Ender 7 3d Printer Review. It's fast but how fast? How is the quality?

hi this is irv shapiro with make with tech and today we're going to do a very interesting in some ways exciting because it's a bit groundbreaking and i hope meaningful review of this new printer the ender 7 from creality this ender 7 was sent to me at no cost by peergear who's a distributor on amazon and the printer is available now on amazon if after this review you're interested in purchasing one now the first impression i had of this printer is boy is it heavy i struggled to get it down the stairs to the make with tech lab where i was going to work on it and the second thing that struck me was how creality is positioning this printer it's a very big printer but they're not emphasizing the fact that it can produce large prints they're emphasizing the fact that it's fast advertised as very fast this printer is advertised at being able to print at 250 millimeters per second now we're gonna dig into what that really means and you really need to watch the end of this video because we're going to go through some very specific examples about speed towards the end of the video but if you compare it to that ender 3 behind me on paper you would say it's five times as fast so is it really and at that speed is the quality acceptable stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] folks before i begin diving into this printer i want to remind you that the make with tech channel has literally hundreds of videos now up on youtube where we teach people how to use desktop technology not just 3d printers a little electronics there's going to be a little bit of programming a little bit of woodworking some other crafts and skills and we teach folks how to use those technologies to make things make with tech so if you're interested in that type of thing please subscribe to the channel click on the bell below share this video with anyone you want and i really do value your comments either here at youtube or at forum.makewithtech.com now let's start with the basic specs of this printer and as we talk about various components i'm going to show you close-ups of those components this printer is not only heavy it's a fairly large volume printer at 250 by 250 by 300 millimeters and it prints well reliably throughout that range it is a bowden style printer you really can't see it here but the bowden tube is quite long and the disadvantage of a long bowden tube is that it makes it really complicated to print flexible filaments like tpu so creality is positioning this as a printer for pla petg abs and similar materials it is a core xy printer and i'll show you a picture here on the screen on what that means but basically a core xy printer has the ability to be faster because it has less weight on the x y axis if you look at many 3d printers ender 3 behind me is a good example again you'll see that there's one or more stepper motors that are actually on the x or the y axis and they move with those axes and the more weight you have on a particular axis the more vibration you're going to get so this is a bowden style printer that means there's no extruder stepper motor on the printhead mechanism and there are no motors on the x y axes the stepper motors are all located on the frame itself and you may be able to see over here in the picture uh the stepper motor that's on the extruder now that's really important for this printer because this printer wants to be very fast and therefore because it's moving faster it also needs heavier duty stepper motors so the stepper motors are physically bigger stronger stepper motors than on your typical consumer grade 3d printer overall i will tell you that this machine is solid it's heavy and that weight helps it minimize vibration there's a lot of weight in the base i haven't opened it up obviously there's a control board there there's a power supply but a lot of the weight is in the actual extrusions these are at least double the width of an extrusion on a typical creality printer and then there's additional weight on the top where you have the core xy mechanism and two stepper motors so this printer doesn't move around a lot now in addition to those components you have a removable print bed that is the new creality glass style print bed and in this size this is also a bit heavy now i'll tell you about these print beds whatever material they have on the top here it works it sticks really well in rare cases i've supplemented it with a bed adhesive i'm a big fan now of dynafix i often use and have recommended in many past videos magigoo which is also really good but i think dynafix is even a little better what's unique about dynafix and i'm going to make some videos about bed adhesives is it gets stronger it holds the print stronger the higher the temperature of the bed so if you increase the bed temperature even more you get more stick with this now because this bed overall sticks very well i found that i have to take this removable bed and put it in the freezer for five minutes to get the prints off now i could hack at it with a single edge razor blade which is what i typically do on a lot of printers but i found that five minutes or so in the freezer make sure it's not going to fall out when you open the door and prints pop right off and the bottom print surface is really beautiful so i like this print bed it also has an interesting mechanism they're actually clips you slide it into on the back