QiDi X-Max - 3D Printer - Unbox and Setup

hey guys welcome back to another 3d printing review and today we're going to be checking out the cutie tech x max 3d printer so in this video we're going to unbox it set it up and do some prints all right so let's get started [Music] all right guys so the x-max here comes in this really large box so this is probably one of the biggest boxes i've had on this table and you can kind of see how large it is compared to that plant if you've been watching the videos but not just that but the weight of this thing is and 110 pounds on the shipping label so definitely large and heavy so if we look here on the side we can see the size of the packaging and it's 655 by 610 by 720. so it looks like the box survived pretty well we do have a little damage in that corner hopefully nothing too major but we do have these bands we need to cut off and because of the weight these bands really help with keeping the box together so it doesn't rip apart all right so let's see where do we start so this appears to be like a normal box with flaps on both ends so let's go ahead and flip it over we're going to try to get it out by opening the bottom and then pulling the box out all right so it looks like we have hard styrofoam and i guess for this weight you really do need it and that's a max here on the bottom of it all right flipping it back over all right so this is what greets us a lot of foam and there's the layers so on the very top we have all of our accessories and things like that and we're going to take a closer look in a second but below that we have the printer itself and i just realized that this is the top so i think we need to put this back on and then flip it over and now we have the bottom up and the reason we want to do this is we want to flip it over onto the feet and plus we want to get this plastic off of the bottom so when we laid down it won't be trapped underneath all right wow this thing is quite heavy and definitely a bit of a job to get it out of the box but it's all worth it because we have a really nice looking printer here and we'll take a closer look at it here in a second all right so first things first let's go ahead and start unwrapping it we've got a nice little door here that opens up and by the way this is all plastic and somewhat flexible but nevertheless we do have a door and the whole printer outer shell looks like is some pretty durable plastic but it does have a very heavy duty frame on the inside and i think this one really makes it heavy so it looks like there's a top cover and a piece of styrofoam holding everything together with a little note on the top of how to get it out and as you can see guys here we need to take off the little clip that's on the x-axis belt that's holding it from moving around and then after that we're just gonna pull the styrofoam out and also there's a couple clips on the x-axis on both sides let me just show you guys so you can see a little better so we got a clip here on the x-travel and two more clips on each side we can see see one there y and the other one right there also on the y take this tape off the top move the hot end to the side and these will just come out well i guess we're also going to need to cut these straps so let's go ahead and snip those off and they are going through the handle here on the side they do pull out to the inside here same thing for this side pull them out to the inside and now we can move this forward and this piece of styrofoam comes out so now we can take out the clear hood that goes on the top that literally sits down right there and it's actually magnetized so it's pretty nice that they included this cover and on the top here it says when printing pla tpu please remove the cover so this is for higher temperature printing to retain the heat all right so we got that out and we have another piece of foam here on the bottom but we won't be able to get that out until we hook up the printer and raise the bed up so we're going to leave that alone for now so let's go ahead and check out what's in this tray that was on the top so we get some paperwork a little thank you note some more information about the xmax a few things in this bag a little leveling card a guide on how to get started and operate the printer another thank you card frequently asked questions with quite a nice chart of showing what temperatures you should print at for the different kind of models that they have and a lot of great tips of how to level and some problem solving with printing and things like that so very cool so they got a lot of good information in here but also looks like we get a build plate and it is the flexible sheet that's very thin and it looks like this part the black is metallic and then we got the build surface on top of that very nice and this is an extra one because there's one already in it alright so also in the tray we got the ethernet cable and that's to connect directly to a network we got a pretty cool looking spatula and it is sharpened very nice looks like some parts to a spool holder and i think this printer has a dual style spool holder you can have once pull on the inside and you can also hang some spools on the top so i think this is the inner one here we have a piece that's part of the outer spool holder so this is going to sit on the top and we're going to look at how this works in a second but you put your spools in here and then you set this on top so this is the external spool holder we do get a full spool of pla in this red color we have and it is cutie tech branded very nice that they include a full spool so here we have a box that says power cord and that's all that's in there and it does have a pretty decent length looks like about four feet or so so here we have another box that came with some instructions and this is actually an addition to this printer which includes a high temperature extruder so if you were going to print something extremely high temperature you could change your extruder to this more extreme one and this is what it looks like we can see the hot end has like a pretty special nozzle made for high temperature and i think just the whole thing is built to withstand high heat and it is a direct drive so it has the motor already pre-assembled here and the whole extruder and one assembly so yeah very cool that they include this option here if you were going to do some high temperature hard to print filaments and it does