The 3D Printer That Can Do It All, FlashForge USA Creator Max Review

last year I went over to my brother's house and we used the time of flight sensor on the galaxy note tend to make a 3d capture of an object and then used his 3d printer to fully printed out ever since then I haven't been able to stop thinking about all the little things that he was able to fix with a 3d printer in his home and just other fun little things to print around the house so in today's video we're gonna change that this is the flashforge USA Creator max let's get started everybody welcome to tech lift Brett where I help tech work for you so flashforge USA reached out to see if I wanted to check out their creator max the 3d printer now they did send this product to me today so that I could make this review now my brother's house I did notice that even though his 3d printer costs a lot less he ended up needing to keep buying little parts or he was having trouble with one thing or another so the Creator Max 3d printer offers an all-in-one solution or pretty much you plug it in get it installed and then you're ready to start 3d printing so I'm really excited to see if this is the all-in-one solution for you now this does cost eight hundred and seventy nine dollars I'll leave a link in the description below if you're interested in checking out the product now some really cool things about the Creator Max is it has a heated bill plate an LED screen with touch screen interface it has an acrylic cover so it's fully enclosed has temperature controls a dual extruder a metal frame six point five millimeter bill plate Wi-Fi connection and cloud printing support for different types of filaments and it comes with the latest 3d components for reliability so let's go ahead and get this unboxed set up and start printing at the top of the box here you have the instructions that actually lays out exactly how to unbox this here we have a 16 gig SD card a leveling card as well as two extra build plate tapes and then we also have two filament guides up here at the top and then here inside the box we have two spool holders the power cable and the extruder that we need to install so let's pull this out and get that installed the creator max does weigh about 50 pounds so you may need some help getting it out of the box the manual does have step-by-step instructions on how to unbox this but I'm just gonna give you a high overview of what is in here so to get everything out we will need to remove this top styrofoam with the extruder then we need to snip the four clips on the guide rod so that we can slide it back and pull out the filament here as well as the lid to remove the last part of styrofoam I just need to pull up on the build plate to move it up so that I could pull out the styrofoam once it was out we can then peel off the plastic here so here we have the dual extruder we all install in just a second but then we also have to spool holders that will go on the back here now these do require the proper filament that can lock onto them here we have a power cable we also have a USB cable and then the tools we will need to install the extruder and a few extra things I don't really know what they're for now that we have everything out of the box we will need to install the extruder this is the only hard portion of the install but it should only take five or ten minutes so here we just need to screw in the extruder so here you want to make sure that the fans are at the front of the machine like it is placed now and then we're just going to set this on the extruder seat and there are two screws that we will screw it in from the bottom in this bag you have the turbo fan baffle that you will install and then there are three screws in here we'll take the two longer screws and screw them into the bottom of the extruder it does come with an allen wrench so no extra tools will be required now we are going to install the turbo fan baffle and it's how we're going to do this is we are going to remove these two bolts here we're gonna attach it and then put it back together so there's one bolt there's the second so this just comes off like that now I just need to place this on like so you know it doesn't really lock on or anything but now we're going to put those two bolts back in and we are going to use these third bolt in the extruder kit to attach it to the extruder there is a bump on the turbo fan seat to allow it to rest in there so make sure that locks in first before you put the bolts back in and then there is a spot for the third screw right under here alright and now the extruder is fully installed now the next step is to install the two spool holder so all we're going to do is we're going to place them here in the back just like so they just rest in there so now we're going to install the filament so again this does have a dual extruder so it can use two filaments at once so over here on the left when you install the filament you would want it to feed in a counterclockwise manner and then over here on the right when you install it you want it to feed at a clockwise manner so that it's not going to get tangled at all and it's going to go right here to the extruder so I'll be getting a second filament later but let's just install this right here so to install this it looks like I need to squeeze this just a little bit put it on and then there it snaps on and it fits great now before we load the filament into the extruder we're going to power on the device so on the back here we have our power cable input and then here you have a master on and off so we're going to plug that in and also just four other ports on the device over here on the right side we have the SD card slot and the USB input and it also has Wi-Fi built in and now we're going to add the two filament guide tube so this will go right into the extruder and then it will line up here into the guides with a little bit of force you're able to lock them in start at the bottom that seems to help the best snaps in and we can place that right in there now to install the filament so the first thing we're going to do is remove the guide tube from the extruder and then we're going to power on the printer to press tools we're going to select filament so now it's asking which one you want to load so the left or the right so we're looking at their machine here we're going to be loading in the right side well it's doing that I'm going to load the filament through the guide tube here okay now it's ready for us to add film so here I'm just going to place it in here once it touched it already started pulling out the filament so once it straight done alright so it hasn't taken very long but at this point we have already installed the extruder and