Flashforge Creator Pro 2 Review - Unboxing - Calibration - Test Print - Are dual extruders worth it?

that is absolutely brilliant [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey how's it going and welcome along i'm rory from break my funeral that was right by the way so another exciting tech review video and once again the absolutely fantabulous people over at box dot co dot uk have sent me some toys so just a reminder box dot co dot uk is an online reseller where you can get all sorts of great techy cool stuff so i thoroughly recommend checking out their website and everything that i mentioned in this video will be linked in the description below so feel free to check that out now what have they sent me two things today the first thing is this this is the flash forge creator pro 2. is that the right name i think it is so this is a dual nozzle 3d printer so it's got two printheads i'm i'm really excited to find out how this is gonna work and the other thing is this pla pro gemini i have no idea as to the difference between pla and pla pro other than pro i'm gonna give it a try we'll open it up and see what it's like that's coming later we'll try it when we get the printer will run now this is my third flashforge printer that i've had a really good play with my original flashforge finder was where i began with my 3d printing journey and then box were good enough to send me the flashforge guider 2 massive beastie which i reviewed and this is the latest one for me to try out and i have to admit i'm really excited to see how it works we'll do a little bit more in this one today i won't just print my benchy and kind of leave it at that we'll do a few little projects because this has got the dual heads i wanted to try and find something that will uh sort of make use of that and see how it works and it should be one that's kind of out of the box ready to go but we're not gonna know until we get it out of the box as always i need some thing to get me in here what have i got [Applause] that joke does not get old what do you mean it does [Music] we start off with a quick start guide and it's got a little 16gb sd card in there also here in the top polystyrene i've got these two tubes okay so simple straightforward packaging it was in sort of polystyrene and now it's wrapped in this i think even i can handle this one the gear is all inside it right whoa i just caught this front for a second i thought it was all cracked it's the feeling don't panic it's fine okay so this looks quite nice this is very tidy tidy all put together very good very good i like it once again we have a qr code with some instructions on the side so they've thought of all the bits so we have there's our two print heads two reel holders power supply some print stick oh no sorry some non print stick branded stick glue thing scraper screws a few little tools usb cable that's pretty much it so it's tidy it's got everything you need but it's tidy so we have some more foam oh it comes with some filament this might be like the guide though where i have to turn it on in order to get the polystyrene out from the inside there's peely everywhere ah so this is the lid uh which will ultimately go on the top oh it's got two reels of filament oh i feel absolutely honoured and 100 i'm gonna have to raise this bed in order to get all of this polystyrene out so all of the insides are currently held in using uh cable ties now one thing that's sad is it doesn't come with any snips so i've got to go and try and find mine now where have i put them seriously so there are four of these yellow plastic things that are just holding all the bars in place make sure you take them out before trying to turn it on so with the printer comes two reels of pla filament one blue one white that's very generous of them actually there's so many printers where you just get a silly little test piece that's useless it's nice to see the printers coming with some filament okay just gonna chuck some power into it just to raise the bed so that i can lift this out of the way [Music] there you go my friend you are free quick tea break [Music] so inside of the quick start guide we get a second dewbry for going on the bed so our print heads uh it appears that we just literally place on these little cradles here so we just place that there [Music] and the other one then each one underneath has some little bolt holes so we have to bolt into to hold them in place so i'll just go ahead and do that okay that screws in both looks pretty cool in there if you ask me on the back very very simple done and now my two hoses just clip into here and then down into the hole there there we go there we go you have to give it a bit of a clicky click now an important thing to note is when you have your two reels on here it kind of feels like you're supposed to go from this reel up this tube this real atmosphere but you don't you must cross over so you go from this reel up to this tube this reel up to this tube little tip there for you okay so you have these two little they're called anti-overflow boards and up there there are two screw holes and i have a feeling that they're supposed to go in there so i'm going to attach them in there and see if that's right this now sits under there and as the nozzle moves across this obviously just gives it a wipe to stop it dripping everywhere boom right okay so we have our printer set up really very easy there was 16 screws to put in which wasn't really a headache we're now ready to go we're ready to load up the software but then we'll print a