Flashforge Creator 3 Review - Unboxing - Calibration - Test Prints

hey how's it going and welcome along i'm rory from wreck my funeral that was right by the way so this is the rmf tech channel a little while back i reviewed the flashboard guider 2. how cool is that which was a behemoth massive great big printer really impressive what you could do with it really cool bit of kit then shortly after i reviewed the creator pro 2. that is absolutely brilliant which was a slightly smaller printer but it had two nozzles so you could print in dual color and it was again really cool little bit kit now i know what you're thinking why don't they take the hugeness of the guider 2 and the cleverness of the two nozzles from the creator pro 2 and put them together into one massive thing and call it i don't know something like the creator three well they have and thanks very much to box.co.uk for sending me one and sponsoring this video and a bit more about them later [Music] [Applause] [Music] and this is the box for it now i don't know why i went to so much effort to lift this up onto here because this thing weighs a ton so bear that in mind if you're getting one of these delivered it is a big box it's not tiny it's massive so usual problem i need to obviously figure out how to get inside this thing um so i need a tool to open the box wait there i'll be right back uh [Music] so i've got it out of the box and it is now on this little table here which is a perfect fit for the creator three now some of the interesting points about this obviously it's big so it means that you've got a large print volume uh also inside there we've got two nozzles which can either print two separate models at the same time or one model but using two different colors or even two different types of filament it's fully enclosed which means it's a consistent temperature inside at all times it's got a removable flexible bed for removing the prints and also the filament goes in the side here which means it's fully enclosed and again good for keeping the temperature of the filament consistent and dry now i just need to get it unpacked and get it ready uh for calibration and putting some filament into it [Music] a manual a thick manual so inside yeah we've got the manual we've got power cable we've got a spatula and some glue and some basic tools more foam [Music] we have a white filament and we have a blue filament both in place also in here are two containers genuinely at this stage i have no idea what these are for i'll find this out shortly i'm sure so here inside the unit we can see this is our removable bed so you can kind of see the volume on that this is this is pretty big um it goes on to this heated bed here it's magnetic so it just clicks on and you know what i didn't i can't remember what the size is i'll pop it on the screen uh as a text oh yeah there we go that's how big it is okay so here we can see you have the control screen then inside we have our two nozzles it's got the clips on it at the moment which are from the transport i have to remove them if we look down the side here this is what i pulled out earlier that's where the filament will go and there's one on the other side as well which doesn't come off there's one on that side as well to take your two filament reels so obviously what is always great about flash forward is they come pre-assembled there's not really a lot for you to do to get it up and running literally plug it in and then press the on button at the back this should come alive we hear a fan kick in and it plays the tune we're also familiar with and then here you can see that there is kind of some very simple options on the very nicely looking touchscreen which actually looks a lot better than the other previous touchscreens in terms of the clarity on the screen it looks really nice so now i will take out this bit of foam so on the screen we're going to go to tools we're going to go to manual and i'm just going to hold the z up button so that this makes its way up and now that's high enough [Music] i take that out of there and then i'll press the home button so that it works its way back down and now that i've taken out the safety clips i'll press the home button and watch you go back down to the bottom it's still going these two buckets are waste collectors so these actually go in here [Music] so now i'm going to level the bed which i believe is fairly straightforward so inside of the tools menu we press level and then it says i'm humming [Music] so i guess that's going to make its way all the way to the bottom before it continues okay now it is asking me to select which extruder i would like to start with so i'll start with the left one and make sure they're clean okay so now i guess the bed is gonna work its way all the way back up to the top again [Music] so the screen says verifying the distance between the nozzle and the plate [Music] now it says press ok button to go to the next point [Music] [Music] uh [Music] so it now says leveling complete and i didn't have to turn any of the knobs that were underneath which is kind of weird but apparently it reckons it's done okay so interestingly enough apparently it's now level but i didn't have to turn any nuts at all i didn't have to change anything which seems unusual but maybe it just worked who knows so next we now need to get some filament inside of it now fortunately enough it comes with a roll of white pla and a roll of blue pla so we'll put these in there as i mentioned before it goes in here we have