Creality K1C - Flagship Carbon Fiber Printer

all right so today I'm presenting to you the creality k1c H let's look at this picture it looks pretty much the same as the creality K1 so I guess most of the differences are going to be under the hood so let's get this unboxed take a close look at all the internals and see what they really changed with this new generation of K1 now I had a creality spokesperson come by my office just recently and I actually cleaned up my office which is uh you know it's kind of a shocking thing when that happens it actually looks pretty nice around here but he asked why I have this 35 lb weight and it's so that I can do unboxings of 35 lb printers onehanded just like that okay the shipping weight of this thing is 14.5 kg that's inside of the Box let's get some of these foam blocks out of here and and let's start to look for some of the differences on this machine a power cable a couple pieces of door hardware just a really tiny activated carbon filter I don't think it's going to do a whole lot to reduce the smell of this machine but any little bit helps so let's get it installed that just kind of attaches to the back there let's take off this tape here's our little screen let's just get that attached up front there's just a tiny box of Hardware here we got some Allen wrenches some grease some glue stick I know a lot of people complained when their printers don't come with glue stick nowadays so we've got some glue stick [Applause] here I overtightened to the screw here and there's no metal inserts all right so now I have a 3D printer pen okay so I'm going to repair this by just injecting some pla into this bolt hole and then uh we'll screw in this bolt into that molten pla there we go okay so just looking at some of the differences it appears that they've done some minor improvements to manufacturability on the previous model these were stickers up here on the top now it looks like they did some kind of masking let's actually pull up the other creality K1 that I have all right so looking at these side by side I don't really see a whole lot of differences between the two now apparently there's some internal differences if we look at the hot end so let's do a closeup of that now the one thing that they're advertising is they have this unicorn nozzle hotend design it's supposed to be a little bit lower maintenance and easier to do nozzle changes so we'll take a look at that actually don't see any difference between this and the old creality K1 I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be 99% of the time you're just going to be printing with the standard4 mm nozzle on a machine like this so I really don't see the need to have an easy change nozzle system however it does look like the stepper motors have gone back to a more conventional sized pulley here so on this other design they went with these really large diameter pulley gears on this updated design it looks like they've kind of you know went back to the old size which is like roughly 20 teeth per Revolution the larger pulley gears over here are more like 40 teeth per Revolution on the older K1 so the newer K1 going with those smaller pulley gears hopefully that makes a good difference in print quality but everything else looks almost exactly the same this extruder latching mechanism feels a heck of a lot better than the old model that I had I know when when City first came out with the K1 they were having some undere Extrusion issues due to this extruder latching mechanism but this one is extremely assured in which setting it's set to it's like 10 times as clicky as a light switch you know like these little light switches over here this thing is extremely clicky very satisfying so that's definitely I mean I really hope that solves any type of extruder ISS issues that you might have with this machine this seems like it's going to be very reliable I just have to remove three silver screws in here and then the machine should be ready to go we've got a one-sided kind of engineering type plate here and it's got a little rubber which is just kind of like shoe sole rubber material almost and I guess that's for wiping the nozzle onto it's got a magnetic build plate just like um I don't know everything else the only new thing that I can see here is they've changed The Branding up front right here you've got this nice lettering that says the build volume and the k1c designation and this hinge is a lot sturdier than the old hinge I think some uh YouTubers had some issues with the hinge door flinging open and shattering so they've put some nice strong deten uh door hinges in here so it's nice to see that creality took that little piece of feedback seriously Al together seems to be really well built it looks like the filament runout detection system is the same and the cable system on top is similar but slightly different if you look on the original K1 the cable chain is flush mounted to the top of the hotend on this k1c it looks like they've spaced it up about 1 cm so that you don't have issues with this cable chain rubbing on things I know that was a common complaint that people had also when accessing the full range of motion we had issues with the cable chain kind of getting caught on this corner back here um which it didn't cause any print issues in my experience but it did give it kind of a cheap sounding rattly feel when that's kind of bumping around but over here you can see it clears the top of the printer so it's not going to bump into anything if you do have this lid in place let's take a look if you have this lid in place and the printer is moving around then it will rub against the edges a little bit but it shouldn't really cause any issues yeah it seems to be really free running in there so um that seems to be another issue that they wanted to fix on this new model of the K1 and it looks like they've addressed it also this cable chain being up a little higher means that you can have a more gradual curve for that Bowen tube going into the extruder so it won't be so much of a pinch point there as it's trying to round that tight Bend there's no major design changes here but it looks like they're fixing a lot of little things with this new k1c all