come with this little instructions on how to swap it out and some tips on how to use it alright so our last piece here looks like a little tool box with some tools and other accessories so in this one we can see we have some clips screwdriver allen wrenches some fuses connectors ptfe tubing nozzles zip ties wrenches so all the basics that you'll need for this printer and also this nice looking flathead screwdriver and if you wanted to you could pull out this styrofoam here which gives you a lot more room and you can put the spatula in here and some other things lock it up and you have one place for all the things to this printer all right so there's a lot of things to see but before we do anything else let's go ahead and plug it in turn it on and raise that bed and then we're going to take a closer look at all the details of the x-max here so here we are at the back of the printer and we can see this is where our power cord goes and over here on this side you guys can see that there's our voltage switch selector so you want to make sure that you're on the correct voltage before you power this thing on so i'm going to go ahead plug in the cord all right so i'm going to hit the power switch and nothing happens because it does have a secondary switch here so i'm going to click that and there it goes wow look at that lighting very cool all right so it's booted up and we got this x-max glow in here in blue and so what i want to do right now is just lift of the bed up so let's go to tools manual and here we can see all of our axes we can move any direction and we got choices of how far we want to move them so it looks like we're on 10 millimeters so let's say z going up and look at that i'm gonna click it a few times and that looks like it's good right there to get this part out and sure enough it just slides right out and looks like we have a couple things on here a glue stick and a usb drive and the usb is a 16 gig thumb drive that probably has files in it like the slicing software and maybe also some test print all right so let's take a closer look at this thing it's quite intriguing and i love how the x-maxx glows there in the front very nice touch so starting from the top we have this cover and i got a little light up there so we can see a little better but yeah this is going to help with retaining the heat with the higher temperature printing and it is held on magnetically so let's go ahead and pull it off so looking here on the top we can see our hot end design it's all one piece with the extruder and everything so it's a direct drive and we are riding on these rod rails for the x-axis and also the y-axis on both sides and the x-axis motor is here on the right side and these rods are quite thick let's go ahead and measure them so yeah it looks like about 10 millimeters on the x same thing on the y and then the z has four of them and these are 12 millimeters so our y-stepper motor is there and it's connected through a shaft to both sides that then are connected to these brackets and that's how the y moves on both ends our y-axis limit switch is back there and also the x next to it and the both these are on the very bottom on each side of the printer and i definitely like that there's two of them because since this bed rides on two separate railings when it holds it's always going to be perfect every time because of the two limit switches on both ends so very happy to see that so underneath the hot end assembly we can see the nozzle with the heat block that's insulated on the very back of the printer we got two large fans with filters so the z axis frame is quite heavy duty we got a nice chunk of aluminum here everything's metal the rods same thing on both sides which connects to the main bed frame which then the bed connects to you guys you can see there's a little cut out here or a little tab where you can grab the build plate and as we saw earlier that's a really thin sheet that's magnetic this is what the bottom of the bed looks like so we got a really thick chunk of aluminum and appears to be a bunch of magnets bolted down to it the bed is heated but it is not insulated and we can see the power socket that comes to it it is strain relief so going underneath we can see we have two knobs up front and only one in the back which is quite an interesting design choice i usually prefer the four corners but sometimes these threes work just fine so going down we can see we have the dual z-axis motors and the coupler sticking out and the motors are actually underneath here and also i don't know if you guys can see but we got a chain going up that's carrying all of our wires inside so it does have a nice clean look in here so yeah overall very rugged and heavy duty and you guys maybe can see we have really heavy gauge steel on each corner of the printer which builds this really strong box but the printer shell itself is mostly plastic including this door but the door is magnetic as little magnets stick and it stays shut we got the logo here so going down we can see we have the ethernet port and the usb port and this is where we're going to plug in that thumb drive that was included so going to the left side of the printer we got a nice large x with some cautions on the bottom and a nice little handle to carry it and you're definitely going to use that handle for this weight now going to the right side same x with the handle and a manufacturing sticker with some qr codes and after sales information so the back is pretty clean you can just see those vents to the fans and that's about it now on the very top we can see here this is where the spool holder is going to go and so there's these two arms that pop out and if we just simply pull on them it's going to lock in place and there's our little tab to unlock it so we can lower it back down so you can see it kind of protrudes up same thing for this side and now we've got the top spool holder out so there are a couple clips here that you still have to pull up and they open up like that and then we're going to grab the spool holder itself put some filament in it and then set it in there simple as that and then we can lock it in and this thing can hold looks like three spools so very cool so here on top of the printer if you guys can see there's some tubings one over here there's one here and there's like some routes and there's even one inside there you can see right here it's kind of poking out so this is to route the filament if you're going to use the top and also if you're going to use the inside holder to route it up to the extruder all right and now we're back up front and this is probably the coolest part is this glowing x-max very nice touch i definitely like that and then we got this really a large lcd screen so i'm pretty curious to see all the menus let's go ahead and see what we got so we got print system tools and after sales so this is the main menu so if we click on print it's going to try to read that usb thumb drive so since we don't have plugged in there's nothing here so here we have systems so this is going to be information here okay so this is currently where the printer is at and what it's doing go back and then we got about so this is about the printer the version and also the ui which is called blue plus 1.0 here we can choose our language and looks like they have six different kinds very nice i'm going to choose english confirm so this is a screen adjustment now we're gonna mess with that factory reset here we have sound we can control the sound okay it's either on or off and then quieter louder and the loudest so i think i'll keep it on but on the quietest seems about right here we can control the led light on and off we're going to keep that on it and then we got tools so in the tools here we're going to have all the functions we click on manual here we saw earlier that we can move all of our axes this is our preheating button actually let's go ahead and see if it preheats so if you click it once it goes straight to the preheat so that's nice filament so this is where we can control the extruder internet this is how you can connect to your internet and i think this requires the ethernet cable connection okay so you can toggle it between wi-fi and the cable very cool then we got the leveling we got fast leveling and normal leveling i'll explore that in a second stop so this is going to stop everything from what it's doing fan controls look at that we can also control the air circulation that's the fans in the back if we click on it on the number itself we can go from zero to 100 that's how you turn it on and off all right and that's it for the tools and then we have after sales kind of tells you what to do if you do have an issue all right well that's a pretty simple and straightforward ui and i am pretty excited to get our first print started but before we do that i totally forgot and i think some of you would appreciate this is checking out the electronics underneath the printer so i'm going to flip it on one of the sides and we'll take the bottom off and check it out all right so we got it laid on its back and we can see here the bottom so it is somewhat see-through so you can kind of see it but we're going to go ahead and take off this plate on the bottom and see if we can take a closer look but yeah we do have these really nice large rubber feet on each corner so there are some allen wrenches included in the kit and there's a few bolts that we've got to take off so it looks like we're close one in the middle all right so that appears to be everything so here we can see the overall layout and everything looks pretty nicely organized so starting here on the top right corner we got a little fan that cools off the board this is our main board it does have the arm processor looks like our stepper drivers are integrated and they are synced up there looks like we have the wi-fi chip so yeah overall looks like a really nice board don't really see any kind of model number on it or anything like that yeah it all looks nice and high quality so below that we have a switching circuit with a couple of relays and this is what makes that button in the front work where you can have power going to it constantly but able to control it with the button up front speaking of the power this is our power supply and it is a mean well power supply 450 watts 24 volts so nice to see a high quality supply and that's the power socket all the wires look nicely organized and crimped and we got both of the z stepper motors here on the bottom we can see them and this little box here in the middle it's just a support bracket doesn't have anything inside of it all right well hopefully that was useful to somebody i'm going to put the lid back on and we'll power the printer on and level the bed all right so let's go ahead and power it back on so we'll go to tools go ahead and preheat it back so i never saw auto home anywhere oh there it is it's right in the middle of the manual settings here so let's click on that to see make sure all of our axes move so i'm going to click it and you guys can see this is where the hot end homes right in that corner and now the bed is going down all right and it's all home now so the next part we need to do and it is preheating right now so let's go to leveling and it's going to say fast or normal and the fast is recommended so i guess we'll go to fast okay so it's doing something it looks like the bed is going up all right now the hot end is moving and we can kind of see it here there's a really small viewing window of about half an inch or so maybe 10 millimeters to 15 something like that but so here it prompts us to adjust it and here we can do rough adjustments up and down if we need to so let's grab our special leveling paper hopefully you guys can see what i'm doing here but yeah we're just going to put the paper between the nozzle and the bed and then we're gonna go up or down depending on what we need all right and mine feels good right there and the bed is really hot so let's click confirm okay so i guess that's not what we needed for the first round because all it did is just go to the middle and we took the metal measurement and we offset it i think what we need to do is the normal bed leveling which is the one that requires more adjusting so we're going to click go all right so it's gonna home again looks like and the bed is going all the way down to home so the funny thing about this leveling paper here is that it's actually a piece of plastic and it melts really easy so maybe it's not meant to be preheated when leveling but the nozzle is moving into position and so this time it's starting at a corner so let's grab our leveling card but yeah we're just gonna put the card in there and then twist this knob closer and farther all right so that feels good there i'm going to click on next so it looks like it's going to our next point it's going to be that corner it looks like they had this leveled already pretty good from the factory i'll click on next so now it's going to the center on the back since we only have three adjustments all right let's click next so it looks like it may be going to the middle it was definitely too tight so let's adjust it down a little that seems perfect right there so yeah it was very close already so i'm guessing from the factory they leveled it really good let's confirm and it's all done so i think we're good from here actually i was thinking about this paper for leveling and i think what you got to do is not preheat the nozzle because the nozzle is what's you know burning it because technically it doesn't really need to be preheated because it doesn't expand much but you can preheat the bed just not the nozzle and then level the bed all right so for the next part let's load our filament in we'll just use this roll that was included we do have a pretty nice red color here so all we got to do is unclip this thing grab the roller and then put our filament through it but as you guys can see we can fit two more spools on here so i'm gonna go ahead and put a couple in there so now we got all three and they fit just fine clip it in and now we have the option to use either of the three but we're gonna go ahead and start with the red cut it on an angle and then we're gonna simply just feed it right here into this hole and that's the extruder assembly and there is a lever here that you push and that releases the extruder and then we can push the filament in through i went ahead and got my hot end preheated so it should start pushing it out but yeah this is a really nice pull holder you can hold three spools at once now there's a couple of ways you can feed this end you can manually just push this down and then force the filament through and that's the fastest easiest way or we can go here to the display and click on filament and here we can push it through or retract it so i'm guessing this is pushing through and so whenever you push this it'll start pushing the filament through you guys can see it's coming out when you're done you just stop it and that's one way you can do it all right so we're ready to print let's go ahead and grab our thumb drive and plug it in go back and click on print and here we can see looks like they did include a test file okay so we got a few things in here okay so these are our files so let's go back okay so i think i'm going into subfolders i got lost in all these files all right so i finally figured it out just in case you're also going to be looking for it so this is the main thing then you click on xmax scroll down to test file and there's that g-code so let's go ahead and print that first and see what happens okay so it gives us a little preview of what it is looks like a calibration of a square in a circle let's go ahead and go for it all right so the printer is moving all right and now the bed's going down so yeah it appears that it will have to do this every time when it starts a new print so all the way down and then back up but that does give it time to preheat also so it's probably not that big of a deal all right so it looks like it started maybe it's going back and forth i think it's purging yep i don't know if you guys can see anything all right so it started to print kind of see it right there okay so it's actually checking the level also all right i guess that's what it's doing i'm not sure it's going around in circles okay yeah so it is laying a bead all the way around i guess to show off how accurate it is because so far it looks very accurate all right as it's doing its thing let's go ahead and check out this menu so we have a picture here shows us what we're printing the bed temperature the nozzle temperature the speed that it's printing out right now the time passed since we started and the estimated time that it'll take to finish so this print looks like it's one hour and 27 minutes then under the picture here we have a progress bar to zero percent the file name that we're printing and then we have hop buttons pause stop and options here so let's click on options so we can control the speed the heated bed the nozzle the circulation those are the two fans in the back the turbine so i'm guessing that's the fan the flow rate and the light on and off and also here we have a outer off option and if we enable that it's going to turn off after it's finished printing and that's one of the capabilities of having this extra power button here with that circuit is that it's able to shut itself down when it's finished so let's click on the nozzle and you have to push the buttons itself or the numbers and here we can adjust it to well i guess i'm going to delete that first 200 let's say and that's a check here and now it's 200. so yeah pretty intuitive and good controls here as we're printing and speaking of printing we are printing but it's so hard to see here even with the slight let's see if i turn it off if that helps okay yeah maybe it does a little bit but in any case it's a really small sliver to look through and it's booging away on the test print there and the printer does seem to have the silent steppers but it does make quite a bit of other sounds let me close the door here i got a little quieter but let me get the microphone so most of the noise is coming out of the hot end assembly so so as far as how loud it is it is making some noise but not obnoxiously loud so all right so we're gonna let the test print print and we'll see what it looks like when it's finished all right so the print finished and the printer actually turned off and that's because we chose that out a power off option in the menu so that's a pretty nice feature let's go ahead and pull out the bed and so the bed is easily removable as you see there and because it's also flexible it'll be easy to get you know larger prints off so that's really nice but yeah we can see here on this test file that all of our lines here have the same amount of distance between the nozzle at least it appears to be so yeah it did a great job with the leveling then i printed this test print here so let's pull it off so it's actually stuck on there pretty well but it does pop off and this is what it looks like so we got a square part on the bottom and then the round on the top so overall looks really solid it's a little hard to tell here on this red color but if you guys look at the reflections they're nice and uniform alright well everything seems to be working and functioning so i think for the next part we can go to the slicer and maybe slice some of our own test files like a calibration cube and a benchy and print that in silk black so we can see a lot better how the layers go down all right so here we are at the computer and i have the thumb drive plugged in so let's go ahead and open it up so here we see a folder called xmax and inside that folder we got a bunch of other folders so let's go ahead and look real quick so we got an unboxing video a pdf of the manual so here kind of shows us everything about the printer and how to get started we got the slicer for mac os or windows so if you're not using cura like i am but since i like using cura and this machine reads g-code i'm going to use that but yeah you can download the qd tech software here and it does come with also a little guide here of how to use the software and connect your printer straight to the computer so here we have a test file folder and that's that one g code that we printed then we have a lot of help here on different things so this is bed leveling replacing the extruder cleaning the nozzle inserting the filament so this one here is how to connect the ethernet to the computer then we also have a video for connecting wi-fi but they go pretty thorough here with all the explanations so you get a lot of information on how to use everything also replacing the high temperature nozzle they got profiles for simplified 3d and also here how to restart a print if you have a power outage so yeah a lot of information about the printer all right so here we are looking at kira and i keep saying this over and over again but i keep using the same generic profile here that i've been using for every printer and the reason i do this is because i want to be pretty consistent on as much settings as i can and i've just been using ender 3 or the crtn profiles and just going to the settings and adjusting the sizes of the build volume so like for this printer we got 300 by 250 by 300 so and everything else is all the same and i have all these settings here always the same so it's pretty basic stuff like the layer height 0.2 wall count 3 bottom layers infill so here we have the temperature which is normally 200 well i guess the initial could be 210 usually that's what i do so speed is also normally at 50. so yeah very basic things nothing too complicated here and the retraction is the 6.5 but for this printer since it has a direct drive i think we can do five millimeters but yeah pretty much everything else is really normal and i just have a skirt going around the print printing straight to the bed so yeah that is all the settings so let's go ahead and drive a calibration cube in and here we can see the volume of the x-max and this is how i print all my test prints just sometimes adjusting retraction maybe the temperature and the speed so other than that it's all pretty basic and of course we have spiralized mode here if you check that it'll do spiralize mode so yeah so pretty much that is it and i just click slice says it's going to take 31 minutes and we're going to print it out and this is one of the ways i can have consistency from printer to printer with the same basic settings now obviously tweaking things in tweaking software slash printer itself will help a lot and getting a better print but i truly believe that a good printer should be able to print a basic file like this and very good to excellent quality so yeah now we're just going to save the file you can name it whatever we want save it and then put it in the thumb drive and print it out on the printer actually guys we totally forgot to put in these two little washers that go around the spools so let's go ahead and unclick it so it looks like they just simply slide over right over the silver part on both ends and i guess that helps kind of keep all the spools together so they're not going out to the edge as much and rubbing on the sides all right so let's grab our black filament and feed it into the extruder and now we're ready to print our cube and bench so let's click on print and find that calibration cube play and there we go it started and the reason you don't see a preview there is because when we slice it as a normal g-code file on cura it doesn't produce an image which is fine because you have the name so you do know what you're printing all right so we got the calibration cube and the benchy all printed and i'm pretty excited to show you guys the results let's go ahead and start with the calibration cube so let's start here with the x so we can see that the layers are sitting really nice but we do have some ringing on the x-axis and we can really see that there so this is the y wall so the y is even nicer there is a slight bit of ringing but it's less than the x but notice how those layers are sitting very nicely in uniform so this is the x wall and the y wall also very good the bottom and the top so yeah it looks really nice so let's grab our calipers here zero them out and measure the axes so we'll go with the x first so it looks like we got a pretty good measurement at 20.1 millimeters let's go to the y and we can see that the y is a bit under so it looks like we do have some kind of offsetting somewhere and now let's measure the z and that's pretty reasonable there so so yeah not perfect but pretty good for some reason the x and y are about point three difference in dimensions between each other but as far as how the layers are sitting you guys can see they're really nice there's a bit more ringing on the x than the y but overall very nice print and definitely above average as far as print quality is concerned for this printer let's check out this benchy here so the benchy turned out well overall the retraction was a little lacking and it was at five millimeters so i think it needs to be bumped up to about six and a half or so which is standard but if we look at the walls here the layers are sitting really good and there's not anything too funny going on with this print on this other side here we can see some ghosting right here just a little bit or ringing and all and also over here but it's ever so slightly so not bad at all and if we look at the walls up here it did okay we can see here where there's a lot of retractions happening for some reason it didn't print as clean as it could have same thing on this side good cooling you can see that in the windows the top looks great chimney looks good and if you guys see that box right there it has a slit but the slit is not all the way around so it's starting here but then it closes up on the other end and i think maybe this has something to do with inaccuracies of the squaring of the print so it looks like it might not be squared perfectly is what's going on here so obviously checking every little part and adjusting certain things might help like belts and whatnot else so keep that in mind that you can micro adjust certain things to you know get even better results and to prove my point about the accuracy we're going to measure this thing here i think it's supposed to be 25 millimeter so this came with the printer that we printed out earlier and we can see here we got 25 pretty much on the dot almost 25.1 and if we measure the other axes we got 24.9 so yeah it's exactly the same amount off as our little calibration cube there so all that means is that this axis here the y is not squared with the x so the one on the sides needs to either come a little closer or farther away to fix that issue all right so i'm going to print out a few more things in pla and i also want to try some tpu see how this printer does since it has the direct drive extruder and we'll check those out and then we're going to try to print some pad g and some abs to see how well this thing does with those [Music] all right so we printed a few more things here in pla and also tpu so let's go to the tpu first so i decided to do a benchy since you know it's pretty challenging and the tpu i use for this is actually a pretty low quality pretty much useless filament but to my surprise this printer still managed to put it down really nice so i bought a really bad roll of tpu i think i just got a bad batch or something but yeah but surprisingly it you know still turned out and actually looks really good and you guys can see that it's tpu i can bend it obviously in the chimney here i think if i bend it too hard it'll probably rip but yeah you guys can see that it is tpu and the layers went down really nice actually so i was really happy to see how well it did with tpu so i decided to print the astronaut in a silky blue i guess is what it is and he turned out really well also you can see a little bit of ringing on the x there and some vibrations on the y but not bad but overall a pretty solid print and it looks really nice all the layers are sitting really well great cooling under the fingers and the build plate on this printer is just amazing it grabs to everything so so on the helmet you can see the reflection and just a really nice looking print oh yeah pretty darn good so here i have a bearing and i like printing this because this is a mechanical part it actually moves and it shows you know if the printer is capable of printing accurate tolerances between parts and to my surprise the bearing actually turned out and it spins now it is not perfect because it spins easy half a turn then the other half it kind of struggles a bit and i think the reason for that is because it's not squared completely but nevertheless it's still printed i did need a little persuading of breaking it loose i'll just stick a wrench in there and turn it but still as you guys can see it's very capable and here we can see the walls the layers are definitely sitting really nice now for the last print in pla here i went ahead and did the vase and this is in spiralized mode and it is the full 300 millimeters tall so this is as tall as this printer can print which is very nice size and actually in the end is about 210 or 15 something like that so it's you know about the maximum what this printer can print in two axes but yeah the bottom stuck excellent and as you guys saw there peeled off really easy and if we look at the layers they're sitting really nice so the little boxy patterns you see that's just from scaling the vase but the more finer details that's from the printer but yeah the axle and print guys so i really like how this came out not only that it's strong like if i push it together it doesn't break which is quite impressive it might have something to do with the filament this is the filament that was provided with the printer so yeah guys so far as far as pla goes it does a really good job so i think for the next part let's move to high temperatures so we'll do petg and we'll also do some abs and so for that we're gonna need the cap now there's one thing about the cap that i'm a little confused about and it's this hole in the back of it there's literally a pretty large opening technically is not necessary there and i don't know if it's supposed to have a cap or something here or what but it seems like all the heat would just escape so i'm thinking that maybe i'm going to tape this with some packaging tape to retain the heat we do have this little cut out here for the filament to feed through and speaking about the filament let's go ahead and see if we can install this internal spool holder with this gray petg i got here so i think we have to put it through this pool and then tighten it down into that bracket back there and screw the spool holder on and that's it now our spool is inside now we just got to figure out how to get our filament to the top of the extruder now there is a little tube right here that i think this goes into and i think once it goes from there it just goes into the hot end the hot end does have a metal ring around it so it should be fine when it starts pulling it in so i didn't really find in the manual how else it could go we do have some extra tubings here but i think these are for this area here but i'm not sure in any case i'm gonna go with this and we'll see what happens so i went ahead and put some packing tape on that huge hole to cover it up so let's put our cover on and so now we're pretty sealed in there and our spool's inside so it's going to be warmed up with the printer so let's close the door and we are preheated 60 here let's go to 70 and we're going to preheat the chamber a little bit and then we'll start the print with the pet g so we're at 70 let's go ahead and start it and by the way i'm not going to turn those two big fans in the back because we're going to try to retain as much heat as we can and i do have a squirtle that we can print in petg so it might be a little hard to record it because you know everything's closed but once it prints down