Saturday, July 8, 2017

I sadly have moved on from my Black Widow. I sold it off along with a ton of spares. The concept of the Black Widow was very good and it drew me in from the start. The problem was quality control and no real testing. I saw a lot of complaints from purchasers that parts were milled incorrectly. That almost all the heated beds were warped (they were very thin!) along with problems with the Z axis rods/blocks that bound up or were not straight. After all the changes and work I did to my Black Widow I could not get a good consistent repeatable output. One time I would print and would be 100% successful only to try another print right after and have nothing but problems and failed prints. I got so frustrated that I just boxed it back up and sold it to someone that wanted the headaches.
So what did I go to? I purchased a Lulzbot Mini and have not looked back. Straight out of the box it printed without issues.. HIPS, PLA, PLA+, ABS, and PETG all came out without any changes, tweaking, modifications or tinkering - It just worked! Yes the price was 3x what the Black Widow was, but I spent close to the price of the Lulzbot purchasing spares and parts to make the Black Widow perform properly.
I presently have been printing without issues since the purchase and have had 1 or 2 failed prints that were my fault as my AC unit was blowing on the printer while trying to print ABS. This was resolved with a enclosure from Printed Solid which kept the cool air off the print while printing the high temperature filaments.
With the Mini I have been able to print 95% of a TAZ 6 printed parts list. This will be my go to printer once completed. The Mini convinced me that the Lulzbot brand was a good product and I figured I would try to build my own (Hell I pretty much created my own Black Widow by the time I was done trying to make it work properly).

Well that is the updates so far.

Lulzbot Mini

Luzlbot Taz 6 Project that I am assembling