right let's turn this thing on and see what happens okay that took about 20 seconds to turn on and that usually happens when I have the wrong power set setting on the power supply right now it's set to 230 Vols let's flip that over to 115 there we go it boots up a lot faster and the power supply and motherboard fan I'm not sure which one is turned on as I flip that switch it's really not that loud but it's louder than absolutely silent so I would like to have that quieted down a little bit it's uh right at that threshold of not being annoying enough for me to feel like actually changing it so let's go through the setup here and you have to agree to this privacy policy I don't really like these privacy policies and cloud services but if you never hook this thing up to the internet then you shouldn't really have to worry about it you can connect this to your Wi-Fi we've got a nice full keyboard here all right touch screen is nice and responsive so it was really easy to enter my password there you can skip that step if you don't want to hook it up to any network and just run it off of this USB port as well so you've got really nice connectivity options using this USB type a port now it's going to run its self check so I guess we just hit start detecting and it's going to do its own startup procedure and calibration and all that kind of thing so let's just uh let it do its thing now according to the information I've received from creality this k1c is supposed to be a K1 kind of carbon Edition that's capable of printing with kind of carbon reinforced materials so it's kind of the equivalent of the x1c you know that bamboo lab x1c Flagship product k1c instead of x1c you can see where they're going with that so I'll be testing out some carbon filed materials just to see how this machine handles it they're probably using a copper nozzle with a steel insert at the tip so that it can handle those abrasive materials a little bit better we'll be trying out a couple different materials um one other thing that I just realized is there's a webcam over here in the corner so overall this is just a refreshed version of the K1 if you already have a K1 I'm not sure it would worth upgrading to this machine since it's going to be roughly the same however it looks like they've fixed a lot of the small issues that you had with the K1 on this k1c so This cable chain routing is a little bit better the uh extruder appears to be of much higher quality and those changes might actually be incorporated onto the regular K1 so right now we're doing the input shaper and you can hear this thing is shaking around quite a bit one thing I really like about about this machine so far is how fast and responsive the touch screen is so when I push buttons on here it's like immediate and using that keyboard is nice and easy okay and we've still got the same massive turbo powerered fans on these machines so they are a little bit loud that's one common complaint with the K1 series is how loud they are and that really just comes down to the massive amount of part cooling they've included on these machines I think it might be installing some kind of speed limiter either through firmware or Hardware where you can reduce the overall maximum speed of that part cooling fan on the side here just because I mean it's a bit much I mean more power is more better but after a certain point it's just more noise so now it's doing its automatic bed leveling thing this is pretty common for printers nowadays but if you haven't seen it before let's just take a look so I guess self check complete so let's see how fast this puppy can go ooh there's a little rubber gasket here too which I assume is to get a better seal when you close this door there's still a gap down here at the bottom but I've seen some aftermarket mods where people print out a little piece that just kind of covers up this area so this should be a much better better machine in terms of like trying to get an enclosed sealed space since we're hooked up to the network I might as well see what this webcam feed looks like and uh we'll slice and upload a couple parts I could slice a Beni but I feel like that's kind of boring let's go with something else delete ah right click delete yes this is a project that I'm working on I'm going to print out a 50% scale prototype just to see what it looks like meanwhile we've got our print getting started over here on the K1 all right I'm going to stop this test with the pement just because I'm not sure if this is a filament that's optimized for high flow printing we can see some kind of issues here it looks kind of perforated let's switch over to some City's hyper series filament which is is supposed to be designed for their machines and for this highspeed printing capability which you definitely need when you're pushing these really high printing speeds you're just moving so much filament that it needs to flow well these little models I had printed out on my my K1 originally and they had little issues with vfas so I'm going to see if that's been addressed in this new version of the K1 all right this test print is coming out a lot better I assume what was happening on the previous prev run was uh we were basically using a filament that wasn't optimized for high flow printing so it just couldn't keep up with the Extrusion demands of this high-speed print but now that we've got the hyper pla in here which is similar to a lot of other manufacturers that are producing their high flow series of filament um this is looking a lot better so let's go ahead and stop this to do the most valuable testing once you see and can assess whether the thing is working or not you stop and move on to the next thing otherwise you're over testing okay let's go ahead and start the Beni and uh it says it should be done in 16 minutes Also let's take a look here at this highspeed 600 mm perss test print I was thinking that maybe since they reduced the gearing ratio uh due to the pulley being a different diameter in the back of the machine there since they're using smaller pulleys now you might think that they'd be losing out some of the high-end speed that the old machine was capable of but nope those stepper Motors just spin faster