we've already loaded the filament and we are just about ready to start printing I'm really excited to do this so the next step is actually to get the build plate right here to be level if it's not level it's not going to print correctly so let's do that now and then here we have the special sheet for building a level plate so adjust the nut under the platform until you can slide the sheet between the nozzle and the build plate back and forth with slight resistance okay so here we're gonna go back we're gonna go into tools and then here we're going to go to level okay so here I'm going to slide this in to the right if it doesn't fit I'm going to turn the knob here trying to counterclockwise to lower so here I can move the paper but it is a little grippy on the top and the bottom okay once that's good I'm going to select next and now it's going to align to its next now it's in the second position and we're actually going to be using the nut here at the back so there are three different positions but there is a nut back here that we can't see that I'll be adjusting alright it seems like the same friction now we're gonna go next and now we're gonna go to the third nut location so it's tight so I'm going to go counterclockwise okay now I can fit it in there okay and then we're just like next okay so now it's going to go to the fourth position in the center of the plate and we're gonna make sure that the card can slide through with the same friction and adjust the nuts as needed okay I think that's good now we're going to select finish now for the dimensions of the creator' max you do need to find a good area to put this now your length here is going to be about 20 inches you will need with the handles the depth around 17 inches and then the height there with the protector here at the top would be 22 inches so the next step is to plug in the USB cable to the creator max and then into your computer and then we're going to install the flash print software that comes on the 16 gigabyte SD card so here you have a few different folders you even have the user guide here but we're just going to head into the flash print folder and then you can see that you have a Mac version as well as a Windows version so I'm just going to extract the 64 bit option and install up on the computer now the first thing it's asking for is which printer we have so we're going to scroll down here we have the Creator Mac so that's what we're going to select and now we have flash printer ready to go next we need to load a 3d file so this could be a dot STL file a dot obj flash print even allows you to import pictures and it can convert it into a 3d object but this will not allow you to create those objects so you can go and use other 3d software to create those I prefer going to thingiverse.com and there are a ton of different options here of things we made that I can just download and print and so for this first print I saw this cool little Apple TV remote holder my dad has an Apple TV and so they got this remote that nobody can ever find so I'm gonna print this out and give it to him and so you come in here and you can see what the actual print will look like here it's showing the STL file or what it will look like in your three software down here you have a summary so you can read more about this specific print and then here it's telling us if we need certain things like rafts or supports which here it doesn't say that we need that now I highly recommend checking out the comments to see what other people tried and what worked for them so here this first one he's saying that it doesn't fit so that's not good but then the next one said printed it at a hundred and five percent to fix the size issue works perfectly so alright some people were able to get it to print and work then you also have the option to look under make so I can come in here and I can look at all the different people that made it and what it looked like so I'm pretty happy with this now here are different types of colors of filament that you could use again we're using the red transparent so if you really like the design and it worked well for you you come back in here and you can tip the designer but we are just going to download the file so it downloaded there and then you just need to extract that file and now I'm gonna head back into the flash print software and up here at the top I just need to select a load and then here I have my dot STL file we're gonna open that up and it puts it right here on the platform you may get a little pop-up that says move it onto the platform and you would select yes so here I can navigate around I can hold shift and look around down here on the bottom you can see that it's blue indicating that is sitting flat on the build plate so then we have some other options let's say I wanted to move it somewhere so over here I can select move and then I can just drag it wherever I want here you can see that when it goes to red it's not fitting on the build area so you go all the way up to the edge if i zoom out here you can see that build area as for the total size you can actually print here it is 227 mm eater wide or 8.9 inches here it is a hundred and forty eight millimeters deep or 5.8 inches and you can print up to 150 millimeters or five point nine inches next we have the rotate option so you could rotate this maybe you want to change the way it's printing you could rotate it this way or whatever if you rotate one of the other ways you're going to run into some problems here you can see that showing red on the bottom so if I had it like this you can see it's going to cut off the print so just need to make sure that there are no red indicators here I have the scale so they said they scaled it up so I can come in here and scale it up just by selecting up here and now we are at a hundred and five percent and you could see the model increase as I did that here you have the option to cut so if you have a print that's too big to fit in one print you could actually cut off the top and then you can come back and print the second part later and cut off the bottom so all you need to do is select cut select what you want to cut and then draw a line and then start the cut and there you can see here it just split that right in half and so it would print those two different things but that's really not going to work for this let's undo that and then lastly we have the extruder here so this is where we can choose which extruder is going to print so we have the right extruder is gray and the left extruder is green so we'll use that later as well so once everything looks good you then need to decide if you want a support so up here you have the supports option so you only need to support if it's