benchy because that's where i always start then we'll have a look at this pla pro okay so welcome over here to the pc where i have my nice microphone and i'm able to make my voice all silky smooth and nice and nice i don't know what i'm talking about right anyway sorry i'll get on with it i'll do what i'm supposed to be doing i'm going to run the flash print software we're going to install it that's right we're going to install the software and we're going to use it mad right first of all it needs to compute it needs to computing my space requirements i want to go mars i figured this would be quicker than this okay it's computed so now we're gonna just we're gonna next probably through most of this to be honest with you [Music] okay so that is all done so i'm gonna go ahead and say yes please do launch flashprint now i have to admit i actually really like flashprint as as a software this was the first one i ever used uh it wants me to choose the machine type so we're gonna go create a pro and we'll go okay right oh we can we can upgrade our firmware to be fair i'm quite familiar with it it's nice it's really simple to use it does a really nice thing there's a feature of flash print which is it adds thumbnails to your stl files so if you open up your folder with your stl files in you'll actually see a preview of them which there are other ways to make it happen but just installing this software whether you use it or not does that feature so that's actually brilliant and i often have this installed even if i'm not planning to use a flash forge but anyway whatever so so this is this is it so next we need to get our benchy and throw it in so all we do is click and drag our benchy.stl in uh wants to repair it fine do whatever you want to do and there she blows so we have our benches we have our benchy sitting there uh ready to be sliced um obviously right now i'm not taking advantage of the fact that there's a dual extruder i'm just going to print a benchy to see kind of you know what do we go through to get to that stage okay so now we just got to print it it's pretty straightforward but first i'm just going to go into preferences and change the printing window type from basic to expert mode um you don't really need to do that but it makes me feel a little bit better about myself like i'm smarter than i really am uh so anyway you know we get a few more options here now basically so we can be a little bit more specific now the couple of things i do want to change is supports i want to make sure is on no and raft i also want to make sure it's unknown and then i'll just press ok it allows me where i want to save it so i'll just save it there whatever it will then slice the model up all into layers and there we can see our model is now sliced up and that is absolutely fine so now we have our g-code so we can save that to an sd card or we can plug in via the usb directly from the pc into the printer and just have it start printing and whatever however before we actually start the print we've got to just do a couple of things there's a few calibration things we've got to do on the printer then we can start printing so as mentioned earlier i have here the gemini pla pro and that is what i'm going to start off by using so as you can see it's uh it's pretty nice as i say whether it's actually any different in terms of the print quality let's find out so to load the filament on this thing is super super easy all you do is simply go to tools and then filament and we do load i've chosen the left extruder i've mounted my filament on the right hand side and i've poked it up through the tube to go to the left hand side print head it's now positioned the print heads in the right place and it is heating up once this gets to the right temperature all we do is just give the filament a little push from the back and there's a little lever you pull that down and the filament goes in easy so that's now at temperature and one thing i would definitely say is not to touch this that's just a joke it's just a joke sorry i'm so silly no just don't touch these hot ends they are really really hot i know it seems obvious but i have done it without thinking and yeah we didn't even push down it has pulled the filament through and it started to work crazy so now when whenever we're ready creating our little mr whippy there we just hit done and that will stop and we can just pull that out okay so our left extruder is loaded and we're ready to go so next i'm going to level the bed now this is pretty straightforward it's not automatic you do have to do it manually but basically you have to line up the bed using these three nuts but first of all we just hit level now we just need to screw the nuts counter-clockwise clockwise now we need to screw the nuts counter-clockwise until they're sort of all tightened [Music] so they're now all done it comes with this piece of stuff i'm just going to pop that under there and i'm going to start unwinding that until it slightly touches our piece of paper okay i can just feel a little bit of resistance so i'd say that's about right so next do the same thing with the rear left and finally with the rear right and if all's gone to plan our bed is now level next we need to calibrate the z-axis or z if you're an american and it's decided that it wants to cool down before it does that so let's give it a minute okay so that's ready so it wants me to choose an extruder i've chosen the right hand side just because it's nearer the card goes underneath and i believe we do the same thing again right [Music] now i do it with the left side so that's the zed done we're now on to the x this was the reason why i already put in the filament is because for the x calibration it will print one line from each nozzle and you have to adjust them on the screen to ensure that they're aligned simple right [Applause] [Music] it's printed the line we now just have to align it a little [Music] this side [Music] now we move on to the y calibration so basically this is exactly the same thing again but the line's going the other way and first time it's come out perfect so i don't even need to adjust that job's a gooden okay that is all the calibration done this is now ready to receive my benchy g-code or gx as it's known for the flashforge and let's see how that prints [Music] okay so bunchy is done and on the standard settings that took an hour and 28 minutes with a bit of tweaking you could probably get that down to an hour but that's about typical for these machines i would say let's see if we can get it off the bed okay that came off actually quite easily and in all honesty that has printed exceptionally well perhaps it's to do with the pla pro and perhaps it's to do with the printer but the combination certainly works the you can see that the layer lines on this are super super smooth the arches have printed pretty well the overhangs considering this is actually a stress test model this has come out superbly yeah super impressed with that really good right now i'm going to set something to print that uses two colors so let me go find a model and let's see what that comes out like okay so now i'm going to try something that uses two colors now the way this works is we have two stls which will basically have the 3d model in the same place now the first one i'm going to do is this question mark block and here if i drag in the second one it'll say it's off the platform i'm going to say no because i want it to come on at exactly the same point so these two are now really well lined up if i grab one of them you'll see it leaves the other behind so you don't want to do that you need to if you're going to move them make sure you press ctrl a and grab both and i'm just going to plop it near the front of the screen the next i need to assign a nozzle to each part i will select extruder here and make sure that i have clicked on the main and i want the main to use the right extruder which it is so it's grey and then i'll click on the question mark the other model and press use the left extruder so now we can see the difference in the two colors we're now basically ready to go if i hit print right a few things i will change in here is i'm going to drop this one just down to low i'm curious to know what the low setting prints like and i am going to go to supports and say no raft and i'm going to say no and additions so the thing that's in here that's actually quite important when you're printing with dual extruders is this wall option and what this does is it prints like a cocoon around the object as it's printing and the idea is that it gets rid of any slightly excessy filament that's sitting on the nozzle now obviously you've got those blockers that we added earlier but you can still get a little bit here and there so the idea of the wall is to kind of reduce that as much as possible but that would make it look really rubbish for a time lapse because you're basically just seeing a solid block being printed so i'm going to go ahead and leave that off for now and we'll maybe we'll try that a bit later on so that should all be now fine i'm just gonna go ahead and print it and see what it's like [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there we have that one now it's printed okay one of the things that i noticed that a quarter of the way through the print was that the orange was very clearly too hot and it was kind of looping up a bit which is i think why you would have the wall on however i decided i could just lower the temperature during the print uh and it's kind of fixed it up uh from the halfway point onwards and it definitely looks better towards the top than it does towards the bottom the base is pretty good for a first layer and inside's a little bit stringy from earlier on again it's to do with the heat if you're getting stringing on your prints quite often it's just because your hot ends too hot so you just got to reduce your temperature a little bit there and your stringing will often go away uh also obviously i did it on the low so uh the fast setting it's it's not bad i definitely think it would look a lot better with the higher quality setting and so on but now let's have a look at something else cool right the next one i'm going to print is this little kind of space man so i'll just click and drag these in oh it's saying do i want to put it on the platform we'll press no because i don't want to adjust where it's going to position i don't want it doing anything automatically because if i press yes it will whiz off somewhere anyway so that's my little martian so again i'm going to move i'm going to press ctrl a to select all and just bring him near at the front so we can actually see what we're looking at again we need to make sure we select extruder and then choose which item so i'm going to do the visor as black and the body i want to be in white so i'll use the left for that and again that's pretty much it so we'll go ahead and press print and this time i'm going to change it to pla i'm going to leave it on standard and i'm going to say no to supports i'm going to say no to raft and