our filament i guess we poke in through the hole there and then place in there and just feed that all the way through till we can feel it stop okay it's come out of the other side push that into place and we'll close that up obviously i've put that onto the right hand side and we can see that down there that is now all ready to go i'm just going to slide this over there so you can see what we're doing i'm going to come to tools [Music] and then filament oh i can load both at the same time right hang on a second while i put the other side in i've put it into both sides so now i'll just press ok whilst both of those are ticked [Music] and now we just have to wait for the temperatures to rise so while we wait for the nozzles to reach temperature i'm just going to quickly mention the sponsor of this video which is box dot co dot uk now box are one of the uk's leading online retailers of tech products they've got over 25 years in the industry so they're pretty clued up when it comes to all kinds of tech from computing to tvs to appliances to smart tech basically they can provide you with everything you're going to want and i can definitely recommend them when it comes to 3d printers you only have to have a quick look through their list of printers to see that there's some awesome models in here at some genuinely decent prices for example i can definitely recommend this snapmaker 2. i did a review of this video before and it was a really really impressive bit of kit the same for the flashforge guider 2. so i definitely recommend have a look through their printer range and they also do filament and again i really really recommend the steady tech stuff that they do is really good and also i'm currently testing out some of the gemini pla pro with some really great results and you will see that in some upcoming videos soon so i would definitely check them out if you are in the need for some 3d printing stuff or anything kind of tech related go head over to the site have a look the links in the description for everything you're going to need there make sure you go and check them out now let's go and see if those nozzles have heated up so both nozzles are just coming up to 90 now that really did not take long they heat up really quickly and we can see here we have some glue coming out there and we have some glue coming out there and there we go our filament is oozing through so once they are both losing the correct color i can go ahead and press done and get rid of this excess which i can even just throw straight in those little bins brilliant [Music] right so filament is loaded in both sides i've got white in the left and blue in the right and we're ready to go so now i just need to get the software installed and connect this up to the wi-fi and send a print to it hmm what shall i start with okay so here we are in flash print i've gone ahead i've downloaded flash print five from the flashforge website installed it i'm not gonna cover all of that in detail in this one i've covered that in other videos before just for speed we're just gonna get this going now firstly i'm going to grab my benchy which is here it's downloaded and boom will drag this into the project i will include a link in the description for any files like this so if you want to grab it yourself it will be in the description below so firstly it said there's an error do you want to repair the model this is just sort of to do with the 3d modeling um the export so we're not going to worry we're just going to press repair let it do its thing it will be more than happy that's absolutely fine and there is our benchy sitting ready to be printed now i obviously i normally do a benchy when i first set up a printer and just test it but i'm going to do something slightly different today because i've got the two nozzles i can use a mode called mirror mode where it prints both items on the same bed at the same time which is really exciting in order to do this in flash print 5 there's a button down here on the left that says creator 3 that's my printer type 0.4 that's my nozzle size and normal mode is my mode so if i click on here i can change some of these settings so i can change to a different printer change the nozzle size or mode i can come in here and select mirror mode this will now give me two benches and it signified the two different colors means that that's with one nozzle and that's with another so that's grand i'm just going to go mirror models and mirror x just so they face each other i think it'll look a bit nicer on the time lapse um and now that i'm ready to go i'm just going to hit start slicing and here we get all the sort of basic settings as normal i say basic there's a lot of settings in here um but we can choose all our materials the temperatures and so on the profile at the moment is set to fast so i'm going to set that to standard now you've got various different options in here standard fine and fast now you can do it all manually or these are just pre-done profiles fine is something like 0.1 uh layer height fast is 0.3 and standard is 0.18 i think so just slightly better than 0.2 and i'm going to go with that one and i'm just going to come down here to raft and i'm going to turn raft off and then under additions uh just going to double check that there's no brim there's no wall it's all very simple that is literally all i'm looking to change and i'm going gonna go ahead and slice that so that will slice our model or models in this case and when it's done we can hit slice preview