Alfawise U20 Plus Review – A Massive 3D Printer!

The Alfawise U20 Plus is one large and in charge 3D Printer. With a massive build volume and some excellent features, is it worth picking up? Take a look to find out. Buy an Alfawise U20 Plus (400mm x 400mm x 500mm print volume) and save with this coupon: “GBU20PLUS” $375.99 USD! – http://bit.ly/2YAWW3V

Learn all about the Alfawise U20 Plus and see what makes it great and where it needs some work. Ready to get into 3D Printing or to up your game? Check out “3D Printing: 13 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Started” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvGKfevdf_Q

You can check out the huge selection of 3D Printers on the Gearbest website at https://tinyurl.com/y3kwuthu

• Raspberry Pi 3 B (for OctoPi): http://amzn.to/2FsWb0Q
• Multiple Sized Compatible Hot Ends: https://amzn.to/2YH6f1Y
• U20 Plus: http://bit.ly/2Kd5dD8
• The 3D Printing Zone on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/the3dprintingzone
• The 3D Printing Zone on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the3dprintingzone

Hi there. My name is Nils and welcome to the 3d printing zone. In today’s article, we’re going to be reviewing this very large printer. This is the Alfawise U20 Plus.

First off. I want to thank Gearbest for sending out this sample printer. I’ve done a couple of printers before from gear best, including the Alfawise U20. And if you want to see that video, you can check out the link in the corner here. Now, one of the first things we have to talk about with a printer like the U20 plus is the print volume. This thing can print larger than any of the printers I’ve got. I have nine of them, and this is by far the largest. So what this one can do is a volume of 400 millimeters by 400 millimeters by 500 millimeters. Very large. What that translates to in inches in the Imperial system is roughly 16 inches by 16 inches by 20 inches. That’s pretty big. So it’s pretty cool to see it print such large things. Just as a test, not because this is functional, but because I wanted to try something large out, I decided to take just a regular nut and bolt STL file from Thingiverse.

I blew it up to a huge percentage and basically maxed it out on what this printer can handle. So this is nearly 20 inches tall right here. And then I went ahead and printed the whole thing on one print, both the nuts and the bolts. And as you can see is huge. So this thing is, I mean, pretty huge. This is what it looks like compared to me, don’t really have much of a use for a gigantic nut and bolt, but I’ll, I’m sure I’ll come up with something, use it to hold a printer down or something, but how cool is that, that something that large can be printed in one, go, you’ll notice it’s two colors. I’ll talk to you just a minute about why that is and the pros and cons section here and what that, how that kind of came to be.

Now, another thing I thought of, I do play guitar and I thought that’d be really cool to print a full size electric guitar body. So I went ahead and did that. At least I tried, so I got part of the way through this does have what’s called the filament runout detection sensor. So just a little piece right here that looks for when there’s no filament going through the extruder, which is really nice. And it actually worked just as, as it’s supposed to. I ran out of filament just before this part here. And it told me it paused and move the print head out of the way I went ahead and filled, or excuse me, replaced the filament, tested it out, ran some through to make sure it was good. And it was, and then I let it keep printing. And then I walked away.

What happened was it actually got clogged somewhere in there. I got clogged and it started printing air. Nothing was coming out of the, of the hot end. So that was a problem. And it’s, I ended up with this. So I have a technique that I use for recovering from these, the best I can anyway. And so I went ahead and printed the rest of the body at the exact place where the Z axis had gotten to it, printed the rest of this and those results were okay at best. I would say I do have some problems with this printer. Some things that I think it could really use some modification on. Not that it can’t be fixed, but it out of the box, it’s not quite how I would like it. So we’ll talk a little bit about that again in just a minute here, but the, this is what I ended up with for the guitar.

Now, another item I wanted to print, just because I always like to try this with a new printer is I took out the hot end on this and I put in a 1.0 millimeter, hot end. Most every printer nowadays kind of the standard at least is a 0.4 millimeter hot end. You can purchase these larger hot ends and there are a lot of fun to play with. So I like to try at 1.0 millimeter and actually print at 1.0 millimeters. So that’s what I’ve got here. It’s very low resolution. You can see all the lines very clearly. And in some cases you can see whole, almost like spaghetti strands of filament that make up the file here. I printed it on the bed just like this. And it struggled a little bit with no supports in this section right here, as well as in these sections here, but it handled it pretty well.

I’m really not too big a deal. If this looks pretty bad up in here where it was trying to print at that angle and I had the fan on and it was blowing and everything, but that wasn’t quite enough to really help it out enough to be a nice, steady bridging of the print, but all in all it worked out pretty well. And the best part is when you do a one millimeter low Rez print like this, you can print quickly. So this thing was printed in, I think, around 45 minutes. So not too bad. Now with the bed, something I need to mention here is that most alpha wise you series printers actually come with a two-sided bed, which I love. This is really convenient to have. So it’s got glass on one side and it’s got a mat on the other, but here’s why I’m not using the glass side on this.

This is one of the other things. And I would definitely list this as a con of this printer. At least the one I’ve I’ve got here, the printer bed is not completely level. So if I were to get the, on the actual leveling system on here, that has you go from one to two to three to four. And when I do that, what happens is all four of these can be perfectly level just at the spot that I want them to be. And then when I go to the center, there’s a gap. I actually have a fairly decent size little gap there that’s difficult to work with. And so my options are twofold. One, I can raise the bed so that the center is just at the right spot. But when I do that, there’s almost zero clearance on the corners. So that’s definitely an issue.

