CoreI3 3D Printer DIY Kit, Auto Leveling, Heat Bed, Improved Reprap Prusa i3 Structure, Filament RunOut Detection, Multiple Colors Printing, 40g PLA Filament Sample

I must say great printer for great money. It is really DIY because you need to upgrade it (cooling of hot end, bowden extruder, reinforcing of body)I had a couple problems with that but technical support was really great. When I tried to heat hot end and hot bed together it always trip power source out. Also some plastic parts were cracked. I wrote email to technical support and they send me upgraded new power source (with new source working great) and other brand new 3D printer. I never saw this. I want to say THANK YOU.Conclusion: you can get really cheap printer with really great print results but you need to work on that. I'm satisfied.

I've spent a few weeks working with them trying to get the box of parts to work as a complete printer. A replacement part was shipped from China delaying things.Poor documentation comes with it and very little can be found online about the major components (main board & drivers).Z axis rods was bent and had surface defects.Z axis motor stuttering caused the acrylic glass at the top to break(which is a structural part of the axis).Unable to adjust the stepper drivers on two axis to work without over heating.

First, the good:Carrie! She is amazing, and truly strives to satisfy the customer. She definitely went out of her way to make up for the shortcomings of this machine's poor engineering. I truly appreciate the gestures she made. I really do.The bad:Inaccessible SD - It wasn't the SD card, after all... I was able to get the USB working, after some adjustment to the card reader insert. The card was fine, once I was able to get the card reader to make the correct contacts.The inaccurate claims of "quality"- The concept is nice, but the parts used are far too cheap, for my taste. I don't mean to be insulting, but this is just fact. The molded right angle plastic is so flimsy that I could see the bowing that occurred when I tried to tighten them. When I had to make an adjustment, I tried to loosen the screw holding the T-nut, and the allen wrench broke off in the screw head, making it impossible to move the right angle tee connector any more. Upon re-boxing, I had to leave the right angle connector attached.The poor engineering:The only "quality" component in this entire kit is the extruded aluminum. The entire reason I had to move the right angle tee, in the first place, is because when I reached the point at which I was attempting to install the X-axis gantry onto the uprights, nothing lined up. There was a 3+ mm gap between the receiving inserts and the linear rail and screw rods. That's way too much to try to adjust...It was at that point that I realized that, if the frame materials are this substandard, what must the electronics be like? I did a quick google search and, sure enough, multiple entries of people's electronics catching fire or burning up. This is the same reason I returned the Anet A8 (my first purchase).The instructions:Carries supplied a link to a better set of instructions, via Amazon message, prior to the the machine even arriving (as I stated, she's amazing!). While these instructions were indeed a marked improvement, they were still rather poor, and steps seem to be skipped. assembled parts simply "appeared" without showing how it was done. Common sense will allow the user to figure it out, but that assumes some prior knowledge of building machines. Not all first time buyers will be able to get from "A" to "C," making this a difficult leap.Please understand that I am not trying to be insulting, by stating these things. Carrie is obviously an excellent customer service representative. Unfortunately, the problems don't lie in customer service, and cannot be sufficiently compensated by Carrie. Free stuff may make the customer feel better, but it does nothing to improve the quality of the product. The problems are with materials and engineering. The stepper motor mounts have screw holes that DIRECTLY line up with the motor shaft (inline, right behind it). This means that one cannot get a clear, unhindered access, and the allen wrench must be angled in order to tighten/loosen any screw there. The linear rail bearings for the Y-axis were not of any use. Two of them were far too tight and, after wiping down all the rods and re-oiling, would still not allow for fluid motion of the bed. I removed two of them, and was going to operate with two on a diagonal until Pxmalion could replace the two inoperable bearings but, after I broke off the piece of allen wrench inside the screw for the right angle tee, I had had enough, and trying to accommodate the misgivings of poorly engineered and far too inconvenient fastener locations just wasn't worth it, any more.I tried to give this printer an honest shot, and the machine seemed to be worth the shot, but nothing should be this frustrating and inconvenient. The missing screws and T-nuts (one arrived with a piece of screw broken off inside of it) are minor. That I can accommodate, and accommodation can be made rather inexpensively. The poor engineering is another story. Again, please don't take this as a personal attack, as this is not directed at anyone, personally. It would be easy, at this point, to launch into the all-too-familiar diatribe regarding Chinese manufacturing... This, however, solves nothing, and helps no one. As I stated, Carrie is excellent at what she does. Unfortunately, there is just not enough that she can provide, as a customer service representative, that can make up for the wasted hours of trying to make something work, that the customer has to do to make up for the company engineers' short-sighted design. I read other Amazon shopping reviews raving about raving about Carrie's customer service, and they were right to do so. She is an asset to her company. This is my fifth attempt at building a quality 3D printer. All have ended in frustration, to one degree or another. Saving some money simply isn't worth this level of frustration. There MUST be a better way. When a company is so cheap that the adjustment knob for the control box has to be printed by the customer (by DESIGN - something not even known until the customer is already putting the unit together), it's obvious that quality is not at (or even near) the top of the company's importance list.I do wish for Carrie's (personal) success, in all her endeavors. I just feel that my money would be better spent on a higher quality product. Superior customer service is no substitute for quality products and engineering.Final update:Given the superior support I received, I would be remiss if I punished Carrie for the shortcomings of the engineers. Based on the fact that Carrie gave her level best to make my experience as pleasant as it could possibly be, I've elevated the rating to 4 stars. While it is still not enough to keep the printer itself, it is a testament to the excellence for which she strives. I'm sure that, had it not been for her, there would have been far more business lost. If you are willing to struggle through, you could not be in better hands, with respect to customer service.

The printer is a tragedy lol, took me 3h to set it up, even the bored were cut with different dimensions which because of it was almost impossible to drive the Z axis because both x axis bores were pushing and bentig lead screw and z axis bore, I mean tragedy, bought it to start with something, and changed everything after 2 days, the board tho is pretty good, if it would burn after a week of work!!! No support from seller or the manufacture whatsoever, wouldn't recommend to anyone.

Missing parts

After days of dealing with support (I was tempted to keep it just on the merits of the support alone.) I was able to get it set up and ran the autolevel. It autoleveled correctly and then I went to print the knob. It heated the bed properly, then heated the extruder, then moved into position and wrote Printing... on the screen. Then it rebooted. I attempted to print 5 more times with the same result. I contacted support, and she sent updated firmware, but neither the Mac nor my girlfriend's windows laptop would connect. The Cura software included seems to be in a non-latin charset, perhaps Japanese. I'm returning it since I am unable to get a print after almost a week of trying.