Firstly, I've been happy with the support and a fan of the work being done at gCreate. My overall impression of the gMax 2 after having it for about 5 days is awesome but I've run into a few show stopping issues that I'm about to open support cases for but wanted to warn other about as they may lead to damage of your machine (or worse). I'll also say that these are mostly minor issues that can be resolved with new 3D printed parts so hopefully gCreate see this or my support ticket and point out the dumb mistakes I'm making or give us remedies for these issues.
1. Firstly, the clamps that hold the Acrylic bed are too tall and the BLTouch Probe (even when stowed) crashes into the clamp bending the probe (pictures below). I'm hoping this is some weird this with just my machine but I highly doubt it. It literally limits the safe Y-Axis travel to 415mm (not the advertised ~457mm), thats nearly 2 inches lost on the Y due to a poorly designed clamp. If they aren't able to offer a resolution for this I'm going to be returning the printer as 2inches is just too much to lose, I might as well get the Gmax 1.5XT instead at much lower cost.
2. While attempting to level my X-Axis per the instructions in the provided manual, my extruder crashed into the edge of the acrylic bed putting pressure on the heater cartridge wires. I couldn't for the life of me understand how the leveling routine could possible level the X-Axis by going all the way to the right and then traveling down as far as possible (off the bed). Upon closer inspection I found what might be a spacer in the box. It seems like it fell off the right Z-Axis brace (picture below). Either way, this approach for leveling the X-Axis seems flawed and instead I just sent the X-Axis all the up the Z until both side were firmly against the top Z stop. Be careful using the included X-Axis leveling gcode routine as you risk extruder damage. Again, Im hoping I did something dumb here but this isn't my first printer and there is a similar spacer on the left side which seems to be what the X-Axis stops on.
3. Wire Drag Chain chaffing heater cartridge cables (or any cable really). Where the wire drag chain meets the extruder it has 2 relatively sharp edges. After just 30 hours of printing I found a powder on the drag chain and then looked to find my heater cartridge cable was rubbing on the edger of the drag chain and making serious progress towards cutting through the insulation. I put a quick fix on tape to hold the wires away from drag chain's last articulated segment. The printer shipped with some extra zip-ties that were not called for in the manual, perhaps they new of this issue but omitted this advice in the manual? Either way, this poses a fire hazard so if you have the gMax 2 please check this and if you see any chaffing, add something to minimize it. If i get time, I'll design a quicj printable shroud for the affected area and share it here.
4. Acrylic Bed - Being a large format printer, I was expecting that the bed would be a bit challenging to level but after printing 10 single layer, nearly full bed calibrations. Ive come to the conclusion that the BLTouch's utility is severely limited for this printer (again, maybe just my) machine for two reasons: 1) The acrylic material has a high thickness variance (>1mm for the bed I was shipped). 2) The Bed's mounting system appears to only provide support at 4 points allowing for the bed to sag, this is made even worse if you have a large print which uses lots of material, adding weight over an essentially unsupported area. Maybe I'm wrong on this, I tried to look beneath the bed to see if the screw heads on the carriage had been strategically places for support but that didn't seem to be the case The result is that the number of probing points (6x6) is too few to compensate. A 10x10 or even better 18x18 mesh would be way better. (maybe there is a way to do this that I'm not familiar with and then have the firmware do better UBL into the standard mesh?). I'm really hoping that the heated bed system that was supposed to ship with this printer (pre-order) overcomes these issues. I'm fairly certain that I can manually tune the bed leveling mesh to make the entire bed usable and am hopeful to have that done sometime tomorrow to try my had at a useful print but it shouldn't be this difficult. The BLTouch should have done 90%+ of the work if mounting and surface were just a bit better. I'm happy to be wrong about all of this so please, someone, anyway, point out the hopefully dumb thing I overlooked.
5. Min Temp Errors - I'm also getting random min-temp errors on the extruder which has led to several failed prints after running for a few hours. Seems the extruder thermistor is shot too.
1. Firstly, the clamps that hold the Acrylic bed are too tall and the BLTouch Probe (even when stowed) crashes into the clamp bending the probe (pictures below). I'm hoping this is some weird this with just my machine but I highly doubt it. It literally limits the safe Y-Axis travel to 415mm (not the advertised ~457mm), thats nearly 2 inches lost on the Y due to a poorly designed clamp. If they aren't able to offer a resolution for this I'm going to be returning the printer as 2inches is just too much to lose, I might as well get the Gmax 1.5XT instead at much lower cost.