The second option is just to try to leave it like that, but then I don’t get good adhesion in the center if the outsides are leveled, just where they ought to be. So that’s definitely something to consider. It’s a problem. Now, another thing I noticed about this printer that I’m not a big fan of is there’s a lot of rubbing and friction going on, at least again, out of the box without modifying this right down here. So you can see here, there’s crumbs. And if I move this over, just a tad, there we go. Look at, there’s a track there of crumbs that are left as the wheels deteriorate, but that’s definitely not a good sign having all of that coming off, just out of the box here. Another issue I’ve discovered with this printer is that there is some layer shift happening out of the box.

And again, this just like pretty much every issue I’m going to mention is something that you can diagnose and try to treat. This has a lot to do with the power going to the motors, making sure they’re secure and tight, and more importantly, with the tension of the bands, the tension of the, of the bands that are moving things back and forth. Boy. So I’ve got layer shift for sure. I’ve got this layer shift happening here. You can see this axis and it’s also on this axis. So it’s actually coming out and up, which is really bad. I mean, that’s just hard to recover from. So you can see here, I may or may not be able to actually get that to work again and fit the pickups inside the guitar and have it line up and everything. I’m going to give it a try and see.

So I’ve got layer shift, and then I’ve got this really mega texture issue. It’s almost as a cool look if that’s what you’re going for, but if you can’t help it, that’s not good. That’s not ideal. So this is, this is the look I’m getting on this print here. And it’s, it’s pretty rough, like super rough. And then on this side, I don’t know if you can hear the difference necessarily, but way smoother. So this looks way better. Aside from the layer shift, this looks way worse. And I’ve noticed that on this print, I noticed it on the helmet print. I noticed it on the nut and bolt print, kind of everything I do, it seems to have that issue. So that’s four things that I’ve noticed. Number one, again the leveling of the bed can be tricky on a bed. This size, number two, I’ve got some wearing of parts underneath and not sure what’s causing that necessarily.

Number three layer shift, which is always an issue, but fixable and number four is the texture issue. I have a feeling that number four has something to do with these wheels underneath. It could have to do with the, the attention of the belts. It could have anything could be any of those things. So maybe fixing one or two things would fix the rest, but those are things you need to be aware of out of the box. I would not say that this is a great starter printer. If you don’t know what you’re doing with printer, you don’t know how to tweak and adjust and test. Then this is probably going to be a little bit more than you are hoping for. As far as the amount of adjustment that’s needed to get a quality solid prints out of this. Those are for negative things. Let me talk for just a moment about all of the positive things.

However, with this printer number one of course is the volume. I mean, being able to print something so large is really cool. That’s probably by far the number one reason you would want a bigger printer like this one. So keep that in mind. You can really do some pretty cool big stuff. Number two, like I’ve mentioned the two features that this thing has, so this is maybe number two and number three, being able to have the filament detection the run-out sensor is really handy. I love that feature. I wish every printer had it. And number three, along with that, the power of failure recovery. So power goes out. This thing will just pick up, ask you if you want to pick up right where you left off as if nothing had happened, which is a really cool feature. He doesn’t kill your print, no gluing afterwards, no sanding, no leveling and figuring out new slices.

That kind of thing you can just say. Yeah, just keep going. I’m good. So very handy to have another really positive thing about a printer like this is that it’s all aluminum. It’s pretty well built. You’ve got your double Z axis. So just in general, the construction of this printer is pretty impressive. It’s, it’s a decent printer. When you level the bed, then you get it dialed in. It stays that way pretty well. I’ve had printers before where you kind of have to constantly tweak and adjust if you level this once it mostly just works after that. So that’s a really good thing, especially if you’ve experienced the opposite. Now, in summary, we’ve got several pros and definitely several cons with the [inaudible] 20 plus all in all a pretty great printer. It’s not something I’d probably recommend for a new 3d printer.

Someone who’s just getting into this, but if you’ve got one and want some larger volume, or if you’re willing to take a little bit more time with this and want something big to start with with this, you’re not really going to have to upgrade as far as larger printers, you’re going to get some great features out of it. And price-wise, I think it’s actually pretty decent the cost on this, and it’s probably going to change by the time you’re watching this spray right now, it goes for 380 us dollars, which is pretty decent for the size of printer you’re getting for the features like the touch screen, the filament run out detection, the power failure recovery, and then just the volume and just the solid build of this thing. So really a pretty good deal for three 80. Check the link in the description below.

I’ll make sure to always keep that up to date with any deals or any coupons that are available for this printer for getting those for a little bit cheaper. Like I mentioned, I did get mine from gear best and they ship it out pretty quickly and it comes really well packed and it’s really easy to put together. So definitely a good way to go. But again, a little bit of a learning curve, if you’re new to 3d printing that you have to be aware of. Now, if you’re interested in 3d printing or getting started with it, or maybe just honing up on your 3d printing skills, definitely check out some of my other videos on the channel. In addition to printer reviews, I’ve got some things like 13 things. I wish I knew when I started with 3d printing. So you’ll want to check that one out and then I’ve got some pretty cool projects in the pipeline right now. One of which just a little sneak preview here is a 3d printed Bulletproof Stormtrooper armor, the whole outfit, the whole body. This thing is pretty nuts. So you’ll want to stay tuned to the channel. Feel free to subscribe if you’re interested in seeing what’s going on there and otherwise, thanks so much for watching I’m nails with the 3d printing zone and we’ll see you next time.