a little bit we'll be able to see a little better and we'll take a peek at it so i do have this infrared thermometer the display on it's kind of messed up but we can kind of see it but i'm going to go ahead and take a temperature right now let's see of the spool so we got 31 on the inside and it looks like about 66 on the bed so this might be a little bit inaccurate but we are retaining some heat and i can feel this thing is getting warmer so as time passes by i'm going to measure it again and see how hot it gets and we are printing at 0.2 millimeter layer height 15 millimeters a second on speed with 70 on the bed and 220 on the nozzle i'm not sure why this says 25 here maybe it's the combination of two axes 25 plus 25 is 50. well i did flash 50 there for a second in any case so we're at 90 and it's still really hard to see there's quite a large chin right here on the door so yeah that's a little bit somewhat of a design flaw maybe because you know they could have left this a little bit more clearer maybe made a you know thinner rim here or something but in any case let's take some real quick measurements of temperature so we got 39 degrees now on just the black plastics there and it is 73 on the bed so believe it or not guys it doesn't really warm up as much as you would think like the top here is a little warmer than it was when we first started but not a bunch more warmer so i'm not sure exactly if that's really helping or there's probably a lot of cracks and holes all around the printer where the heat seeps out but i guess every degree helps when you're printing especially larger items and it doesn't appear to be any issues with the filament being fed like that it is kind of going on an angle there you guys can see but it doesn't seem to be affecting it at least what i can tell on the print quality so this has that metal ring i think it's fine but i think the best scenario would be you know having the spool out here and then feed through this piece here and then into the extruder that will definitely be the more ideal way alright so we printed both ptg and abs so the abs just finished so let's look at the p80g one here you guys can see it actually turned out really nice now one thing i did notice not so much on this one but the abs one is that we did have some snaggy but this one didn't really have any snaggy for the most part all the layers are sitting quite uniform and it's stuck to the bed even though there's not too much to grab onto still had a really good result so yeah petg seems to print very well in here so the plate is still hot and i haven't pulled the abs one off okay popped off and this thing is still hot to the touch and look how well the abs looks very nice it's actually got a little bit of a shine to it too now you probably will be able to see some layering and things like that and that was the filament snaggy and i noticed it was snagging as it was printing so i think the way it is right now is not the best scenario it's better just to leave the spool on the outside and then just put the hood on and print that way so but yeah guys i'm pretty impressed with this printer let's see if i can get even closer here you guys can see how well those layers are sitting and this is abs so quite impressive so i'm actually kind of curious how well it'll do with a larger print so i think i'm going to print something else in abs so yeah i'm definitely going to bring that spool up and put it up here and actually guys i forgot to tell you that when i first started printing i with the pla i just put the spool up here and kind of just went straight into the hot end from here like this but that was a mistake and let me show you guys what i'm talking about so i actually started this print before i went to bed and as you guys can see the filament got tangled on the spool around this pipe and eventually kind of jammed it and yeah that's what happened so when i woke up in the morning this is what i saw so after that i printed this one which was successful as we saw earlier and the reason it was is because i fed the filament down and through here and then into the extruder and so that keeps it from popping off this pool because when this thing moves around everywhere like this it makes the filament kind of go in and out a lot and makes it go over the spool so running it through here completely gets rid of that problem so i just wanted to mention that all right so out of all the ebs parts i could have printed i decided to go with a spiralized spaceship which i was very curious if it could even do it because abs is already tricky to print and i was pleasantly surprised to see it succeed and not break apart or warp anywhere so that's quite interesting let's go ahead and pull it out so i haven't printed too much abs especially lately and i know from trying it before it's usually hard to print and i don't know if this kind of print would be harder or easier compared to a solid one for abs but i'm really impressed how well the layers went down and most importantly the base here didn't lift or anything so yeah this material on the bed has been very sticky let's go ahead and try to pop it off by flexing it okay so it's stuck a little too well it's actually breaking the model i think yeah it's cracking it right above the foot there so we might have to help it just a little bit here under the foot so i got it under one foot here and now we're a little bit better shape i think yeah this thing is stuck very well and usually that's the biggest problem is getting abs to stick in the first place and this stuck very nicely so for a solid model this wouldn't be a problem obviously this thing is one layer so it's quite fragile but yeah we're able to cut it loose here with the spatula pretty easily there it goes so yeah it stuck so well that it's got a little bit of white on it so let's take a closer look here guys maybe even closer but yeah you can see the layers are sitting pretty good and overall it's pretty nice i mean it's not as good as pla but it's pretty close which i was not expecting it to be even this good at all to be honest now i can still flex it and it doesn't seem to break wow that's impressive normally if i do this to pla it would crack maybe we should do an extra stress test in a second here but yeah looking at these windows here you can see a little bit of layering but it's very very fine so it's not anything a big deal there is a little bit of discoloration of