to make up for the difference and it's still able to achieve these um 600 mm/s print speeds in terms of the print quality here I can't see any layer lines seems to be very consistent and clean print but that's what we come to expect out of printers nowadays they just have to work so I mean so far this thing's been working pretty well let's see how the Beni turns out and then we'll do some practical prints just to evaluate this machine further all right so another test model that I've loaded up here is a bunch of these little bearing these little rollers that go inside of a 3D printed bearing that I was messing around with pre previously um this does a really good job of drawing out the vfas that were present on the previous K1 model so I'm really curious to see how this print turns out also I printed out this tie thing uh it's like a print in place mechanism and you break it loose and it's like a chain mail kind of thing it's a pretty cool print and it's got my Channel logo on there so it's just a fun thing to wear if I go to events this will be a really challenging print lots of retractions lots of moving around and print small objects so this will be a really good stress test let's go ahead and slice this and while this Beni is going let's go ahead and take a look at the printer UI so here's the laptop view you can see it's got a pretty high resolution camera here looks like it's at least 1080P and unlike the crap you get on some other printer manufacturers you actually get a really good frame rate here this looks like 15 or so frames per second second really nothing to be too upset about image quality looks nice and good it's also in a relatively useful spot there we'll see if I can actually change the angle of the camera a little bit Yeah well it would be nice for the camera to be pointing to the left a little bit just to kind of Center the frame but this is good enough uh maybe I can work on that after the printer has stopped moving but anyways you can see all this useful information here this is like a a Clipper like interface I guess it's called fluid let's see we've got exclude object that's awesome oh man and this bed mesh is not looking so flat I don't know is that really that bad let's see looks like we've got plus half a millimeter up here then uh minus 3 mm down there I mean that's the nice thing about automatic bed leveling is that it compensates for these kind of you know skewed beds automatically I'm not sure if that's even enough skew to be visibly you might not even be able to see that just by looking at it I'm looking at the bed right now and I can't exactly tell which Edge is lower so I think I can fix that by um rotating one of those screws relative to the others but yeah exclude object is a really cool feature so let's say I'm printing 20 items like uh I don't know like this and let's say this cluster of little items starts failing well with exclude items I can actually just click the one that's not working well anymore and then it'll delete that out of the current build and it'll continue printing the rest of these I think that's a really good feature to have if you're running a really large print job and something fails you don't want to have to waste that entire tray of half printed Parts you can just cancel the one that's not working anymore and proceed that way let's see we've got these fans I guess we can control them here let's see if I turn that side fan off does that quiet things down a bit yeah it does model fan let's turn that one off too oh yeah that's a lot quieter but we have to keep these turned on otherwise I think we're going to have issues with the print quality on this Beni it doesn't show all of the information like uh for instance we don't have volumetric flow rate showing up on this graph we have the current x and y coordinate you can see the Z has to change quite a bit to compensate for that bed not being perfectly flat but overall it looks like things are working out pretty well so we're going to finish printing this Beni pretty soon looks like we're going to be right on schedule right around 16 minutes all right while this Sprint is running I think now is a good at time as any to do a decel test so this is kind of a worst case scenario we've got the top and front open with all the fans running full blast so let's just see how loud it is in the worst case as is customary I do this from one arm's length away let's see what we've got so right about 62 DB that's incredibly Loud Let's go ahead and shut the top looks like right around 53 DB so immediately you're getting like a 10 D reduction just by closing this thing off a little bit I think actually you've got an appreciable amount of noise coming out of this small Gap here so let's just say we're able to plug that up all right so just by plugging up this little Gap Gap in the bottom we'll do one more measurement arms length away okay so still right around 53 DB so not really a noticeable difference from that small Gap being there all around this kind of top perimeter I guess there's a hole back here as well there's there's little bits of uh sound being able to escape out of all of this because this isn't foam lined up here this is just hard plastic against metal there's no foam in there kind of filling the Gap and preventing the the noise from spilling out which I think on the K1 Max and some of the other printers kind of in this price range they actually put foam gaskets around all of these kind of ceiling points which really helps hold the noise in quite a bit I mean it's just a little bit of material here and there but it ends up making quite a big difference so maybe that's a mod that I could do on here put a little bit of uh you know extra material just to seal up these last little bits and areas where sound can escape but overall I mean 53 DB that's not too bad it's well within you know the limits of other printers in this speed and price category I mean that fan is incredibly loud but it's doing an important job at making sure this Beni doesn't look like crap so yeah okay and then when the print is done it turns this side fan on and this part cooling fan on all the way to try and cool down the hot end as fast as possible let's just turn