and you know we can do what we normally do and and you know run through make sure that it's all as we would expect which it is it gives us a bit of info up here roughly how much material and how long it's going to take and yeah we're good to go now this printer is wi-fi compatible so i could connect it to the wi-fi and then i could connect directly in here and just send it but just for speed right now i haven't connected it yet i'm going to go ahead and save it to a usb stick and pop it in the printer like that so let's get printing [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] well that was one hour and 24 minutes printing on the standard setting printing two models at the same time that looked pretty magical right the way that that was doing that with the two going at the same time really cool really interesting effectively with half the print time when you think about it right because normally it would take that just to get the one but we've got two and it's on this uh print bed i didn't use any glue or anything i literally as you saw before i did that calibration where i didn't even have to change anything and then i just set it to print that's really impressive the models themselves look pretty good i'll just try and remove easy enough to come off there and yeah they look really good i'll cut to a shot of them revolving so that you can see the detail a little bit better but you can see that both of these benches have come out really well um considering this is its first ever print now the one thing that i didn't quite understand was why one of them printed with a raft and one of them didn't because i thought i switched off raft in the software so i'm not sure why that happened however that is using the two nozzles simultaneously but the next thing now to try is printing one thing using two different colors let me go see if i can find something for that and we're back in flash print five now i've got a little stormtrooper model here so this is what we're going to print uh i want employee jewel one which i guess is done like that for copyright reasons so repair now what you'll see is that this is obviously the the one set of pieces and then i'm gonna do number two get rid of that repair and the model has been repaired now unfortunately they have not come in central now i don't know whether this is an issue with the files or an issue with flash printer i need to somehow get these into the right place so i'm going to grab hold of this i'm going to press move first and grab hold of this one and let's see so that's moving it right that's moving forward so let's just zero that out oh it's definitely closer okay so we could click and drag it and to be fair that's probably going to be the easiest way obviously the more precise this is the better chance i've got of this printing well but that looks to be about right now quick note do not try and click and move your view otherwise you will move the uh the item and it will be really annoying so we'll press set view again and now we can go and have a look and it looks all good so what we now need to do is figure out which side has what filament so i know that the white filament is in the left side so we're going to press left for this one and then we're going to select this one and we're going to choose right extruder and then that way it the printer knows which extruder to use for which bit and it will print this as two color print and exactly the same as in the last one we just go start slicing i'm gonna do it fast this time just because i want it to be a little bit quicker obviously i could do the really fine print but it would just take a lot longer rafts do we want a raft i've just realized there's something actually i needed to do before i did this i was going to create wiping towers so if we actually come down here we've got wiping tower and there's uh default two this is fine so all i do is slide here this is the right one so i'm gonna put this on this side like that and then this is the left one so i'll put this one like that and then that's it so i've now added wiping towers so basically what that will do is when it's swapping between the two printheads it will just do a quick run around this just to ensure that the filament is is running you know at its best and not sort of starting again from where it's been sat in the nozzle waiting for the other bit to finish so that's cool so i'm now going to do start slicing um and just double check yet we're still on fast i want to make sure that raft is off uh i'm not i don't think we need a raft and again i think that's probably about right everything else fine we'll just leave it for now and we'll slice that [Music] like so and we'll get this into the printer and let's see how this looks okay so i tried to print a two color stormtrooper model that i thought looked pretty cool and i had a ton of problems for some reason the right side nozzle the filament stuck to the bed no problem but the left side was sitting just a little bit high and i could not figure out why i tried the printing and printing printing i eventually got it really close and i left it overnight unfortunately i came down to this which is obviously a really beautiful spaghetti mess however i then reached out to flashforge support and they did ask me have i updated it to the latest firmware so of course i double checked that and no i hadn't updated it so i've now updated it and sure enough that leveling sequence has changed so i'm just going to go ahead and re-level it now with