and then they're clips on the front that rotate to hold it on so no office supply style clips holding this print bed on the print bed is a manually leveled print bed they're typical ender style knobs under the four corners since the print bed in the zero position is up here at the top it's really easy to get to them so you literally can print a leveling print i'll show you a picture one that i used here you can print a leveling print and fine-tune the bed leveling as it's printing the firmware does include interestingly enough support for both auto bed leveling and there's no auto bed leveling sensor on this model must be coming in a future model and manually leveling which is very useful where it will position the printhead to the four corners for you so i leveled this print bed in the typical way with a sheet of paper and there are instructions and videos that come with the printer that show you also how to do that and there are many on this channel now the physical gantry is not only significant in the front but i'm going to show you a picture now of how it holds the print bed on on the ender fives which also have a print bed that's cantilevered out like this there's really not a lot of support all the way to the end just held on the back in this case there are actually supports underneath the printer connected to a large strong mechanism on the back and then there are four wheels gripping that extrusion so there are not linear rails on the back it is typical wheels on an ender extrusion now some people doing reviews have commented they thought there was too much movement on the print bed and there was when i got this printer but there are four eccentric nuts that you can use to adjust the tension of the wheels and if you take the time and it takes a bit of time to get those just right this print bed is pretty solid would it be ideal to have another drive screw here in the front sure it would but that's not the case in this printer in terms of assembly of this printer it's a delight other than the fact that everything's heavy all you basically do is put these three sets of extrusions these are already connected together on the back into the base you screw them down you put the top on you screw it on and you're done now when you first open the printer and you get a bag of goodies in that bag of goodies are a lot of bolts because there are four here there are four here i think they're four or eight in the back they're more holding the print bed on because the print bed you do have to bolt on yourself overall if you watch the video that comes on the sd card with this printer the video is excellent there's no reason for me to show it to you i think you can have this assembled in 20 minutes then it's gonna take five or ten minutes for you to properly level the bed and maybe another five minutes or so maybe 10 to get the eccentric screws on the back mechanism properly adjusted the core xy mechanism which is tricky to adjust comes pre-adjusted from the factory one of the other things you'll notice on this printer is the cable management is excellent and they use heavy-duty connectors and cables i'll show you a picture here of the cable that connects to the heating element on the print bed so you can see what those look like so cabling is done very very well the hot end which is very hard to see here because of this frame around it and it doesn't move it stays at the top the whole time and just moves in the x and the y directions that hot end is a completely new design it has two sets of fans you can see in this close-up photo and it's specifically designed to handle the increased volume of filament that you need to push through to print at much higher speeds likewise the extruder is a new design it's all metal it has dual gears there's one stepper motor and there are gears on the back of the two gears so they lock together and then the filament goes between them now you'll learn in this video in a moment that i had to take that extruder apart i'll explain why and make a minor repair along the way it wasn't a defect in the printer it probably was a minor defect in the assembly at the factory they didn't tighten one of the screws correctly but we'll talk about that in a few moments okay now let me take and rearrange a bit so that we can concentrate on looking at the prints and the speed of those prints on this printer okay i zoomed in a little so that we'll be able to get a better look at these prints as we proceed well the very first print i printed was a print on the sd card that comes with this printer and i must emphasize there are videos on that sd card specifically a video about assembling the printer you should watch it before you start assembling the printer not surprisingly this print uh looks great um and you would expect it should it is very heavy though interestingly enough because they used a very dense infill i'll show you a little bit of video of it printing and you'll notice how fast the print head is moving now what i learned as i moved along is that sparse infill when printed at very high speeds at the full 250 millimeters per second probably gets under extruded just a bit so you may want to increase your infill a bit if you're going to be printing very very fast so this print was beautiful not surprising the next thing i did is i printed two calibration cats one using filament from mater hacker one using hatchbox filament both in pla and the reason i print these is to