all that off now all we have is kind of the fans inside the bottom of the machine so that's the motherboard fan and the power supply fan we'll see how loud it is at idle here so arms length away so about 44 DB now that's to say that silent operation isn't one of the machine strong suits what it's good at is I mean what you see here printing things as fast as possible and having decent print quality while it's doing it so let's take a look at this I mean we can do some close-ups of this later but this is extremely good print quality for a 16-minute Bene definitely nothing to complain about here I mean this is a darn near perfect benry at those speeds I don't see any ringing that's just very good okay so let's go ahead and get some of these other prints started I loaded them up onto this flash drive I can import print jobs through this web interface so all I have to do is go to the IP address if we go to our network settings uh it'll have the printer's IP address listed there you just enter that into your web browser and then that pulls up this interface screen and you can start and stop print jobs from here you can check the history basically a lot of the same options that you get here you also get on this web interface so that's really nice to be able to start up your print jobs that way and you can even upload files here um see I can click this import button and then that'll open up my files and I can import whatever pieces of G-Code I want onto this machine creality print does have a great uh multiple device management tab here so if you have like 20 printers you'll be able to load them all up in this tab however since this is a pre-release model um I I'm guessing that the support for this printer isn't built into the slicer just yet at this moment but I would expect it to be when this printer actually launches so once that's working you'll have all your printers loaded up you can ceue up jobs to them and check the status of all your printers quite easily that way but for now I'm just using the USB drive or if I wanted to I could also uh upload files this way using this little import button um also I can check my webcam here so lots of cool functionality but let's go ahead and get some more print jobs started so I can plug in my USB drive here we click the USB drive button and then we've got all of our print jobs loaded up right here it looks like I forgot to uh load that last job onto the USB drive so actually I'll use this import functionality so I'll just go to that piece of G-Code we'll open that up and that'll upload the G-Code onto the machine using this web interface so nice and convenient there we're already 50% the way done so it's a nice and fast data transfer there and once that's uploaded I can see it here so now that print job is showing up at the bottom there also if I look on my local files here I can see that print job loaded up right here and it even has a nice preview of The Print model so I think that might be a feature that you only get by using creality print uh they might have that kind of functionality using Orca slicer but I don't use Orca slicer all that much if you go into Orca slicer you will have a bunch of print profiles baked in for this K1 so if you want to use a different slicer you can always use Orca slicer and then upload your jobs wirelessly using this online workflow or just put them on a flash drive and toss them over onto the machine according to creality this print job is going to be almost hours so let's just flip this over into time-lapse mode I'll come back to either a giant bowl of spaghetti or hopefully some nicely finished [Music] parts [Music] [Music] all right so this print job finished up pretty uneventfully let's go ahead and peel off the plate all right so let's take a look at this this covered most of the bottom of this print surface and it appears to have excellent first layer quality so everything seems to be working just fine let's go ahead and switch over to this ptg I want to repeat my tests where I'm printing out some of these small diameter little thing ofama Jigs and that's really going to show me whether the vfa issue has been fixed on this machine so let's just switch this out all right and before we get started with this next print job I'm actually going to change print surfaces this is a print surface from my cr10 SE so I'll just go ahead and pull this one off and put this in it in its place and it looks like it fits just fine in here I personally prefer the way pgti to this Pei sheet material so that's why I want to use it now I uploaded some models into this machine from Orca slicer and the Orca slicer previews aren't loading correctly I'm pretty sure there's some way to get this working correctly but I wasn't able to figure it out it's not loading any of the uh the metadata about this print but it does have the bed and print temperature as well as the time prediction in the title of the part itself I'm going to go ahead and skip the calibration oh wait no I probably want to do the calibration because this is a new bed sheet so this will be a PG test print and it'll have the dual purpose of verifying that the vfas are truly Dead and Gone on this K1 and again the reason why I'm doing so much investigation about the vfas on this machine is because on the older K1 I was having issues with that so let's take a look here the main difference is I think this pulley gear in the back it's much smaller in diameter it's like a 20 to pulley if we take a look over at the old K1 as well as the K1 Max I believe you can see they decided to go with some wacky stuff here you can see that pulley gear is much larger and I guess they were going for absolute highest speed possible by going with those large diameter pulley gears this the only reason I can think of why they would do that they've decided to stick with a more conventional pulley size and I'm hoping that helps fix a lot of the issues that we were having with vfas and what are vfas well let me just do some close-ups here these were some of the troubled parts that came off of my old K1 and you can see that texture on these parts looks like about every millimeter is a bit of a bump there I'm not sure exactly what was causing it but on