Large Fully Enclosed CoreXY 3D Printer (Qidi Tech X-Max 3)

with the increase in popularity of core XY 3D printers we've seen a race from many of the large manufacturers to try to meet that demand one of these companies is cheaty Tech they've been making printers since 2014 and specialized in fully enclosed box frame machines so transitioning over to core XY really made sense for their next gen lineup what I don't think anyone was expecting was for them to release three printers at the same time to be fair two of them are very similar to each other other than size but this was still very ambitious the smallest a lot the xmart 3 launched without a hiccup and I've seen mostly positive feedback on it however the larger 2 X+ and x max 3 had some issues right out the gate gdtech ended up pulling them to revise these issues and a few months later they were re-released a few months ago chch sent out the reworked xmax 3 for review and today we are going to be diving into this printer we'll go over the printer specs what is changed how it prints and I will share my thoughts based on my time with this printer so far so with all that being being said and without further Ado let's get right into today's [Music] video thank you to foxo pla for sponsoring today's video voxoa aims to make 3D printing more accessible with a reliable and affordable filament this filament is used exclusively in 150 machine print Farm their pla plus is now available in 12 great colors with my favorite being firetruck red and lavender purple foxo pla performance is excellent even on highspeed printers pricing is $16.99 per kgam and at three spools shipping is free within the US bul discounts are also available foxo pla has also expanded to offer printer upgrades like the vision enclosure for the bamboo lab p1p or the Bento Box filter this two-stage filter is compatible with bamboo lab printers and even the voron Trident it includes everything needed and setup is super quick so you can get back to printing right away links will be in the description to vox.com so you can find out more about their highquality affordable filaments and printer upgrades before we jump into the specs let's first go over the changes that were made for the final release the main issue with the initial version was that the bearings that held the lead screws for the bed were fixed into plastic and not the metal frame of the printer due to thermal expansion during the print this led to inconsistencies in both the first layer and throughout the print the xmax 3 now has an entirely metal interior frame that everything attaches to they also put a large beam across where the lead screw bearings mount for added rigidity which resolved the issue they also swapped out the carbon rods on the x-axis for hollow steel rods which I think was a much better option steel rods have been battle tested in this application and really require little to no maintenance those are the primary Hardware changes and we'll touch on a few other changes shortly getting into the specs the xmax 3 is a large fully enclosed core XY 3D printer with a build volume of 325x 325x 315 mm for motion all axis are using linear rods and bearings and the printer uses 10 mm belts the printer's structural frame is primarily made up of Steel and it has a bulky plastic exterior this gives the printer an overall footprint of roughly 553 X 635 X 61 mm with a spool on the back the printer also weighs 66 lb so a team lift is definitely recommended there are handles on the outside of the printer which help get it propped up onto a workbench the bed is a fairly beefy 6mm plate that has embedded magnets for the flex plate system the actual bed surface included is a double-sided powdercoated Pei plate adhesions been great on it but some of the darker paint has started coming off from my abs and ASA printing the bed rides up and down on four linear rods and two lead screws but it is single motor driven the Z motor is in the back Center and a closed belt wraps from the motor pulley to each lead screw the tool head has a direct drive extruder and allmetal hotend the gearing on the extruder reminds me quite a bit of an lgx the hotends heat sink almost looks like a clone of bamboo Labs but it has a bimetal heat brake and a circular ceramic heater core the xmax 3 ships with two hotends one for Standard Printing and one with a harden steel nozzle for abrasives there are two fans one smaller fan for the heat sink and a 5015 for part cooling for bed leveling the printer uses a BL touch I'm actually not a big fan of the BL touch from a few past experiences I've had but I know a handful of people that swear by them I did run into an instant or two of the probe not deploying but this was corrected by adjusting the set screw on top of the device on the right side of the printer is an auxiliary fan which really helps with part cooling especially for pla prints in the bottom back of the printer there is a 24volt 300 W chamber heater which is not something we commonly see for anyone interested in printing strong functional Parts in a demanding material this will be a huge plus there's a chamber thermister that is used for controlling the heater on the upper right side of the printer there's also a carbon filter located on the back for connectivity this printer is running Clipper and includes a Wi-Fi dongle so you can print wirelessly or over USB using the full-size USB port I love that they went with a full-size USB so you can use a flash drive instead of a micro