track how accurate the extruder is on these printers because these are supposed to be exactly 20 millimeters square so we'll go ahead and check that and let's see in this direction i don't know if you can see that here or not it's 19.92 millimeters that's very good in this direction it's 20.02 millimeters very good so the extrusion was working quite well on this printer now that will be interesting in a minute because it's going to actually change next i printed a print using a technique that i really like and this is a very large vase that's very solid and watertight now i didn't print this in vase mode i printed this in traditional print mode by setting the top surface to zero the top layer to zero by setting the infill to zero and by specifically checking that i had the right number of walls in this case there are three walls on this print so this print took about four hours on this printer i can tell you it would be a lot longer if it would fit on a lot of the other printers that i have now we're going to look at side-by-sides performance speed comparisons at the end of this video so this is an absolutely beautiful print and i'll show you also a close-up of this print next i was ready to start trying a vase mode print so i started a print and you can't really tell what it is from here but this print completely failed let me show you a video of what it looks like while i was printing this print what you see is that it's printing a little bit stopping a little bit stopping a little bit stopping now all i did is went into the slicer and set spiralize mode and for all of these prints by the way i'm using the creality slicer because it has a built-in profile optimized for this printer so what's going on here well there's a feature in this printer this feature is shared with the cr6 and it appears to have similar firmware and the feature is a power fail detect feature that takes and writes a snapshot of each layer as it changes layers to your sd card so a couple things there number one you want to use fast sd cards because it will minimize the amount of time it takes to do that right number two as of right now it breaks vase mode or in the case of cure it's called spiralized mode why in this case when i printed this vase i set it up to print a full layer then move up print a full layer move up print a full layer but print no infill and no top surface that's not really spiralized mode in true spiralized mode or vase mode it's making micro adjustments of the z-axis as it works its way up so from the point of view of the firmware it's constantly changing the z-axis that's triggering the feature in this printer to take and write a checkpoint file a file with information about the current layer to the sd card that's causing it to fail now there's a workaround there should be two workarounds one workaround would be to put a g-code command in your start of print setup for the printer i tried doing that it didn't work i hooked a g-code terminal directly to the printer over a usb cable and i found it told me it was working so i'd issue the command to shut off the power file recovery and it said it did but then when i went to print off the sd card it failed again now there's another feature of this style of power fail recovery and that is it only works if you have an sd card in right because it's saving the snapshots to the sd card so i tried doing a print directly from the creality slicer over the usb cable by the way it worked perfectly easy to do i just plugged it in it worked and that ended up being this face here and that printed perfectly so there's a bug in the firmware which i consider an annoyance not a show stopper that if you want to print in vase mode which has pluses and minuses and i'll link a video that i where i talked about that recently then you need to print over a usb cable now there are a couple ways you can do that you can do that from a computer you can do that from octoprint or you can do it from one of the creality remote print boxes that sells very inexpensively directly from creality so then i continued my testing and the next thing i did is i printed the kickstarter test print and it came out okay now a number of things are actually very very good this particular angle right here often has a lot of trouble if there's not great cooling on your printer this overhang here needs great cooling bo all the overhangs on this print are really good probably the best i've seen in the printers i've used in addition these fires on the top these sort of little narrow towers that are smaller than the diameter of your nozzle don't print correctly all the way to the top on some printers they get lumpy and bumpy and they fall off they all printed perfectly on this printer there was a bit of stringing but it's pretty fine stringing and you can either knock that off i left it on on with a exacto knife or if it's on a heavier print not on knit very fine features like this you hit your print for about three seconds with a hair dryer or a heat gun and those will shrivel away so this was an okay print i checked the size of the towers and once again extrusion was pretty good but it looks a little messy i can see the layer lines a little too much there's a couple gaps here and there so i wondered what was going on next i decided to print one of my favorite toys for kids and grandchildren and that is this dragon if you just look up dragon on thingiverse you'll find it it's called the flexi dragon