larger Parts it wasn't really apparent that that was an issue but it was only on like really small objects like that where I would see those vfas showing up so you know I've designed a special print job just to investigate and see if it's still an issue so we'll see how that turns out in terms of this plate everything looks pretty good there is a little bit of surface roughness on the edges everything's nice and smooth this nice satin glossy finish that you get on the bottom with the provided build tray is pretty nice so let's get this PG Printing and then next up we'll run some carbon fiber nylon Parts because I think that's what the C stands for this k1c it might stand for carbon fiber printability so we'll investigate anyways I'm going to switch this over to time-lapse mode just because watching I don't know 3-hour prints one at a time is not the most entertaining way to spend your day so let's just uh speed it up a little [Music] bit [Music] okay so I just had a print failure on this thing basically the bend radius for that PTFE tube was two sharp so the filament broke inside of the tube I mean that's a common problem if you're dealing with stiff carbon fiber reinforced filaments but it's something that on a printer that's designed to print carbon fiber filaments should be sorted out anyway so that broke and then as the printer just kind of sat not printing for a while it was continuing to run I guess there's some heat creep that worked its way up into this heat brake so when I try to feed some filament in here you can see it doesn't want to go very far in it stop STS about there which is all the way up here it appears we have a clog so what I'm going to try and do is heat this whole thing up blast it with some heat and force that through and hopefully we can do a cold pull and remove any residual plastic in here this is one of the downsides of having this proprietary type nozzle it's a easy nozzle change but I don't have a spare nozzle on hand right now and uh you know I can't just throw some random nozzle from one of my other printers into the machine so I'm going to try and clear this clog out hopefully I don't damage anything so I'm just going to heat up this whole section from the hot end all the way up to this heat brake area where I suspect the nozzle clog is so let's just heat it up okay so that's melting this plastic already but uh yeah that's PLA and what's stuck in there is is probably that carbon fiber nylon so that's going to be really hard to clear out just cuz I need such a high temperature so this is going to be tricky let's heat it up some more I think I'm actually going to use this metal tool that creality provides there we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so now I'm going to take this hot end apart I mean I probably failed at trying to clean this nozzle out I think I burnt out a lot of the filament and it kind of turned to dust but um overheating this nozzle could be a bad thing it looks like this is a threaded piece on the tip so I'm going to see if I can unthread it so I can't tell if this is a press fit or some sort of screwed together construction I tried taking it apart but it didn't work very well so we're just going to leave it alone alone and creality is sending me a replacement nozzle however I think what I'm going to do here is see if I can install this micro Swiss flow Tech hot end so micro Swiss sent me one of these to check out so uh I guess I'll see if it fits on this machine and it comes with its own hot end that looks like it'll be a little bit more sturdy just because of this metal construction and they've covered up that ceramic heater with a little metal shield which is a nice touch it allows one-handed nozzle changes pretty similar to what creality has provided there's a couple small differences I'm noticing though and the main one is this diameter is different so on the flow Tech hotend you have to install this little copper sleeve thing then every time you thread a nozzle into here uh it threads in and you know this butts up inside of this little copper heat transferring device that helps you bridge the gap between the Heat brake and the install heat sink inside of the K1 I have a feeling this isn't going to fit in the stock configuration so I might have to do some modifications here so I'm just going to go ahead and take this apart and I'll be giving my feedback to micro Swiss so hopefully they can adapt this flowtech Hoten to work on this new k1c one kind of annoying thing about this K1 is there's no way to move the table downwards oh wait if I push on it it'll [Music] move so never mind you just got to push on it with a little bit more Force make sure you're pushing kind of in the middle of the bed and that should drive the table down okay so what I want to do here is I actually want to remove the entire um heat sink inside of here just so we can take a look at it I know the previous iteration of the heat sink had some issues in my opinion some little design improvements could be made to it also this PCB seems like it's a little bit wobbly and loose these feel like they were inserted all the way it's just they weren't completely clamping down on this little uh breakout board here wow that's interesting so I'm not sure if you can tell what's going on here but we've basically got this uh heat sink which it looks like they have made some improvements to it they've actually cut all the way through here so you can see my finger behind here uh through this heat sink so the air is passing all the way through if the air is going all the way through that's a big Improvement to just blowing flat up against this plate and getting trapped because with heat sinks it's important to have air flowing through it it's not enough to just blow air at it the air has to go past those fins in order to dissipate heat into the air in terms of the heat brake design it really doesn't look that efficient you can see we've got these two spacers and then two screws kind of attach it to this aluminum block when we insert this nozzle here this is the stock creality nozzle and we thread it in this kind of just goes up in there and then uh well the threads are all kind of gunked up because of my experimentations