SD card or a standard SD card but it's located on the very back top right of the printer which I just can't wrap my head around interfacing with the printer is done via its 5-in touchscreen which runs its own firmware I wish they had just gone with Clipper screen but for being their own setup they did a pretty good job thumbnails are pretty slow to load when you click on a file which can be a little annoying but everything else has worked well for electronics under the printer we have two 450 w 24volt mean power supplies I was happy to see them using quality power supplies on this machine on the back of the printer we can find the controller which is a custom maker based Skipper board this board has both the Clipper host installed as well as a separate MCU for controlling all the printer's Hardware this printer uses an MKS emmc C module for Clipper instead of a micro SD card for drivers there are three 2209 used on the main controller and there is a separate toolhead board that contains the driver for the extruder this board also has an accelerometer for input shaping and is connected to the main board over USBC there's a separate mosfet board and a controller fan on the back panel the controller fan is wired to and always on Port so even when idle it is running at full speed I mostly kept the printer in the garage just due to its sheer size but if you're going to be working in the room you might want to swap that fan for possibly the LEDs so that way you can control it through firmware the printer came packaged nicely and the setup was pretty straightforward it involved taking out a couple of boxes and foam that were inside the printer cutting a couple of zip ties and removing four screws that held the bed in place during shipping powering on the printer for the first time the screen interface guides you step by step through the initial setup process it first has you preheat the bed and use the included piece of leveling paper to set your Z offset then it does a 25o bed mesh followed by input shaping calibration before you are ready to print when it came time to load filament I discovered one of my biggest annoyances with this printer the spool holder is located on the back of the printer which seems to have become a trend lately with a lot of printer manufacturers it's just something that I will never understand however on the xmax 3 they give you a sealed container and desicant for the back of the printer to keep moisture out of your filament in theory this sounds nice but in actuality it makes it near possible to load filament without standing behind the printer I ended up removing the filament enclosure and just using the spool Mount which did work but it still feels like a major oversight luckily there are some mods already out there that I highly recommend over the stock setup after loading in a spool of red voxel pla I printed out the pre-sliced 17-minute Beni this is where I noticed a change in the firmware from the original xmax 3 the printer now ships with variable mesh enabled by default which in my opinion is a huge plus we covered how this works in detail in a previous video but to summarize based on your sliced file the printer will create a bed mesh before each print but only in the area you are printing this means that the meshes are faster and more accurate once the first layer printed I got to see the xmax 3 really pickup speed and it did a great job with the Beni there were some super fine strings but overall I was very pleased there was no obvious ringing and the auxiliary fan did a great job of cooling the part moving on to slice up my own files I found the next big change for the initial release of the xmax 3 and that was the slicer previously they shipped with a slicer that was based off of cura but the new one comes with a modified version of prusia slicer there are some really nice additions to the slicer for one there is an entire help page that has quite a few guides built in then there is a device page that lets you see the fluid web interface directly from in the slicer on top of that you can set chamber temperature in the slicer which makes enabling it automatically very simple from what I can tell it looks like the majority of these features were ported over from Orca slicer Orca does already have profiles for the new chitty Tech printers so if you're already familiar with that slicer I would just stick with it but for the sake of the review I did use chitty slicer for all of my testing I also almost exclusively stuck with the settings that they had in place other than some small adjustments for print settings for Speed the printer's firmware is set to 20K acceleration and 600 mm a second velocity but this is overwritten in the slicer travel solid infill and infill are not adjusted down the default in the slicer is 10K 5K for perimeters and 3K for external perimeters for printing the speed range is 200 to 300 mm a second depending on the print moves this is still very fast but the advertised speeds are more marketing than what you will actually be using in most instances during my Von 2.4 build a couple months ago I used the xmax 3 to batch out panel clips for that printer I went with the annex engineering ones and was able to batch out roughly 20 of them in ABS the Adaptive meshing has worked really well and adhesion has been awesome for all of my abs and ASA printing I planned on using the active heater once I experienced some warping and I just didn't get that warping for the same 2.4 build I