BIQU BX 3D PRINTER REVIEW
Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2021 10:54 am
Purchased from : https://technologyoutlet.co.uk/collecti ... 3d-printer
Ordinarily I would not bother writing reviews. But as the above company kept pestering me with emails to write a review I did just that. I doubt it will get published so rather than wasting all my rants but I would paste it all here as well
I'm not out to slate this company or their products. I think this printer has great potential but unfortunately it is a little way off yet.
So here it goes..
BX REVIEW
As I keep getting tested to write a review.
The good points : it seems well constructed but a lot of the screws even on the pre-assembled parts were actually loose. I first benchy out of the box printed amazingly well.
The baby step feature to adjust the head even in real-time is very useful along with temperature and other speed settings.
Does have a very large LCD screen. I think if anything it is a little too big for desktop usage. It is responsive and seems to function well. My only gripe with it is that my LED ceiling lights reflect off it with LED which makes it difficult to see.
The printhead seems to work very well. I have had no issues loading and unloading filaments. It was one of my buying points for this printer was the quality of the head.
Everything else, mostly bad.
Out of the box and assembly are somewhat confusing because the instructions stopped making sense at step four. It was a nice touch that bags were labelled in correlation to steps, but bag 4 was missing and the screws were loose in the box. Even so the instructions made even less sense as they went on. I think these instructions were for the previous pre-release models.
I was unable to find any manual on the Internet pass the quick construction guide which came with the printer. I never had a reply from BIQU but I asked some questions even before buying the printer, I guess I should have took that as a omen.
As other reviews of mentioned, the fan in the power supply is rather loud. Though as this is a "of the shelf" PSU I cannot really hold the printer at fault for this. But I think people will definitely want to change this at some point you are working in close proximity to the printer.
It comes with some blanking off plates for the corners of the printer which is a nice touch. However unfortunately they do not actually stay attached to the printer, so I'll probably have to glue them on.
BED LEVELLING:
while this does level the bed it is not actually accurate and has some bizarre bugs. I spent about two weeks puzzling over this as there is no instructions how to set it up. Upon printing a test square with 50% infill, it was printing 50% fill as expected, then 100% infill. This was repeated across my test square. I think this coincides with where the probe measures the bed. I can only assume the software does not take a average measurement between points. So part of the bed end up higher than others which actually defeats the object of bed levelling. In any case, when I turn this off and recalibrated the print was consistent across the bed that 50% infill. Recalibrating and turning on bed levelling brought back the problem.
Z-STOP ISSUES:
this also had me puzzling for some time because the head would either be 2mm above the bed at the home position or crash into the bed regardless of how I set it up.
For example if I homed the Z-axis, the head would move 2mm upwards, so I would move it back down with software and set their head 0.2mm above the bed. However if I Homed again, the head would crash into the bed.
Part of this problem seem to be a poor quality Z-switch. When the head is moving vertically down, switch clicks and activates, then moves upwards 2mm, and slowly moves back down again. As expected. The problem is it takes a additional 2mm travel before it registers it has actually physically moved 2mm high. Basically it was totally impossible to calibrate the bed height as the switch on and off positions on switch varied too much.
So out of pure frustration I replaced with a Voron hall effect switch which I fitted to the side of the printer. Now when the Z-axis moved up and down the would consistently be at the same physical location and the software will then report accurately location. So I was unable to set up the bed and home without it crashing into the bed.
However there is also some bug in the firmware or something, where I'm not sure how to repeat this exactly, but if the home position already homed, and you home again only the Z-axis, even though the switch is already activated, it would not move upwards first and then slowly move down as you would expect, it continues to move down about 2mm until it registers the switch. This is not the which I fitted up for as it has a LED show when activated. So there should be no reason for the printer to move Z-down when it is already homed.
The work around for this is to always home the X-axis first, as the head physically misses the end of the bed. So if it moves 2mm too far down it does not crash into the bed.
Z-AXIS TILT:
Other printers seem to have a synchronisation belt on the dual Z-motors. I can now see why. Every time the printer is turned off left overnight and turned on again, the X axis would be totally out. In fact it managed to move 2mm on the right-hand side and not the left-hand side. So when the printer powers up on the motors are engaged, the X axis is way out of alignment. Again out of frustration, I just disconnected that motor and unbolted the guide wheel. Now I do not have this out of alignment problem.
BENT BED :
One of the first things I noticed was the rear 2 bed wheels were actually loose. It was causing the bed to wobble all over the place. There was no way to adjust this so I had to dismantle the bed assembly and physically bend the metal plate so it aligned with the runners properly.
MAGNETIC BED:
as other reviewers have pointed out, the black coating on the bed seems to come off incredibly easily. I thought this was primarily down to the reviewers being of prerelease units. But after a short time the build platform is pretty much destroyed.
Also a problem is while printing ABS (moan if you like about this) magnetic sheet does not stay firmly attached to the bed and starts to curl up in particular when printing with a hot bed over 100c. I'm not really surprised about this. But I really should not be having to bring the bulldog clips out to hold it all down.
CONCLUSION :
I think this printer has great potential. But as it is a new on the market printer, I expected there would be some problems, but I think there are a few too many problems out-of-the-box. I hope these will be all be fixed in the future. As other reviewers have stated, it would have been better with linear rails at least on the X-axis. The dual Z-motor drive work as this current setup do not work properly.
So given the choice would I buy this printer again ? Is a difficult question because I am mostly annoyed as I needed to print parts for work which I have not been able to do because of debugging this printer for the past few weeks. I would probably say no overall. I would probably look for a printer which has a synchronised Z-axis, linear rails, and possibly the option of fitting the H2 head to it instead.
If all of my problems were addressed and fixed in later versions, then I would probably not hesitate to buy this printer. But in his current condition, I think there could be better ones out there.
There are various interwoven posts in my blog about such issues as well https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... 540#p71693