drive that feeds into a stubby little heatsink and then on into a Mark 8 style heater block I don't know that eligue has any particular name for this but creality would call it the Sprite because it's identical to the Sprite as far as I can see a quick note that hot end is Teflon lined so you will be limited on your max temperature that you could reliably print at somewhere around 230 235c is what I would recommend it the most at the back corner of the tool head is a pretty cheapy proximity sensor used for auto bed leveling the X and Y axes both have quick easy belt adjustments on the ends of them speaking of that y-axis belt since this is such a large bedslinger it is running a nine millimeter belt with a single Nema 17 motor driving it this also has six v-slot roller Wheels riding on fairly widely spaced extrusions for the y-axis on top of the auto leveling it also has manual leveling with six leveling points four corners and two in the middle of the bed with springs and adjuster wheels and one of the things I was happiest to see with this machine it comes with a spring steel Pei coated sheet textured on one side and smooth on the other underneath this machine is one big panel with a whole bunch of screws holding it on that allows you access to the electronics box this is pretty thoroughly enclosed so you're not getting filament dropping through the machine or into the electronics box inside of there we have a 500 watt 24 volt power supply in the corner of the vastness of space that is this box you will find the main board that runs this machine it has an elegu version of a robin Nano board that has an arm 32-bit processor on it quiet stepper drivers if you look closely you may notice that only has a single z-axis stepper driver when we come back around to the top side of the machine on the back of the z-axis we will find dual Z Motors so those are driven off of one stepper motor so they are synchronized and cannot operate independent of each other there is a belt at the top of the z-axis to keep them aligned with one another but I would have preferred to see separate stepper drivers to round out our features there's a top spool holder a filament run out sensor up there as well a couple of z-axis support rods and even a little drawer in the front of the machine for storing tools and extra parts and last but most certainly not least we've got a touch screen interface magnetically attached to the front corner of the machine and here's where we'll start talking about running this machine I'm generally not a fan of touch screen interfaces on pretty printers this isn't for any silly Luddite reasons it's usually because the menu systems just aren't very deep on them these companies usually have to make their own operating system for the touch screen and many of them cut corners and leave out menu options that would be available on your standard click wheel like an ender 3 would have elugu did a pretty good job here this menu system has some depth to it I can adjust things like e-steps or acceleration Max speeds on the screen I can run an auto level I can control the Z offset pretty easily through this menu system and it also is only a magnetically attached so I can remove it and hold it so if I'm looking at this machine from a side angle it's not fitting on a table I can move it around and view it better it's not their most responsive touch screen on the face of the Earth but it does its job perfectly well and I don't hate it now before we get to the pros the cons and compare this machine to the any cubic Cobra Max yeah let's take a look at some of the prints I got off of this thing I printed some cosplay armor there's still supports inside of that helmet some practical objects big flexi stuff heck I even printed some flexible materials let's start with the cosplay inevitably whenever I talk about bigger machines I get a flood of questions about Cosplay stuff this is the way these files are provided to me by Nico Industries first up we have the Wolverine cowl and there's a definite issue here but the problems with this print are slicer and support setting related they're not related to the printer itself this was printed in polymaker matte black PLA and overall the layer lines the layer consistency looks really good on this one but when you kind of look at it at an angle this might be hard to capture on camera but there is some vfa mind you that's only visible when I look really closely at this and aside from the obvious issues with the print settings this turned out really good aside from the fact since I never print cosplay stuff I have no idea how to scale things to actually fit my head it's more Wolverine cow used a 0.4 millimeter nozzle and took over 48 hours to print moving to the Mandalorian helmet I started using a 0.8 millimeter nozzle here and things changed big time I've grown pretty impatient I have a bunch of fast printers and when it comes to my bigger printers I like to run large nozzles to get prints done as quickly as I can this is using a 0.4 millimeter layer height and the layer consistency lies they all look pretty darn good you can definitely see some serious stepping when it comes to the details but I figure that folks printing cosplay stuff are very likely to post process and finish their prints so I didn't see much of an issue here because this one printed in 27 hours which was a day of Time Savings versus the smaller Wolverine helmet it's not only larger than the Wolverine cowl but it also took more material at 1.4 Kilograms of course I still have support stuck to it because it wasn't really dialed in that well but I don't really intend to wear it mentioning how much filament that helmet used reminds me to stop and thank my patrons on patreon on it is thanks to you folks in your direct support of this channel that content like this is at all possible all of these spools of filament in front of me are the spools that I finished off on the Neptune 3 Max for this review I don't have a film and sponsor so this has to come from somewhere so thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of my patrons who helped to make this possible if you're not already a patron please consider checking it out at the link in the description but I printed more than just cosplay stuff on this machine such as these practical parts for my server rack these are air scoops slash blanking plates that are going to be installed in the rack to make it so my servers ingest cool air through the door and not stagnant hot air from inside the rack having the machine this large allowed me to print things like this for that server rack without having to do it in multiple pieces I also did a handful of calibration and test prints a 200 benchy with a 0.4 millimeter layer height that printed in just over two hours the overall quality on that print looks pretty darn good to me and I don't really have have any major critiques of it and then we have this big old Beast here the one thousand percent hot end God this thing's Hefty heatsink heater block heat break screws even a little collet and retainer clip on the top for a Bowden tube I really had to dial in the silk filament don't get me wrong I took some tuning and learning and time there's maybe a little bit of Z inconsistency up in the top area where it's getting close to those bolt holes so later times were varying a little bit up there but overall the quality of it I'm really happy with and there's actually two pieces of flexible filament on this so we should probably talk about how the Neptune 3 Max handles flexibles this black piece that goes in the top and meant for the Bowden tube coupler is 95a Overture TPU and this was the first flexible I printed on this machine it just printed well so then I wanted to try something bigger and more impressive and that's where this comes in the silicone sock for this one thousand percent hot end this was printed in ataraxia's flexible pla this is 89 a Shore hardness and it's quite flexible it really squishes and has them give to it this was a real pain to print but that was not down to the Neptune 3 Max it was down to the material it just really wanted to curl off the bed and would not stay stuck I posted a short about this a little while ago I finally got one complete print out of it it's not perfect but it turned out pretty darn good and at no point did the machine itself give me any trouble printing this material the last flexible I printed was this adorable little coochie Kopi from thin air 3D I used ninjaflex 85a TPU on this two perimeters four percent gyroid infill and you can really squeeze this thing down to almost nothing this ninja Flex material has given multiple of my machines a hard time in the past and the Neptune 3 Max's extruder just handled it like a champ now that we've had a chance to take a look at some of the prints off of this machine it's time to talk about the pros the things I've liked about using it the cons and the pro problems I've had with it and then compare it against the any cubic Cobra Max directly let's start off positive the biggest Pro with the machine is the bigness of the machine when you need a big machine there's no way around it you need a big machine the mod video I recently did for the bamboo X1 I made a single piece riser for the glass top on that by remixing an existing one that was meant to be printed in four separate pieces no other machine I had other than the any cubic Cobra Max would have fit that build volume that I needed for that print I mean you can literally fit the bamboo X1 entirely in the build volume of the Neptune 3 Max the direct drive extruder that came on this machine has worked out really well for me as I said I printed 85a TPU with it without an issue it's probably helping that Extrusion system that the Marlin firmware on the machine is well configured out of the box I've got linear Advance enabled and it's working perfectly and a star of the show for me it has that m600 posit height command enabled in there so I can pause at a certain layer height change out filaments and then go back to printing with a new filament for color changes the Pei coated spring steel bed sheet is great and adheres well and removal of prints is so easy when you've got a Bed full of a big print it makes a big difference to just be able to flex the bed and off it comes and some would argue the biggest thing the value here the price of this thing at less than 500 that you're getting a lot of machine for that money and there is an excellent value here but nothing's perfect there are always negatives so let's talk about the cons and the problems I had with the Neptune 3 Max various things I listed as Pros also have flip side cons to them on this machine the auto bed level sensor on this thing I mentioned earlier is kind of a cheapy proximity sensor I truly question how accurate and repeatable that is I definitely saw some points where the first layer was not perfect all the way across the bed some areas seem like a little too close some a little too far away the auto bed leveling was compensating but I question whether or not I get accurate readings to compensate off of a fairly big out of the box issue is the ribbon cable going to the tool head only has a p-clamp to hold it to the Gantry out of the box and that's just not sufficient it drags on the bed on the initial layer and could actually totally rip a print off the bed later on due to its sagging I designed a mount that angles it upwards holds it a lot more effectively and will prevent these issues that's available for download at a link in the description but the absolute biggest issue with this machine flow rate of the hot end this is a print that I did that filled the Bill volume on the Neptune 3 Max it's 420 millimeters X and Y and 500 millimeters tall and it printed fine within the volume but the print quality is just hot garbage this was printed phase mode it took over a kilogram of filament to print and I used a one millimeter CHT nozzle from bontec in the Mark 8 heater block on the machine I was pushing like 12 millimeters cubed per second flow rate which seemed lower than I should have been able to push and I was still under extruding printing this you can see Salmon skin you can see holes in the Extrusion it just didn't print well but I wanted to max out the build volume to ensure that the machine wasn't going to have any issues going that high as I said on big machines I like to run big nozzles I usually run at 0.8 millimeter nozzle on my Ender 5 plus I was running a one or a 1.2 millimeter nozzle in the Cobra Max most of the time on the Neptune 3 Max I ran a 0.8 C HT nozzle from Bond Tech the reason for that was the CHT