2. While attempting to level my X-Axis per the instructions in the provided manual, my extruder crashed into the edge of the acrylic bed putting pressure on the heater cartridge wires. I couldn't for the life of me understand how the leveling routine could possible level the X-Axis by going all the way to the right and then traveling down as far as possible (off the bed). Upon closer inspection I found what might be a spacer in the box. It seems like it fell off the right Z-Axis brace (picture below). Either way, this approach for leveling the X-Axis seems flawed and instead I just sent the X-Axis all the up the Z until both side were firmly against the top Z stop. Be careful using the included X-Axis leveling gcode routine as you risk extruder damage. Again, Im hoping I did something dumb here but this isn't my first printer and there is a similar spacer on the left side which seems to be what the X-Axis stops on.
3. Wire Drag Chain chaffing heater cartridge cables (or any cable really). Where the wire drag chain meets the extruder it has 2 relatively sharp edges. After just 30 hours of printing I found a powder on the drag chain and then looked to find my heater cartridge cable was rubbing on the edger of the drag chain and making serious progress towards cutting through the insulation. I put a quick fix on tape to hold the wires away from drag chain's last articulated segment. The printer shipped with some extra zip-ties that were not called for in the manual, perhaps they new of this issue but omitted this advice in the manual? Either way, this poses a fire hazard so if you have the gMax 2 please check this and if you see any chaffing, add something to minimize it. If i get time, I'll design a quicj printable shroud for the affected area and share it here.
4. Acrylic Bed - Being a large format printer, I was expecting that the bed would be a bit challenging to level but after printing 10 single layer, nearly full bed calibrations. Ive come to the conclusion that the BLTouch's utility is severely limited for this printer (again, maybe just my) machine for two reasons: 1) The acrylic material has a high thickness variance (>1mm for the bed I was shipped). 2) The Bed's mounting system appears to only provide support at 4 points allowing for the bed to sag, this is made even worse if you have a large print which uses lots of material, adding weight over an essentially unsupported area. Maybe I'm wrong on this, I tried to look beneath the bed to see if the screw heads on the carriage had been strategically places for support but that didn't seem to be the case The result is that the number of probing points (6x6) is too few to compensate. A 10x10 or even better 18x18 mesh would be way better. (maybe there is a way to do this that I'm not familiar with and then have the firmware do better UBL into the standard mesh?). I'm really hoping that the heated bed system that was supposed to ship with this printer (pre-order) overcomes these issues. I'm fairly certain that I can manually tune the bed leveling mesh to make the entire bed usable and am hopeful to have that done sometime tomorrow to try my had at a useful print but it shouldn't be this difficult. The BLTouch should have done 90%+ of the work if mounting and surface were just a bit better. I'm happy to be wrong about all of this so please, someone, anyway, point out the hopefully dumb thing I overlooked.
5. Min Temp Errors - I'm also getting random min-temp errors on the extruder which has led to several failed prints after running for a few hours. Seems the extruder thermistor is shot too.
Code:
Send: N8997 G1 X410.105 Y280.468 E210.1128*101
Recv: T:225.25 /225.00 B:0.00 /0.00 @:80 B@:0
Recv: echo:busy: processing
Recv: ok
Send: N8998 G1 X411.044 Y278.037 E210.2809*111
Recv: ok
Send: N8999 G1 X412.439 Y273.374 E210.5950*102
Recv: ok
Send: N9000 G1 X310.802 Y171.736 E219.8696*109
Recv: echo: cold extrusion prevented
Recv: echo: cold extrusion prevented
Recv: Error:MINTEMP triggered, system stopped! Heater_ID: 0
Recv: Error:Printer halted. kill() called!
Changing monitoring state from "Printing" to "Error: MINTEMP triggered, system stopped! Heater_ID: 0 - Printer halted. kill() called!"
Changing monitoring state from "Error: MINTEMP triggered, system stopped! Heater_ID: 0 - Printer halted. kill() called!" to "Offline (Error: MINTEMP triggered, system stopped! Heater_ID: 0 - Printer halted. kill() called!)"
Connection closed, closing down monitor
Last edited:
