Qidi Tech 1 or Flashforge Creator Pro

A_Nony_Mouse
Tue, 27 Jun 2017 03:42:15 +0000

You’ve probably already bought a printer, so this is more for anyone else finding this post and is considering the Qidi Tech 1.

I bought a Qidi Tech 1 about a month ago and I love it. It is my first 3d printer so I don’t have anything else to measure it against. However… although I love the thing it’s got some interesting “quirks” to say the least.

I haven’t weighed the printer but I don’t think the printer itself weighs 50lbs. I think that’s the shipping weight. I’ve picked the printer up several times and to me it doesn’t feel anywhere near 50lbs, so that means either I’m stronger than I think I am or the printer itself is lighter than what it says.

The printer comes with two spools of filament to get you started; one spool of PLA and one spool of ABS. It also comes with a few other things including some spare parts (fuses, clips, and a spare servo controller questionably inserted into a piece of foam that isn’t ESD safe), an SD to USB adapter, an extra printing bed mat, and a small tool kit with extra screws, screwdrivers, and hex key wrenches. The only things it doesn’t include that in my opinion it REALLY needs to come with are a soldering iron and a roll of 1/2" Kapton tape. I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience with the Qidi Tech 1 so I’m only speaking for myself here. The Qidi Tech 1 kinda reminds me of a Lada car. It’s built like a freaking tank and it gets you where you need to go. It’s the assembly and reliability that’ll have you scratching your head wondering what the person assembling it was thinking.

Two days into owning it I got a TOOL 0 Temp failure (unable to read the temp sensor). Although I ended up figuring out what the problem was in the end, I had contacted their tech support VIA Skype and they got back to me immediately with an answer so thumbs up to them on that front. However, the experience didn’t give me the warm and fuzzies since it’s obviously a known issue. The fix is to literally unplug the temp sensors from the control board and plug them back in. It’d work fine for a few days but it got annoying enough where I just left the bottom of the unit off so I could reseat the connections easier.

This morning the heated baseplate stopped heating up. The fix? Reseat the connections.

At this point I had enough of this stupidity and decided to permanently fix the problems with the printer. I literally went through every connection one by one and examined them. I found that only half the connections to the quick disconnects were tinned, and those that were tinned were poorly done. So right now *every* lead with a quick disconnect has been tinned properly (or re-tinned with some good solder) to prevent corrosion and to give it a better electrical contact. I also squirted some Deoxit on the quick disconnect terminals too.

Don’t get me going on the horrible wire management job they did too. Although that sounds like a nit-pick, the way they had thrown the wires into the bottom half was blocking the airflow over the servo controllers, so to give my unit a fighting chance at long term survival I went and cleaned that up too.

Then there’s the issue of the cabling going to the X axis servo. They literally zip tied it in such a way that it rubs against a sharp edge on the right side of the case. After a few prints you’ll start to see some light shavings from the wiring housing being left on the case. The first thing you’ll probably want to print out is a parametric chain guide to stop that from happening (there’s a really good one on Thingiverse: Cable chain for Replicator Dual Xmotor by stephenmhall - Thingiverse ). Then there’s the issue of the filament guide tubes lying directly against the back of the printer, and because of that when you first put a spool of filament in the back it’s very easy for the filament to come off the spool and get tangled. With that said, after you print the chain guide you’ll want to print one of these out too to stop that from happening and to save your sanity: Qidi Tech Filament Alignment Bracket by KludgeGuru - Thingiverse .

I mentioned that the printer should come with a roll of 1/2" Kapton tape, and what the tape is for is to help secure the build surface to the bed. The build surface is stuck to the bed with some adhesive, but what kept happening to me is that the edges would lift off no matter how many times I’d press them back into place. The solution? Use the Kapton tape to secure the build surface to the bed along the edges.

Then there’s the whole unpacking of the printer in the first place.

The printer comes with a manual that explains how to unpack and set up the printer for the first time. The manual isn’t printed though; it’s on the provided 8GB SD card, and that card comes shipped with the printer pre-inserted into the SD card slot. The SD card slot just so happens to be INSIDE the printer, so to get at it (and the electronic manual that explains how to unpack the printer) you have to unpack the printer first. Obviously someone didn’t think that through. I mean it’d have made more sense to put the SD card into the SD to USB adapter since you can get to it easily, but what do I know, right?

Although it may sound like I’m nit picking and ripping apart the Qidi Tech 1, in reality I REALLY like my printer. For the price it’s hard to go wrong. Just be aware of these potential issues and work-arounds in case you have a problem though and know that going in you may encounter them. I’m not saying YOU WILL encounter them, I’m saying that I did encounter these issues.