nozzle helped to improve the flow rate of the anemic Mark 8 heater block that they include on this machine early on I did some baseline testing on this hot end I found that I was getting reliably eight to nine millimeters cubed per second flow rate with the standard nozzle that came in it running a bontec CHT 0.8 millimeter nozzle I was getting more like 14 millimeters cubed per second a definite Improvement but then you have to think about something like the any cubic Cobra Max that comes with a volcano heater block on it and that without a special nozzle is pushing closer to 20 millimeters cubed per second now this is not going to be a negative if you are fine with just printing slow and steady and to get the best quality off this machine as it's a big Slinger you're not going to be pushing a ton of speed that might make sense for you just stick with a 0.4 0.6 millimeter nozzle keep your print speed slow and just pump out big prints for somebody like me who wants to run a bigger nozzle so I can get through these prints quicker and arguably be stronger with larger extrusions for my larger practical prints it's just not a good enough hot end that's seriously my biggest problem with the Neptune 3 Max and I already mentioned the any cubic Cobra Max has a superior hot end in it so is that a better machine let's go check it out since before I even got the Neptune 3 out of the box folks have been asking me to compare these two machines together and I can understand why similar build volumes close in price and I'd already reviewed the any cubic cover Mac so that just makes sense I feel like I need to draw attention to my crappy backdrop here so that I cut off anybody picking on it to me for me almost everything about the Neptune 3 Max is superior to the Cobra Max it's cheaper it's got a bigger build volume direct drive Extrusion the only things that I don't like here is the direct drive extruder really limits your visibility to the nozzle area and I really like being able to see that it's much more visible on the Cobra Max and of course the flow rate letting me down on the hot end that's included with the Neptune 3 Max but then for most folks out there how often do you actually concern yourself with the flow rate of your 3D printer my use case is not everybody's use case and I don't think that's a limiting factor for most people who are going to be picking one of these up oh and the glass bed on the Cobra Max I am still not over how much I hate that bed this Pei coated sheet vastly Superior for print removal [Music] any cubic does now offer a Pei sheet for the Cobra Max but it doesn't come with it it's an additional 55 purchase outside of the machine let's get back to the bench and I'll give you my final thoughts on who I think this machine is for and whether I recommend it at all there's one more thing to mention about the Neptune 3 Max I didn't want to include it as a con because it could change over time that's inventory problems elegoo so far has not been doing very good about keeping this machine available for sale it goes up for sale and sells out really quickly whenever it's been coming in stock I've been blasting it out on social media on my Twitter Instagram Tick Tock letting folks know when it's available so they can scoop it up if they want to so maybe follow along on those platforms to see when that happens before the Neptune 3 Max launched I was going to upgrade the Cobra Max with direct drive and a Pei bed and various things I wanted to see that machine have then elugu dropped this machine into my lap and hey it's everything that I was going to do to the Cobra Max minus the flow rate on the hot end for my need and once I'm gonna see about upgrading the hot end and changing some things around to get it exactly what I want but I like tinkering you don't have to do that to get really solid prints out of that machine out of the box whether or not the elegoo is for you is hard to say do you need the build volume is the number one question I can ask you do you want it or do you need it don't get me wrong I love printing big stuff but at the end of the day the majority of stuff that I personally print would fit in the build volume of a boron 0.2 so do I need a machine like the Neptune 3 Max no I want it I understand and not everybody has a studio space that can fit dozens of printers heck I don't half of them are in the basement so if you have to displace or get rid of multiple machines just to make space for that one big machine you might need once every couple months does that make sense something important to remember about a lot of the positive things I said about this machine here is the three plus and the three Pro exist and they're basically the same machine in smaller form factors in fact I had a lot of fun printing the one thousand percent hot end but all of the components of this since it's broken into individual pieces that actually thread and fit together would have fit on the Neptune 3 plus I didn't need the max to print this I can't say whether or not this is the right machine for you but I hope I provided the information you need to make that decision if you want to pick one of these up there's an affiliate Link in the description down below that doesn't cost you anything more but it helps to support future content like this you know what else I can't say my intro to this video check out this outtake see you folks hey folks behold this Bodacious blue Behemoth potentially the prime prodigious printer perfectly priced under 500 bucks but beware it Bears a bulky bother let's rigorously review and compare the Colossal elugu Neptune 3 Max that is excellent but I'm never going to be able to say that without reading off the screen

Channel: MandicReally

Views: 83,520

Keywords: mandicreally, 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d printed, elegoo neptune 3 max, elegoo neptune 3 plus, elegoo neptune 3 pro, neptune 3 max, neptune 3 pro, neptune 3 plus, anycubic kobra max, kobra max, big 3d printer, big 3d printer build, budget 3d printer, creality cr-10 m4, creality, cr10 m4, cr-10 m4, elegoo, anycubic, cosplay, maker, diy, big budget 3d printer, huge 3d printer, large 3d printer, best 3d printer, elegoo neptune 3 max review, review, bambu x1, bambu x1 carbon

Id: EbQuP2mBNFs

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023