it's a wonderful print but it takes a long time to print so i started it up and i'll show you a picture here on the left hand side you'll see after a couple layers it looked like it was printing fine then on the right hand side you'll see what happened when i came back in the morning yes i let it print overnight when it came back in the morning that's what i found now that didn't make any sense because it looked on the left hand side like it was sticking properly in fact if you look at it very carefully on the wing on the right there is a piece missing but when i took that mess off the top it was still stuck on the lower layers so what causes it to just suddenly stop to get so out of adjustment that it just makes that mess i then attempted to print a very large benji this is 2x and it's extremely under extruded you can see a part of the smoke tower fell off and if you look at the base i'll show you a close-up of this also it's extremely underextruded i did some more tests it got worse it got to the point where the printer would stop extruding filament after about two minutes the first two minutes it sort of worked and then the filament would just stop coming out of the nozzle okay so let's think together about what could cause those things i could have a plug nozzle i could have a plugged hot end i could have something wrong with the bowden tube i checked all those things i manually extruded filament looked like it was working fine so then i took a careful look at the extruder and here's a picture of what i saw you'll notice the grub screw is not aligned with the flat surface on the shaft that didn't seem right so i took the filament out and i found i could manually turn that gear it was loose now probably it hadn't been tightened completely at the factory maybe it came loose during my tests but i disassembled the extruder i tightened up the grub screw and i continued printing and from there it was perfectly smooth sailing so the first thing i did is i reprinted the benji this double size benji took about four hours to print and it's a beautiful print now in the top left you'll see it in the freezer because it was really stuck to the print bed i didn't want to damage the glass put it in the freezer for five six minutes and took it out and it popped right off so wonderful trick for you to know this print is actually quite nice i also printed a smaller benji see how that would print also just a really good print in both cases there's some fine stringing inside and a heat gun would solve that problem or i probably can actually yeah i can really just rub it off with my finger because it's really quite fine and that doesn't bother me at all so next and you'll see a picture here of it on the print bed i decided to reprint the dragon and it's a beautiful print okay now let's look at the speed of the ender seven and we're going to do this two ways so in this first segment we're gonna use the creality slicer and we're gonna compare the ender seven to the ender three now an ender three is not the fastest printer i have i'd say my prusa is 20 or 30 percent faster in general i find that the direct extruder printers that i have the ultimate 2 from monoprice the focus printer that i recently reviewed are all faster than bowdoin style printers by about 20 but they're not 50 percent or a hundred percent faster and they're definitely not 5x faster so we're going to compare slicing times into reality slicer now something else you should know is i tracked carefully the actual print times of these various prints and in general the actual print times of the ender 7 were often 10 to 20 percent faster than the estimates so that's going to give it a little bit of an advantage we're going to start with a traditional benji and on the traditional benji what's the difference in speed let's look at this together you'll see on the left hand side the ender 3 would take an hour and 45 minutes on the right hand side the ender 7 would take an hour and 20 minutes that's faster it's not a lot faster so let's see if this trend stays the same or things change next we're going to look at this large vase once again this was not printed in vase mode it was printed with no top layer no infill and a little thicker walls and we'll compare the two so on the left hand side we'll see it would take 7 hours and 16 minutes on the ender three and four hours and 53 minutes on the ender seven in fact it took four hours and 25 minutes on the ender seven so that's already maybe what seventy-five percent eighty percent faster that's more meaningful let's do one more test in this case i benchmarked printing the bigger benji so in the case of the ender 3 this would be 7 hours it was estimated as 5 hours and 35 minutes it actually took about four and a half hours to print so quite a bit faster so once again you're getting about an eighty percent performance improvement now i expect if you printed something the absolute maximum size for this printer with a lot of straight lines versus all these curves you'd get two to two and a half times faster performance but why not 5x so let's look at the creality slicer in detail together so on this screen you'll see the actual default settings for this printer so you'll see the print speed is set at 250 millimeters per second but look at the black box on the left hand side it indicates that only affects the raft well that's strange that's not how traditional cura works but if you go down below you'll