trying to print something and there's nothing underneath so let's say this Apple leaf didn't have this bottom piece you would need to add a support to keep it floating in air because it can't print into thin air so we'll get more into that but now we are ready to print so I'm going to select print I'm gonna choose the type of material I want here I have standard resolution and here sometimes it checks the wall we only use that if we're going to use the dual extruder so I'm going to uncheck that then down here I have all kinds of options where I can change the shells the infill so how much is being filled the type of pattern speed and other options there so that all looks good so I'm going to select okay and now it is going to save a file that is a dot GX code so this is the actual file the printer reads to print so here you can see exactly what that print is going to look like it adds this little strip here so that it can have a nice clean print at the bottom and then over here on the bottom corner it shows you how many layers so this is going to be a hundred and forty different layers and then up here in the top right it says it's going to take an hour and 56 minutes and it's going to use twelve point six eight meters of material and then you could do a weight estimation if you care about that or you can check out the slice parameters make sure everything looks good before you send it to the printer now we are ready to print so I'm just going to select print up here connect to machine so down here on the bottom right you can see that it is connected and now I just need to select send G code it's going to send that file to the printer warm up and then start printing so I know it's just warming up the printer to print here you can see the temperature is rising and once it warms all the way up it started printing so here it starts with a pre extrusion and then it begins with the first layer so watching this is really fun to do making sure it all looks good and this is going down really well so now we're just going to wait and then see how long this takes [Music] so the print has finished and here it says it took two hours and 17 minutes about 12 minutes longer than it previously said it would take but it is all done now to give this off looks like there's a little string hanging here so it's actually on there pretty good let me just pull a little bit harder all right got off that was stuck on there pretty good but look at this really nice print now even though this was standard quality I'm very impressed with how it looks now this is transparent so you can see the hexagon pattern there but the adhering to the build plate worked really good and just it's a very nice print now this is much lighter than I originally thought it would be because it's hollow but let's see if this will fit so it slides right in there no because I did increase the size it's a tiny bit loose on the right and the left side but it fits the front in the back which is probably why it wasn't fitting for the other people that printed this but that looks really great so the first print is now complete and I am very impressed so there were absolutely no issues in the printing process it only took 12 more minutes than it said it would to print and the quality is just really fantastic again this was the standard quality for the print getting it off was a little bit hard I did just warm up the heat plate and then I was able to pretty much pull it off really easily for the second print I'm now going to test out the dual extruder function so this will allow me to print two different types of filament on one print which is just really crazy so there are these little cube fidgets spinners that my brother was making so I want to print that out but using the two different colors so now let's remove the filament here load those up and I'll show you how you can adjust the colors over on the computer so the first step is to unload the previous filament so I'm just going to come in here and unload right filament it's then going to warm up so I can take it out though then give you a notification when it's heated up and then to pull it out there's just this lever on the side that you push down and then you can pull out the old filament now I'm going to add the two different filaments to the left and the right extruder so now to remove this I just need to pinch right here okay so I think I found the first main issue with the creator max is the spool holders that it comes with don't allow for third-party filaments to be put on so here there's no lip around the inside but here on the flashforge filament you have this little lip right here so when you put this on to the small holder it's able to lock there into place so it's gonna have a nice bit like pinch it pull it off put this on here you can see that even though it's pressed in all the way it doesn't slide off it locks here at the end but that doesn't make it very nice we're just gonna try it this way see if it works but I might need to go ahead and print some other spool holders so that I can use third-party filaments in here on the right side it needs to go counterclockwise and again for the left extruder we're gonna make sure that it turns clockwise here a little pro tip for my brother that when you are storing your filament make sure you store the silica gel inside and close it off nicely so that this can keep it so that there's no moisture in here and it will let the filament last longer after a print finished I got in the habit of leveling the printer every time so that it was automatically ready for the next print it seemed to work really well also just an FYI for all the time lapses you're seeing I actually attached an indoor nest cam to the Creator max there isn't a camera built-in so this worked really well you could also get a cheap Weiss cam version too and I think that would do a really great job as well now for the fidgets cube I need to find a print that is able to print two different colors for this I'm just going to look for dual option so here I found a fidget cube version two with the dual color so that means it can do the two different color so we're going to download this and import it into flash print now when importing this file there are actually two different files so there's going to be one file for the right extruder and one file for the left extruder so there's the first file and then we're just going to select load choose the other file and then load it in and now we will need to make sure that we highlight both of these if we're going to move it around but I'm just going to leave it right here and now we need to choose which extruder it prints what part so here I'm going to select one of the objects and then I'm going to go over to extruder and choose which one is going to print that portion so here I'm going to select use left extruder and here you can see the two different colors that it is set so that means one's going to use the left and one is going to use the right now we're gonna head into the print menu and here you do have the option to change the filament per extruder we're gonna leave it how it is P L is what we want and we're not going to select supports or rafts and then when everything looks good I'm going to hit print now it is giving me an error that you should add a raft or a wall when you're using the dual extruder to help print but I'm not sure about that right now so we're gonna try it without it and see what happens so here I'm going to ignore this warning create the GX code and then send it to the printer now for this print it looked like everything worked well so it started off really great we have the two filaments here it's going back and forth between them and it is adhering well to the build plate now you will notice that the colors that it's printing are actually different this is actually color changing filament so I thought it would be a really fun effect to have it but looking at the print now you can see that it has all these weird edges around the outside now this is because I didn't use the wall and every time it changes to the new color there's a little bit of filament left over in the extruder so it causes that little problem around the outside edge so this is just a learning process so when you do the dual filament you will need to use the wall now let's check on the spools on the back so there you can see it's working but here on the green filament it kind of came off a little bit but it's still working just fine so we're just gonna leave this and let the print finish looks like everything is going well so far now when a print starts off well I'll usually leave it and then come back and check on it later and when I came back this is what I found now this is not what I wanted to have happen and is what happened is the green filament got so wrapped up on the spool holder it was so stuck it could not pull any more filament out and it just stopped printing the green filament now after getting the print off it looks pretty good but then trying to break it apart it just wasn't done all the way so it just kind of fell into pieces and was very brittle I probably should have used a little more infill but it's good I didn't since it ended up failing so I think the next step is to get some new spool holders and I don't want to go buy any so let's just print them I'm gonna head to Thingiverse and see what I can find so I found these two different spool holders that said they would work with the creator Pro it's a very similar model to the creator max we're going to try them out I'm gonna start with this yellow one as it did get more likes and views so we're gonna do that first and it did require supports so let me show you how to do that so loading it into flash print here you can see it's not properly on the build plate so I just need to select yes and now it has been oriented properly so now we need to add the support so all I need to do is tap the supports at the top of the screen and now we are in the supports Edit menu so you can tap support options or here I'm just going to select auto supports and what this is going to do it's automatically going to generate support so any part of the object that wasn't sitting flat on the build plate it will then need to build a support so that it can hold up that object now under here I do have a few different settings so it did say that they used supports at 45 degrees so make sure you don't go any less than that and then here I'm choosing the tree-like supports and here I can regenerate those and everything looks pretty good now if you do want to manually add supports you can do that over on the left hand side but this looks great so now we're just going to select back and head into the print menu now when we select back it asks if we want to save a new file with the supports so yes I'm going to do that and now we are going to go into the print options so again we're going to keep the PLA and everything the same but we do need to select to add the supports if we say disabled it's not going to print those supports I learned from experience and you will not have a good model so make sure that you enable supports and then you can go through and choose the rest of your settings and for this because there are so many little tiny supports on the build plate I also want to have a raft so that it has a nice build plate to build on I did try printing the supports without the raft and all those tiny little circles ended up falling off and it made a mess so a raft was able to help keep all the supports on the build so that I had a really nice finished product once all the settings look right we're going to select okay to create the GX code and then it will show us exactly what the build is going to look like so this is it with the supports and the raft if it looks anything like this you need to make sure that you don't print that because that doesn't have any supports and it's just not going to work but this is what our final product would look like now for this I'm actually going to load it on my SD card and go over to the printer and print it so here we just need to place it into the side of the creator' max and then from the main menu we need to select print here we have the SD card in the middle and then I'll show you all the folders that you have on your SD card so we are going to go into the prints folder and then scrolling down it will show you all the prints that you have available here and it shows a nice little picture with them and then here we're going to choose the universal spool and now I just need to select print it has all of the supports and everything saved and then it'll start warming up the printer and print and here it's starting off with the raft and then you can see the supports there on the side and it goes through and it does the whole print and it worked excellent so I highly recommend picking up some of these Clippers from Cline I learned that if I clip the very bottom of the raft here I could then use a plastic scraper and I was able to peel off the prints much better than just trying to pull them off it still took a little bit of work but it definitely was easier and now that we have our print here you can see all of the supports and everything that are attached now we need to remove those and the supports do a pretty good job where you should be able to easily break them off but this is where it's nice to have those Clippers where I can then break any part of the filament off that just won't separate especially the raft part of the print alright getting the supports in the raft off took a bit of work but the print came out pretty great so here you can see it's going to be able to hold much more spool so here if we put this on there you get a pretty good overhang so I'd like to find one that didn't have so much but there it's able to spin no problem let's try it out on the back is great now since I can use two filaments on this I decided to go ahead and print a second now when I imported this other type of spool holder it was very small now let me quickly show you how you can fix something that you import like this so that it is the proper size for what you want it to actually be when you print it the first thing we need to do is change our view so we're going to change this from perspective to orthographic so that allows it to be a exact lineup from the build plate to what you're seeing and then we're going to head to the top view so the perspective would skew it a little bit this allows all the lines to line up properly so now I'm just going to get the scale option and then I can just increase the numbers here or I could drag the object and scale it up until it is the proper size now what's the proper size well I measured the filament and it's about 60 millimeters that I need so I want the portion that's going to hold the filament to be bigger than 60 millimeters so that it can fit on there easily so I'm going to adjust the scale until it fits six centimeters here inside this top portion so here I'm just going to keep adjusting it until it lines up the way I want it to so I'm gonna go through keep counting these I'm actually going to make it about seven centimeters so the filament can fit on there without any issues now once I have that right you can move it around so here I can line it up exactly where I want it to go and now I think the size is correct now we're going to switch back to the perspective view is just a little easier to look at but one thing it mentioned in the comments is that you need to print this with the bottom portion flat on the build plate it was supposed to save time and just be easier to print so now we need to rotate the object so here I'm going to go into the rotate portion and now I'm going to rotate the read 90 degrees now you could click and drag and try to get 90 degrees but that's hard to do so I'm just going to come over here on the side and then I can click the plus 90 or minus 90 option until it is oriented correctly now we have it but it's not sitting flush on the build plate so now we need to go to the move portion and we need to move the Z up to zero and when you put Z at zero it then is sitting flush on the build plate so if I look at the bottom you'll notice that it's all blue and so everything is going to work great and then the last thing that we need to do is make sure that we have supports because this back portion it can't print that without supports so now all I need to do is select supports auto and now it generates the supports but this looks like a ton of supports really we only need supports for this back portion of the object we don't need supports for all this middle section so over here on the right I can select delete and then I can just go through and delete all those supports that aren't needed now it could print that way and that should work fine but the way that this was modeled it was to not need that many supports so I'm gonna go through delete all the ones on the side just leaving the ones on the back I'm still going to use a raft because I have the supports on the back and now that it looks good I'm going to go through the printing setup making sure that I have the supports enabled and the raft and then print it out now for this print I changed the filament out again and I'm using a blue ABS filament so great thing about the creator max is it can use different types of filaments whether they fit on the back or not is a different story but so far this ABS worked actually really well I've heard that you do need to have an enclosure to have ABS work great and with this print I had no problems again using the Clippers and the scraper I was able to get it off now I also want to mention that each time there is a little bit of cleanup you need to do on the build plate haven't really shown but those Clippers came super handy to be able to clean off the build plate every single time and here is the final print the size turned out really great and I love this blue color and the ABS is some really great quality filament yes it does fit so there you go at about 70 millimeters we have plenty of space and adding the spool holders to the back of the creator' max you can see how great those look I'm really excited that now I can use any type of filament no matter what the case is like now since we're back here I didn't want to make one more improvement on this so I printed a new filament guide for the little filament guide tube so before the filament was pulling right up next to the machine and it just didn't look very good I was kind of tight so I decided to print this filament guide that moves the filament to the middle of the filament so it kind of just looks a lot better and then you just place the filament tubes in here and it worked really really well so here is what it looks like as it's pulling out the filament you can see that it's moved to the middle as it's going through so I just think after printing these three things on the back I've really improved how the creator' max works here too bad all those things weren't included but that's why you have a 3d printer so that you can fix and improve things that you already have now that I have two new spool holders for the filament that I have we're going to come in here to flash print go to file and go to examples and add this little Hilbert cube so this is one portion of the cube and now let's go ahead and add the second portion of the cube and I thought it would be really cool to print this in two different filaments now you can print these one at a time and use supports it's kind of a cool double design just to have but I thought it would be fun to use the dual extruder so here we're just going to go to the extruder and here we're gonna change one to the left extruder so now we have the two different colors here and now we're going to head into the print menu and print this properly so we're gonna change this to PLA on both of these I'm going to use the color-changing filament I have and then we don't need any supports for this because it's sitting fully on the ground and now I should at a wall and a raft but I'm just going to select okay now when I do this it says hey because you're using the dual extruder it's best if you have a wall so I'm gonna select yes this time to add the wall and then it says with a wall you also need to add a raft so I'm going to select a draft as well now I'm going to say the GX file and here we can see what the print is going to look like so there you can see the wall around the edge it has the raft as well as the pre extrusion for both colors on the bottom so that looks great now I'm going to send the G code to the printer and try it out now there are options where you can choose what filament is going to print the raft but I think it just shows the default option here and you can see that it's printing that raft and so far it's working really well now when looking at the time lapse of this you'll see those same types of edges where they don't look very clean but this time it's actually happening on the wall so the print inside is going to work really well the wall is what it's printing a little bit of each color on every time it does a new layer so you have the imperfections there instead of on the actual print and the raft on the bottom make sure that everything sticks great especially the wall and here is the final print this looks really cool so there you have the two different wall colors and then we have our little Hilbert cube in the middle here so let's pull this off and remove the raft and the wall so here you can see how important that wall is when using the dual extruder and now getting it off again take some work having these Clippers though was just so handy to have because I was able to just clip the wall off and then the raft on this one I did leave it overnight when it printed but the raft was really hard to get off so it took me a while but I finally was able to get everything off and here it is without the wall or the main portion of the raft and I would say that this is a really high-quality print it's crazy how close the layers can get to each other and this is a really nice constructed block I finally finished pulling off the raft and now you can see the cube here so that is the side where the raft was on so I don't know if sanding or something could help that but here it is it looks really cool having both colors you can see there's a few imperfections here and there where it didn't get it right but for the most part this worked really well now for the last print today we're going to set this up so that we can print over Wi-Fi so I'm going to go into the settings here and go into Wi-Fi and we're going to turn the Wi-Fi on just a quick side note you can't use the SD card while you have Wi-Fi enabled once it is turned on it has then created an SSID that we can connect to over on our computer so here in the network settings I now have the option to connect to creator max so I'm going to select connect and then I'm going to head to my web browser and type in 10.10 dot one hundred two five four and then here it is asking for the username and password by default it is admin and once we are logged in here we can see the status of our printer and we have a few different settings so by default it is an AP mode so it's like a hotspot but I actually want to come in here in the Wi-Fi settings and I'm going to change this to sta mode so that will allow it to connect directly to my Wi-Fi router so that it will always be available while I'm connected to my network to print to and then under sta mode at the bottom I need to type in my Wi-Fi router and password hit save and then it's giving me a prompt that I need to restart the Creator max for this to work so I'm just going to select restart now we are going to go up to print and say connect to a machine here I have a Wi-Fi and Ethernet selected and then I need to add the printer IP address this can be found in the Wi-Fi settings of the creator max now that we've adjusted to sta mode and then here I type this in select connect and now it will show that it's connected in the bottom right and now to print something we just need a load of file just like we normally would this file I actually created from my phone the galaxy s 20 altra and they did an update where you can now scan faces so it's gonna be really cool to have this own customized print of mine that I can do now loading it in it was really small so I'm going to go through the process of increasing the size getting it oriented right until it is where I want it to be now I probably need supports because my chin is sticking pretty far out but when I did the auto supports it didn't work later I found out that a setting was checked where it would only do supports on the platform so I should have unchecked that but for this one that let's go ahead and choose high quality to see how that looks and I'm also praying this with ABS and I'm also going to add a raft and then I'm gonna print and let's see how it does so once we have our GX file here again I am already connected to the printer over Wi-Fi so I just need to select send G code it's then going to download that over on the Creator Macs and begin to print all right so it looks like Brett Terminator edition is complete and we ran into a bit of a problem pull it off here take a closer look that is a pretty nice-looking print so something happened right there where it just did not work well and it started to bubble up but still pretty cool-looking so for something that I was able to create from my phone and print off in high quality I'm very impressed with this print so if I would have added a support I think it would have turned out really perfect I might need to try this again but really happy with the results here now I mentioned in the beginning you can just add a picture and it creates its own file so you can add PNG x' JPEGs BMPs so here I loaded a PNG of my logo and then it gives you a few options in how this works so you can have it have the light as thicker or the dark as thicker and then when you import it here you can have the picture so it's taken all the different parts of the picture and extruded it so that you have a nice little picture here so this doesn't have very many layers it prints pretty quick but it's a fun little thing that you can do just by taking picture you already have and loading it up now there are different styles this is just the plain you could have it print as a tube or a canister or even a lamp and then you could also have it be a seal so some really fun things you can do with a basic picture here is the end result a little dark here but turned out pretty cool now it really wouldn't be a tech with Bret video unless I added something smart home base to this so I actually attached a switch bot here next to the power switch because if I leave the office and it finishes printing it just stays on and the fan is spinning so here I added a switch pod and then I can just easily turn it off at any time now one of the hardest things about doing a 3d printer review is there are so many different variables it could depend on what type of filament you're using or what heat settings you have you could have the same printer but have a different experience so I'm just going to tell you what I kind of learned and how it went with the Creator Max and you may have the same experience or not but overall I'm impressed with what the Creator Max can do is a very powerful and reliable machine I've been using the Creator max for a few weeks now and I've done my best to constantly keep it printing this last print is one of my favorites that I've done it did take a little bit more work but the end result I'm really excited about so here I have a custom tech with Bret logo that I can lay here on my desk so I'm going to turn the printer off during this review just so the fan isn't spinning in the background so over these weeks I've printed all kinds of things I printed this logo I have printed my face taken from my phone I printed controller holders I printed phone holders with the controller now that's one of the great things about 3d printing that there is never an end if you can think it up you pretty much are able to print it all the things here I was like hey you'd be cool if I could print this I was able to find the file print it and then I have it here and I'm able to use it and I haven't even got to designing things that I want to print yet that will hopefully come later down the road it does take a little bit more work so now let's talk about the full printing process so the first thing is to find a file now I do have a bit of a design background so I could go in in the design some of these things but some were just a little too complicated so it's nice that there is already a repository of tons of different files that you can find on Thingiverse now once you find something you want to print it was very simple to load it into flash print I felt flash print was very easy to use and there were a ton of features some of the features I didn't find and the prints didn't work well just because I didn't know about the software fully but after using it for a while there are a ton of things flash print can do if you are looking for an expert mode flash print has that as well so I found this later you can go in and turn on the expert mode where it will really open up what flash print can do and there are a lot of features in here that I don't know what they do but if you're really into critiquing what your printer can do flash print is able to do that one other cool feature I found in flash print is you can actually adjust the LEDs of the Creator max so you have all kinds of different colors that you can choose here I didn't find this out until after I had done all my prints but that would be a fun way to change the look of the print while it's printing now that our file looks great here in flash print let's talk about the three different ways in which you can load that file onto the Creator Macs one of course was the plugged into your computer which that worked great you just plug it in it connects you can load it over no problem next was the SD card that was really convenient I moved the printer to another room so I could just load it on the SD card come over here plug it in and then I would print now if there was a problem it was nice I could just pull it right back up now that was really nice but sometimes I did have to redo the print just because it didn't print properly so I had to come back to the computer create that GX code file again put it on the SD card and move back so nice but not in the most convenient and next we have the Wi-Fi so once I had it set up on the creator max and I was connected to my Wi-Fi I was able to use any computer I had around to make the print which was very convenient to do so if I did need to print something again or change it just go to my computer fix the GX code and then send it to the printer and it would print the only two issues I really had with Wi-Fi is sometimes if the print was too big or was too detailed it took a long time to send and ended up failing a few times so as long as your prints reasonable you won't have any issues now one of their little issue is if your computer went to sleep for some reason while it was trying to send it to the printer it would fail and abort so just make sure that your computer doesn't sleep after a minute or two and you shouldn't have a problem with that so but I really preferred the Wi-Fi solution to print just because it was why you're free I could put the printer anywhere within the Wi-Fi network and I had no issues once the Creator max downloads the GX file you will then begin warming up to get ready to print now before we talk about the printing process the most important part of 3d printing is getting your print to stick to the build plate so here with the Creator max it has this sticker on the build plate that actually works pretty good now I did have some issues depending on the filament that I was using that it just wouldn't quite stick so it would print a little bit it looked like it was sticking but as the printhead moved around and there was just all these other factors it would hit one another and they would bump into each other and then it would end up just being a big mess so here is one print I was doing I tried to print two of these phone stands at once one of them popped off and then it just got stuck and started wrapping around and here you can see it just left a bunch of goop on there so highly recommended to watch the print as it gets going or you're gonna have a big pile of mess in there but as long as it could print the first few layers just fine I really didn't have any issues now if I did I would then add a raft and for whatever reason whenever I had at a raft it always printed great so the raft would stick down just fine and then it would go on with the rest of the print and other times actually I was having an issue where it wasn't sticking with any of the filaments so I pulled off the sticker put a new one on and then I was having much more success but mainly that was with the filament that they sent me here this red transparent filament some of the other ones did struggle so I did need to use a raft in that situation but I did also see there's a glass attachment I could get for this to use a glass bill place so I'm thinking about getting that one I've heard that's a great way to use it so far everything's stuck and then once the print is done getting it off of the build plate was pretty difficult so I ended up finding a little trick where if you have