again i'm going to do it without the wall just to sort of see what it's like i think i might follow up with the exact same print again but with the wall so anyway we'll just get this saved onto the sd card let's get it in the printer and see how it looks [Music] ha that is absolutely brilliant this is wonderful you can see that there are some levels of slight markings on it and again that's where i believe i had the temperature of the black just a little bit too hot so we've just got some a little bit of stringing that's gone into the white areas a little so out of curiosity i wonder what would happen if i printed it with the wall enabled so i did another print i didn't time lapse that one because obviously it would look a bit naff just a big blob now you can see it's definitely made a small difference but in all honesty not enough to warrant the additional two hours that it required this thing was just over seven hours to print but with the wall it was nine and a half hours so in my opinion looking at this i would say i wouldn't want the wall on i would just want to make sure i get all my temperatures right and again the base is really good it's really sharp it's come out really really well super super impressed with it well now we've done some fun stuff let's have a look at five things i dislike about this printer while this printer is not absolutely huge the size of the footprint is not very relative to the size of the bed you get quite a small bed with this i have to admit after being spoiled with some printers with really big beds this for me is really annoying and it's fixed in place so i can't do the take it off and flex it to remove the print thing there's no wi-fi on this printer so you cannot send things to it wirelessly in order to print from it you either have to plug in the usb cable into your pc or put the files onto an sd card and then put them into the little socket on the side so the same as every other flash forge i've ever played with it's loud i mean it's not so loud that it's unbearable but it's just quite loud there's a permanent hum whenever it's on and the movement inside it's not quiet while the bed leveling is quite easy to do it's a faff i've been spoiled with other printers that do it automatically so to have to play around with these is really irritating i also find them quite slippery so i have real trouble grabbing onto these smooth slippery nuts that sounds absolutely awful having dual nozzles is great on one hand but bad in another in that when it comes to maintenance with a 3d printer most of your time is spent messing around with the print head if you've got two that means you've got double the amount of effort to deal with so it's definitely a double edged sword now you might be thinking rory you hate this printer right absolutely not it couldn't be further from it let's have a look at five things i absolutely love about this printer so again something from flashforge is that they are always super super easy to use the controls of it are all done through this lovely color touchscreen it's super easy to use it's a joy as you saw you take this out of the box and you're printing straight away and there's a lot to be said for ease of entry into a hobby that is really quite fiddly so the flash print software that comes with these is absolutely brilliant again it's got a really low learning curve so you can get messing around with it almost straight away and as i mentioned before it gives you thumbnails in windows which is brilliant being that it's completely enclosed with this lid and this front door means that printing abs is a lot easier than if it was all open and the environment is interfering with your temperatures that's really useful i actually love the look of this printer i think it looks really neat it looks really slick this is something that you're really proud to have sitting on the shelf and when people come around like whoa what's that i just think it looks great i've always been blown away by flash forged printer's print quality like the prints really really print super super clean and smooth and they're just an absolute joy to watch print i absolutely love the fact that i can print the supports for a model using soluble filament which means that you can print really complex models with really bad overhangs and not have to then dig away trying to tear off all of the support material that's that is absolutely brilliant i just really wish i'd ordered some so i could actually try it note for next time and there we have it all in all another printer that is actually really good the whole dual nozzle thing really nice feature i like it i'd love to know if you've had any experience with flashforge because so far i've had only good experiences with them so once more i'd just like to thank box.cod.uk for sending me this printer remember the link to where you can grab one of these from is in the description below and if you did enjoy this video please do remember hit that like button and if you're not subscribed make sure you subscribe and if you are click the little bell to make sure you get notified when i put up a new video if you haven't seen one of my ragdoll animation videos you should probably check them out because they're quite fun so that is basically it from me and the flashforge creator pro 2. i look forward to seeing you again and oh yeah bye for now [Music] foreign

Channel: Rate My Funeral

Views: 22,686

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Id: 6p99ywUx_gI

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021