printed out sturdy handles and the Never more carbon filter in the same ABS I ran a couple batches of ercf parts in polymaker Galaxy ASA and I was pretty pleased with the results due to the importance of tolerances with many of these parts I spent a bit of time diing in flow which I needed to scale back on and I also ended up dropping down speeds by about 50 mm a second for pla printing I removed the top cover and did my best to leave the front door open in pla I printed out a large spool holder for the 2 and 1/2 kilogram roll of poly hacks that we tested in last week's video along with a couple of Halloween prints results were pretty good but there is some room for improvement a lot of it is in the slicer profiles the support Gap defaults were too far and I think that speeds are set on the higher side I understand wanting to print fast but there has to be a balance between speed and quality on the ghost print I also noticed a pattern in the Z the axis that I thought may have been caused by the bed lead screws however when I printed a single walled Tower right after in a different pla I didn't see any of that same pattern I'm wondering if it might be flow related but it's kind of interesting cuz I didn't really see it show up in any of the other prints that I ran I also printed Mark robber's full-size one piece compliant Blaster which turned out awesome this model is incredible and was a great test of the xmax 3's meshing the first layer looks great and the compliant mechanism had no issues so so what are my thoughts on this printer after the last few months let's start with the pros at the time of recording the price of the xmax 3 is $949 this is a lot of printer for the money from its overall footprint and the rigid construction down to the electronics I'm actually surprised that it is not more than it is on top of that it's running true Clipper firmware and you have root access to the controller for those that want it with the direct drive all metal hotend enclosed chamber with a heater and auxiliary fan your options for materials to print with are nearly endless lastly chitty Tech from my own experience and from what I've heard from a couple of others does a really good job with customer support as much as I wish they had caught the issues with the Xbox 3 before the initial launch they did a really great job of handling it they immediately issued a public statement paused pre-orders and gave any that had received the option to swap or get a refund gdtech is definitely up there for me in customer service and how they handle themselves moving on to my gripes the printer is bulky separate from it having a large build volume with the the outer plastic shell adds quite a bit of half to it so you really need a fairly large dedicated space placement of both the spool holder and flash drive are less than ideal I would definitely print a different spool holder and if you plan on using a flash drive instead of the Wireless transfer a USB extension cable to bring it to the front would be my recommendation another part of the bulky shell is that when a print starts off it's kind of difficult to get a really good view of it I found myself leaning in trying to get just the right angle to make sure that the part was laying down properly for the for the price I wish that they had just included a camera you can add a USB camera and chy is releasing a $40 camera upgrade but it feels like it should have just shipped with one and lastly once again I'm just not a huge fan of the BL touch I've heard mixed things about how it performs in a enclosed warm printer and given what a lot of other manufacturers are using it would have been really nice to have seen them using either load cells or some kind of a strain gauge most of my complaints are things that can be solved relatively easily but I just really wish they had SP SP a little bit more time on those finishing touches the xmax 3 is a good printer and I feel like for most people that are just wanting a large core XY 3D printer to print large Parts they are going to be happy but had they spent some time on these little details it could have been the difference in my opinion from a good printer and a great 3D printer and that has been the chaty tech xmax 3 I hope that you enjoyed this video and that I was able to answer the majority of your questions if you do have any other questions be sure to let me know in the comments down below and I will do my best to answer as always if I don't know the answers to your questions I have no problem reaching out directly to the manufacturer to try to get those answers for you on that note don't forget to like And subscribe for more great videos we make a video every single week so there's always fresh content coming your way and if you do want to support the channel furthermore I'll have links Down Below in the description over to our patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of our existing patreon supporters I appreciate each and every one of you for allowing me to come back every single week and spend more time doing what I love which is making content for you all to enjoy on that note this has been Dan from modbot I look forward to seeing you guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 18,249

Keywords: large corexy, corexy, best corexy, qidi tech, xmax, xmax 3, x-max 3, 3d printer review, chamber heater 3d printer, auxiliary cooling fan, best large corexy

Id: X6jpidg2bEg

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023