the new firmware and i'm going to see if that makes a difference but yeah definite pro tip there always update your firmware when you receive a new machine i might have forgotten this time [Music] oh [Music] and that's what and it's finished so this has taken me a few attempts to get the leveling right so i've had quite a few failed attempts on this however this one has now worked so there's a little bit of stringing going on but it looks like it might not be too bad let's see how we can pull this here i've broken his ankles so i've just broken his ankles off he's stuck to the bed really well um so i'm gonna fix that let's put it on the turntable so you can see what it looks like so yeah overall it doesn't seem like it's too bad it took a little bit of cleanup just to remove some of the stringing i reckon as always you know you have to bear in mind i'm just doing this out of the box 3d printing always needs a bit of tweaking to get it you know correct and printing really really well and also you learn the kind of the foibles of the printer the longer you own it the kind of more you kind of just know well if that does that you tweak that bit so yeah so that came out not too bad however in the world of 3d printing i am yet to ever find a 3d printer that is absolutely perfect in every way and this one is no exception so here's five things i dislike about this printer so this touch screen i know that i said that it looks nice however the responsiveness of it is really bad you have to press multiple times to get the buttons to work quite often and it's kind of laggy and just a little bit cumbersome i'm really not a fan of this touchscreen after after trying to use it being so big it has the same problem as the guider 2. it takes forever for the bed to get to the bottom when you're waiting for it to be fair it's not really that long it just feels long when you just sit and watch it the bed calibration on these printers is still finicky i don't like these twisty knob things this time there's only two however it's got an auto calibration plus a manual calibration and i don't know it's just not intuitive and it took me a lot of messing around to get this set up and printing well on the bed the removable bed is a step in the right direction without a doubt however getting stuff off this as you saw a minute ago is still quite tricky and the fact that you still need to use glue and have a spatula to take prints off of it i don't know it feels a bit old this isn't 2018 after all as is the case with every flash gorge i've ever played with it's loud the current come out of it is it's idle when it's actually printing it makes so much noise and it gets louder than that and then when you add the movement of the nozzles in it just gets so noisy for example you wouldn't be able to have a video conference you wouldn't be able to have a video conference in the same room as this thing while it's printing fully because it's just too noisy and it just keeps bleeping so don't panic it's not all bad here's five things i really love about this printer inside the printer just there is a camera which means that you can actually remotely watch your prints from a pc somewhere else on your network that is actually very very useful [Music] the bins are incredibly useful for storing rubbish in it it's actually a really good idea to have bins inside here because otherwise you end up with bits all over the floor and everywhere at least in here you can chuck them all in these bins and then empty them in one go nice as i mentioned earlier the filament is stored in these side compartments which is really great for really utilizing the footprint of the printer and not taking up additional space plus there's a pragmatic reason as well in that it helps keep the filament dry and a consistent temperature throughout the prints so underneath the print nozzles are these little metal guards and these are used to scrape off the excess filament and stop it from oozing out and where they're positioned it all falls straight into the bins using the software it is possible to control multiple printers all at the same time so if you have say several flash forged printers dotted around you can send a print to all of them just with a few clicks so all in all it is a really good printer it's got some very clever capabilities getting the setup on it right is probably out of all the flash forges i've played with this is probably the most difficult to set up however once you've done it and once you've got it working it's a really really clever piece of kit having the big bed gives you obviously a lot of flexibility to do large projects having the dual nozzles gives you even more flexibility when it comes to colors or even filament types so anyway i'd like to thank you very much for watching if you did enjoy the video make sure you hit that like button hit the subscribe button as well and clicking the little bell will notify you when the new videos go up i've got another couple of 3d printers to come up soon plus a very very special little gadget that's just been sent to me that as soon as i get time i will do a review of once again i just want to say a massive thanks to box.cod.uk remember details in the description do check them out for anything techy that you need go to box.cod.uk alright thanks very much and see in the next one i will get this in you

Channel: RMF Tech

Views: 309

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Id: GhR5Zx2VQ6U

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021