I was doing with the blowtorch but anyways this goes in there and then this copper piece in the middle here actually goes up inside of this aluminum part and there was a little bit of thermal paste on there so that helps dissipate the heat into this heat sink however the issue here might be this little thing is transferring too much heat up into this aluminum heater block let's unscrew that and take a closer look at it now just's use tiny screws let's just unplug this uh heater making sure my power is off before I keep doing this I don't want to short any of the connectors here and damage the printer all right so here's the Heat think and let's take a closer look at this little assembly we've got here these are little pieces here that kind of function as spacers and then the screws go through the middle there and clamp this down now these spacers seem to be very big they might be kind of too big so the issue here is since you're only using two of these spacers they have to support a load in a Cana lever mode so if you look at at it from the side you know you've just got this these two Fasteners right here and any bending load like this that the tool head sees it's going to need to react that with these two little Fasteners which isn't ideal I mean really you want to have three or four of these little spacers arranged in a square or triangular pattern to react any type of load but with this since they're in a line you know that's a really bad load case kind of bending to front and back like that so I I guess they had to size them up but as a consequence they're now a little bit too big and are transferring probably a significant amount of heat up into that heat sink so you can see this heat sink here it's going to have to be dissipating more heat because of these big fat spacers I think these are some kind of ceramic because they have kind of a a strange surface finish I mean they're not really shiny and they feel a little bit lighter than I feel like something this size should be and and I've got my little tool here I can pick stuff up and you can see here oops these do not react to the uh the magnetic field from the screwdriver so these are probably some kind of ceramic uh low thermal conductivity element but that kind of nozzle clog that I experienced shouldn't happen even when it's clogged overnight and the filament's just sitting in that area for a long period of time you really shouldn't have issues with nozzle clogging like that now another potential reason might be the way they have this fan set up this fan gets installed here behind this PCB so the Fan's right here and then the PCB is right in front there so it's obstructing the intake of the fan a little bit which might be reducing the air flow that you're getting but overall you should be getting a decent amount of air over this heat sink let's take um the bamboo lab hot end for example you can see it's roughly similar in terms of surface area I think this bamboo lab hot end has maybe twice the surface area and the fan is positioned in a in a way that it blows more air through those vent holes so this might be maybe twice as efficient plus you don't have the heat load from the additional supports that they've added on the creality hot end on this bamboo lab hot end it's just the typical design where you've just got that one small heat brake that's carrying all the load regardless uh I had an issue that I feel like I shouldn't have had on this machine so yeah now when it comes to installing this flow Tech hot end I don't think it's going to work very well because um well this copper piece is too large to fit in here also if you take a look at this area above the heat brake you can see you've got this really long uh extended portion of the heat brake that goes up into the machine so that kind of guides the filament way up here down into the heat brake and if I were to just install this flow Tech hotend I'm not sure it would work it'll need to have this tube so just make this titanium piece you know quite a bit longer I think this is something that micro Swiss could do ah okay so all that's to say I didn't have a very good experience trying to print carbon fiber with this machine however the PG and Pla prints that I was running seemed to work just fine it's just you know what does the C stand for does the C mean carbon fiber or something or does it just mean slightly improved K1 to me it doesn't seem like this machine is really ready to do carbon fiber printing mainly because of the issues that I had so you know that clogged hot end also this Bowden tube up top has to Sharp of a Bend radius and you can see that carbon fiber filament inside of there it snapped as it was going around that bend radius so you know this really isn't a machine that's ready to do carbon fiber printing in my opinion but it is a very good printer in other ways like if you just printing regular materials so I think there's a bit of a branding issue this really isn't a k1c in my opinion this is just a K12 that's kind of you know got some nice design improvements in there you've got the easier nozzle changes you've got the uh slightly improved heat sink here with those vent holes that go around back so I mean there's a lot of nice little improvements on here but it's just not a carbon fiber filament printing machine in my humble opinion now they have on here listed uh generic pla carbon so maybe this would have worked with City's pla carbon fiber filament I actually have some of it here so I'll be trying this out at a later time when I get this hotend replaced but overall you know what's the deal with this machine all right well time to share my final thoughts on the bamboo lab k1c creality k1c and how it compares to the old creality K1 so there's a bunch of minor improvements here I'll just go over all of them now for clarity the first one is the cable chain so instead of having just a flat cable chain that runs along the top plane of this printer they've elevated it a little bit with this spacer and I think that makes it run a lot smoother especially when the lid is off the cable chain behaves really well and it just goes to this outer area when it's moving um so that's a nice little Improvement also