see that outer walls are printing at 80 millimeters per second you'll see that initial layers are printing at 20 millimeters per second so the only thing that's printing at 250 millimeters per second is infill so if you have a large print with a lot of infill it's going to be a lot faster the less infill the smaller the print the more it will be similar in speed to a lower end printer probably still faster but not as much as you would expect but what's going on with this slicer and how is it different than cura so let's look at cura for a moment so this is the cura profile for an ender 3 and you'll see the speeds are in general much slower but you'll also see the default speed impacts a lot of other speed it impacts infill and wall speed and top and bottom and travel and raft print speed so in the case of the creality slicer they made some changes to how it really works in terms of speed another change they made was that when you change individual speed settings there's a little function indicator next to them that says that this particular setting is derived from other settings that capability seems to be missing in the creality slicer so creality is chosen to simplify things and to really fix these various speeds probably to make it less likely that someone who's not as familiar with the slicer will make a mistake so what did we learn here well the first thing i learned was this printer is really heavy the build quality of the printer is excellent it feels like a piece of commercial equipment versus a consumer or hobbyist piece of equipment the print quality is really very very good but as we learned is a 3d printer with moving parts and things are going to get loose so the grub screw in the gear on the extruder was loose and that caused my prints to severely under extrude when i corrected that it worked properly again it has a long bowden tube so you're probably not printing tpu with this but because it's so squared off i could see it being very easy to put some plexiglass around it if you wanted to enclose it for abs prints with better temperature control it's very quiet printing slow but as you start printing fast it gets quite noisy and a lot of the noise is coming from the fans and interestingly enough the extruder the default retraction settings on this printer are 10 millimeters at 80 millimeters per second i think that's excessive and i think it affects quality a little bit so i dropped that down to five millimeters at 40 millimeters per second and that's what i used for these prints and they were just fine there's a bug in the firmware so if you're using vase or spiralized mode you cannot use it from the sd card you'll have to use it connected directly to a computer or to something like octoprint overall it'll be probably about 1.25 to 2.25 maybe two and a half times faster than a lower end printer not 5x but not the same it's clearly a faster machine so who should buy this printer well first of all i think it's a quality machine and it's built at pretty high standards can when compared to other consumer grade printers some reviewers objected to the frame around the top that makes it hard to see the print i didn't find that personally a problem the canton levered print bed needs to be properly adjusted or it's going to vibrate you need to adjust those eccentric nuts on the back carefully to give it as much rigidity as possible so if you need a printer for probably more like production use where you're printing a lot of the same thing over and over again you can fine tune the profile fine tune the speed that works best this is going to crank out a lot of prints for you in addition it does a very good job with the full volume of the prints so folks i'll leave it to you to determine whether this is the right printer for you i enjoyed doing this review i had some challenges with vase mode and then with that grub screw coming loose that grub screw i do not see as a overall defect in the printer i think it was an assembly issue at the factory for my particular model and i have been engaged with the marketing department at both peer gear and creality directly they're aware of the vase or spiralized firmware issue and they're looking at ways to address it on the cr6 which has the same issue there's an option right on the front panel just turn off power flow recovery for a particular print thanks so much for watching this video i hope you you learned a lot in this video if you did subscribe all of that stuff also you can go to forum.makewithtech.com to leave your own pictures of prints and i'll tell you a little secret i often post information about reviews i'm in the process of working on there at forum.makotech.com before they go live so if you want to get an insider's view it's a good place to go thanks again for watching and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 4,510

Keywords: 3d printers, 3d printing, fdm, fused deposition modelling, fused filament fabrication, 3d modeling for 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d printing videos, additive manufacturing 3d printing, how to 3d print anything, what is 3d printing, what is 3d printing technology, what is 3d printing video, creality, anet, prusa, monoprice, cura, 3d printing for beginners, 3d printer review, make with tech, makewithtech, Ender 7, creality ender 7, ender 7 review, ender 7 3d printer

Id: TKKCIE2vbDk

Length: 35min 24sec (2124 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021