like more shiny less shiny but you know we are talking about abs here so and as we go up here this part is really smooth and perfect and even the seam i don't know if you guys can see the seam there but there's a seam going through here you can barely see it but then going to the very top this part here is usually very hard to print and it usually melts and i'm surprised how little it melted compared to how much it could have melted and then even the ball was able to print which is impressive on its own and i didn't even have the fan on for this thing the whole time and the temperature was 80 degrees on the bed and 240 on the nozzle so we were really hot and sealed so yeah guys i'm pretty impressed with this print i'm not sure if i should be or not but i sure am i didn't know that abs can be printed this well so let's see if we can kind of force this thing more than it should and see if we can crack it but okay so i see a little crack developing there but it's it's quite flexible what's interesting like i can push it pretty hard i'm sure it's going to crack i hear some crackling yeah it's cracking right here on this rim but overall it's more flexible and much more stronger than i thought it would be okay there it goes i broke it off eventually but yeah but for one layer it's quite flexible and bonded very well as you guys can see it's not breaking off that easy so this could be very good for specialty printing for parts that need to be stronger and even maybe flexible i'm thinking more hobby things like rc airplanes quadcopters robotics things like that abs definitely is a more durable compound but harder to print but it looks like with this kind of printer and an enclosure with the right heats you can get really good results now with that said this printer is much more capable than that because we still have the specialized high temperature extruder that can be swapped out and then you can really print the impossible prints like nylon carbon fiber pc which is polycarbonate so i don't have any of those filaments to try out but seeing how the abs turn out i have no doubt this thing can do the job all right guys so what do i think about the printer well it's really an interesting machine and it seems to be aimed at high temperature now as we saw you can do pla very well also but i think the value in it is the higher temperature printing and not to mention the build quality even though all of the exterior's plastic has an inner frame that's extremely rigid that the shell just attaches to so the overall design and structure is very high quality not to mention all of the parts inside we got large rod rails the thick heated bed aluminum which is really impressive the removable flexible bed sheet is great we got dual z axis rails which give it a lot more stability circulating fans in the back for controlling air excellent build volume of 300 by 250 by 300 can pretty much do any project we've got this large 5 inch touchscreen display with an automatic shutoff feature and also this button here to turn it on and off so you never have to go to the back also there's pretty unique spool holder up there that holds up to three spools that's really convenient so we also get ethernet and wi-fi connection and if you do lose power to the printer it does have power loss resume feature and that brings me to some of the things that are maybe not so great and the first thing is not having a filament detector so that could be an issue if you're printing and your filament breaks you're not going to really know until it's too late so there is no filament detection now another thing that's a little annoying is this door the way it's made you can't really see when you start a print you have to have the door open or you can't see anything and you can't see from the top because of the whole assembly so big you know there's just no viewing angles and there's no side view either i almost wish they would have made little windows on the side right below the handles because that's exactly where the bed starts and you would be able to see it through the side at least through you know a few inches of sliver of window so i would like to see that because viewing the print as it starts is kind of a challenge you know and the only way to do it is open the door and look through here and you only have like an inch or so to look through so now another thing that could be a con for this thing is the weight and the size i guess but the size is expected obviously but the weight it's absolutely astonishing of how heavy this is now it's not impossible to pick up but definitely probably takes a couple people because of the size and the weight being up there close to 100 it's not really something you're gonna you know want to move around a lot now with all that said i think this printer is an excellent printer for what it is and i think qd 3d here did a great job on the x-max with providing you everything you would want for the high temperature large volume printing so for everything this thing can do and and kind of you know try to reach for the more pro industrial levels i think it's a great value for what it is and if you're interested in printing high temperature filaments and you still want reasonable cost this printer should be on your list all right guys well hopefully you enjoyed this video of the xmaxx this was quite a unique printer and i definitely enjoyed taking a look at it so if you guys are interested in this thing i'm going to have some links in the description check it out and if you enjoyed this video then hit that like button if you want to see more 3d printing videos i do on this channel then stay tuned and also check out my pretty long playlist of printers i've already reviewed so as always guys thanks for watching and i'll catch you on the next one peace

Channel: Just Vlad

Views: 78,242

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printing, qidi tech, 3d printer review, qidi x-max, best 3d printer, 3d printed, 3d printer time lapse, 3d printer in action, 3d printer projects, 3d printers for beginners, 3d printer enclosure, 3d printing time lapse, qidi tech 3d printer, qidi tech x max, qidi tech x-pro, qidi tech x-plus, qidi tech 3d printer large size x-plus, best 3d printer under 1000, best 3d printer for beginners, qidi tech large size intelligent industrial grade 3d printer, qidi

Id: K4wz776pIWY

Length: 48min 13sec (2893 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021