the heat sink inside of here is improved they added some slots that cut all the way through the aluminum heat sink so that allows more air to pass through there and allows them to dissipate more heat also they changed the belt pulley in the back so now they're using a more standard smaller sized belt pulley which probably sacrifices a little bit of the top end speed but it ends up being more optimal for regular Printing and I think that also allowed them to use smaller stepper Motors because the amount of force you can exert on a belt like pulling and pushing it using a pulley and motor is proportional to the diameter of that pulley so if you use a smaller diameter pulley you can get more Force out of those Motors so that has essentially allowed them to spec a smaller motor if you look on this K1 it's got some absolutely massive stepper Motors and on this k1c the stepper Motors are just a little bit bigger than average but they're not the huge jumbo uh stepper Motors that you've got on the K1 also the extruder issues seem to be all sorted out that was kind of an issue that plagued the original K1 the uh the little flipper switch up here was basically having issues where it wasn't firmly clicking into the engaged position um but now on these newer extruders that's no longer an issue um on both of these printers that I have right now these extruders are very tight and you're not going to have the same undere Extrusion issues that were common with the very early model k1s so whether you get the K1 or the k1c your extruder is probably going to be fine they've really sorted out those issues and uh yeah they just you know they seem to work a lot more reliably now also this k1c comes with a nozzle with a hardened steel tip so you can print abrasive materials right out of the box um I guess creality is trying to push their new uh hyper pla with carbon fiber added which basically should be like a normal pla but have increased stiffness so that could be something that's worth printing on this machine I tested out carbon fiber nylon because that's really the main reason you'd want to switch over to using a carbon fiber reinforced material in my opinion um because you're getting that increased strength as well as the toughness of nylon if you print other materials using carbon fiber reinforced filaments they'll be very brittle and easy to snap nylon has such a high base toughness that it's able to handle that carbon reinforcement really well and produce like extreme mechanical properties pla is kind of stiff enough already if you were to print out a pla part and a nylon part the nylon is actually quite flexible um so when you add carbon fiber it stiffens it up and kind of makes an improved material versus pla it's already stiff enough it's really easy to print at low temperatures you can print it on really cheap machines I don't think that's a really good example of a carbon fiber reinforced material I think uh you know Carbon Fiber nylon is really what should be the gold standard for carbon fiber reinforced uh materials and printers and any material that's capable of printing carbon fiber reinforced materials or advertised as such should be able to handle carbon fiber nylon because uh personally I think that's the main reason you'd want to print with a carbon fiber reinforcement also this k1c comes with a camera pre-installed so you can monitor your prints and watch everything that's happening but largely these two machines are pretty much the same alth differences that I mentioned really aren't game changers in any way on my K1 which I destroyed by doing really stupid things with it I didn't notice any major differences in the print quality or speed the main issue that I had with this K1 was just the extruder not working and since the newer models are shipping with improved extruders that's no longer really an issue so I mean the K1 is still a great printer the k1c has some improvements and I do think those improvements uh make for a better user experience but there's some downsides to it mainly their switch to a proprietary nozzle system like this it means that you can't just buy any random nozzle and install it into this machine now they might be able to make some kind of adapter that's like you know basically this assembly but with the tip cut off and then you can thread in a V6 style standard nozzle and uh you know they could do something like that I think prusa did that with their system that's remarkably similar to this but yeah it still has some of the same issues with serviceability these machines are very well constructed but let's say in the future a bearing goes out or something you're going to have a really hard time replacing it compared to the old Ender 3 style machines you know you can replace basically any part on those in a matter of minutes versus this would require you to disassemble the frame and do some weird stuff to get these rods out or you know replace these bearing blocks on the sides a lot of the components on this corxy stage are glued into position or press fit into position so it's really not a user serviceable design I really like what they did with the cable chain here that fixes like all the issues that I was having however when you have the lid on here it's still going to kind of collide with it a little bit and might cause some issues um but really you can avoid that if you have the lid installed you can avoid those issues by not printing in that back left corner there I think one kind of problem that this design has in general is this Cable Management especially when it goes to this back corner see you have this overlap it's like hanging off the back of the printer here which this lid has a hard time containing so the real issue here is that they decided to taper in up at the top if they would have just kept a square profile all the way around there would probably be enough room for this belt uh and this cable chain to be just hanging out over here in the back but since they decided to taper it in a little bit you run out of space and you you kind of run into issues there so that's something that would require a slight redesign to just like kind of have this top Edge just be straight I still like the print surface