some little Clippers like this I clip the very bottom corner and then I would use my little plastic scrapers here and scrape the rest of it off it gets on there pretty good so if I tried too hard I would felt like I was going to break the build plate so I did find those little tricks if you have any other tricks about getting your prints off the build plate let me know in the comments below but overall I am pretty impressed with the build plate and its ability to adhere to it and so overall I was able to print a ton of things because if it doesn't stick properly you're not gonna have a good print one other little issue that I did have is when it was heating up it would let a little bit of the filament come out of the nozzle so it was just sitting there and then it would start printing and that little piece would get in the way so I found that sometimes I would have to pause it clean that up so that there wasn't anything dripping from the nozzles before it started the prints so it had a nice clean start if I didn't do that sometimes it got on the in the way and ended up causing problems later and maybe I just need to clean out the nozzles or something like that but for the most part all the prints worked really well the other parts is you need to make sure you learn about support so I had an option set where it would only do a support on the bottom so like here for my face it didn't put a support here on my chest that would have fixed my chin so you just need to make sure you learn about supports because if I had a few prints where it was trying to print in the middle of nowhere so like some of these prints here it's printing flat and there's this big gap well it can't print that top part in the middle of nowhere it needs to have support so once I disabled that setting that I had turned on then it was able to add supports here and all the prints worked really well so you do have to learn a little bit about what the supports mean and what works best and how that all works to have really good prints but in the end I was very successful in what I was able to print with flash print and the crater max one really unique part about printing with the crater max is its dual extruder so here I did this little test print where I'm printing with two two different colors and it looks really cool and it's a very high quality print now this was the second time I tried this I tried it another time and I didn't use a wall and I ran into all types of issues now it was a bit hard to take off the raft from this um I found that sometimes we were really hard to do that but I was able to clip it off but with the dual extruder overall it worked really well one other really important part about using the dual extruder is that you need to make sure that your build plate is perfectly level between the two different nozzles because if one nozzle is lower than the other it will cause problems and you'll end up with something like this with both colors so make sure that they are perfectly level when you're using the paper there but overall I'm really happy that the dual extruder can print all kinds of cool things so here is a fidgets cube that I printed it was sticking too much between each color so I wasn't able to get it to function properly it came apart in pieces but I think it's really cool that I was able to print with those two colors this model a lot of people are like hey this doesn't work right and they didn't understand that you have to use this two different models on one print to get that to work so I'm really happy with the dual extruder I do need to get some more filament to really test out its capabilities but it seems to do the job really well after you've done your print and removed it from the build plate the last thing to do is clean up again highly recommend getting some clippers like this so you can clip off any part that isn't very smooth or to clip off the raft this worked really well and then now I have all kinds of different prints so I have this folder for my Nintendo pro controller and I have these holders for my different game controller so there are just so many things that you can print with the Creator Max and having it be an all-in-one solution was just super nice to be able to plug it in and get it going and it starts printing so I've learned a ton about 3d printing now so if you're looking for something as like a first time printing machine this was great to learn because I didn't have to do with trying to get it to print right that was working fine I just had to learn what worked and what didn't so I'm adding a raft or not if I needed the wall or not and in just a lot of little tweaks they're not necessarily tweaking what the printer can do this can do it is just learning about the best ways in which it can overall I am very impressed with what the Creator Mac can do now there were a few little things that could be improved like I wish there were different spools that came with it were a little bit longer but I was able to solve that no problem just by printing another one or on the back the little filament holder extruder part didn't work great so I ended up just printing a little things so it could feed a lot better so it's really cool that you have the printer and then can fix little things on it there are some other things like I want to make a better camera attachment or I want to make an attachment for my Clippers here on the side and I'm able to do all that with a 3d printer like I said it's never-ending in what you can do with a 3d printer so if you are looking into get into 3d printer or you just want a really nice quality printer the creator max can totally do it it was nice that I could just start printing and then learn that the little things I needed to on the go I didn't have to learn about all the ins and outs of how the printer worked I just needed to know how to print and I was able to do so many different things so if you guys have any further questions about the Creator max please let me know in the comments below I'll also leave a link to it in the description if you want to pick one up and if you guys just want to see how I was able to use my phone to make a file like this to print make sure you check out the video over here on the side thank you so much for watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Tech With Brett

Views: 34,856

Keywords: Tech With Brett, 3D Printer, 3D Printer in action, 3D printers under $1000, 3D Printer time lapse, 3D Printer projects, Creator Max 3D Printer Review, Flash Print 3D Printer Software, 3D Printers for beginners, dual extrusion printer, At home 3D Printing, 3d printing

Id: CuVrtAVY07U

Length: 53min 19sec (3199 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020