that this machine comes with I like the speeds that you can achieve um I solved the vfa issue I know a lot of people complained about that but basically the trick with that is to just turn the speeds down so I was running uh a print and then halfway through I turned the speed down to 25% and then the outer layers were much much cleaner after you know reducing the speed slow it down when you have features that have uh important surface finish requirements and it just gets rid of all the vfas and replaces it with just nice smooth Extrusion overall both of these machines are really well built and they're offering really great value it's just uh you know with this k1c I think they're advertising it as a carbon capable printer but since it was having trouble with this carbon fiber nylon that I was trying trying to print with it I wouldn't call it as such um really it's just a slightly improved K1 with some you know some decent design improvements however the one thing I don't like is their use of this proprietary nozzle system uh because it's really put this review on hold because you know when I had a clog in this nozzle that I couldn't resolve I couldn't just pop it out and clear the nozzle because you know you can't just push the jam through if you push really hard you have to do it with the nozzle heated up really hot as well as the section where the clog is occurring heated up then you just got to like brute force it through and try and squish that out of there um and that's hard to do so obviously I was having issues with it versus on the regular K1 you can just unscrew the nozzle uh take out the heat brake maybe replace the heat brake if you need to it's a relatively standard part I think I have one over here you know this heat brake is pretty similar to what we see on other printers I'm pretty sure you could get something that's designed for like an ender 3 or similar printer and just pop it in there and it would work and then it can fit standard volcano style nozzles on this K1 hot end versus this one you have to use their proprietary nozzle system and I haven't seen the pricing or whatever on these I'm sure it's reasonable creality doesn't really tend to gouge you on pricing on creality stuff usually upgrades cost between $10 and $20 so maybe this would cost maybe $25 since it's got all these extra pieces in it maybe $30 and that's kind of the issue with these proprietary nozzle systems instead of being able to take advantage of existing Supply chains and open source designs that everybody uses you're kind of locked into just getting nozzles from creality until the thirdparty manufacturers end up uh spinning up production but you know in 10 years I bet people are still going to be producing volcano nozzles but I don't know if they're going to going to be producing these proprietary nozzles from all these different uh 3D printer manufacturers since volcano nozzles have hit this kind of critical mass and so many people use them you basically ensured that there's going to be a supply chain basically indefinitely for these products well at least as long as you'll live until we can start 3D printing nozzles which uh believe it or not is a thing I mean this is a case of two steps forward one step back in my opinion there's a lot of really great improvements on this machine and a lot of them have actually been folded back into their regular K1 uh something I'm noticing here is this hot end is a lot tighter on this new K1 I wonder if they worked on their tolerances for their bearings and stuff but it seems like this is a lot sturdier this one kind of rocks back and forth just a little bit but you know this is just they're improving the design they're working on it uh I just wish they would consult me you know personally just give me a call and be like hey uh what do you think of this design we're working on I could be like uh no do something different um so at the end of the day both of these machines are pretty similar if you can find a K1 on sale and it's $100 cheaper than a k1c I'd probably still opt for the K1 just because you know it's not that big of a difference I mean this one has the camera monitoring and stuff I guess that's important for some people for me personally well I guess I could have used it in this case and saw that broken down print and stopped it early instead of letting it run for a while and jam itself up but at the end of the day both of these offer the same thing they're both really high-speed printers um really good print quality at high speeds you've got a great user interface you've got you know USB workflow capabilities you've got uh great landan capabilities so just by logging into your Wi-Fi you can check a bunch of stuff on these printers and the other great thing about these is you can root them so you can put your own version of clipper on here and basically reprogram and mod these if you feel like doing that so yeah that's about all I have to say about this machine we'll get it back up and running when I get one of the new proprietary nozzles from creality and just screw that in and put this all back together if you want to pick one of these up check the affiliate Link in the description down below um I think it's a good printer overall I probably wouldn't print uh carbon fiber reinforced filaments in there unless they're significantly more flexible than this kind of stuff that I was printing with uh carbon fiber filament tends to be pretty stiff so if you have uh you know a more flexible type of carbon fiber reinforced filament then this nozzle can handle it it can handle the abrasiveness of the carbon fiber also I've done kind of a hack to be able to uh use all the bamboo lab material profiles on this k1c in Orca slicer so I'll leave link to that as well I'm uploading that to my patreon it's basically a profile that you import into Orca slicer and allows you to use the K1 with all the material presets from the bamboo lab printers so yeah thanks for watching I'll see you in the next episode um cool printers

Channel: Nathan Builds Robots

Views: 38,007

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Id: dg8uqq2xlMo

Length: 58min 10sec (3490 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024