Experience with Makerbot MethodX Printers

[Heidi_Arvin 0]

This is from one of my students that has been using the Makerbot MethodX extensively for over a year. I hope you find this information useful.

"

Overall the Maker Bot's are decent printers. They print reliability when only using ABS-R, and are somewhat reliable when using ABS-R build material with Rapid Rinse support material. The printers are not worth the price though and I definitely would recommend that Kettering never buys any printers from Makerbot ever again, they are not well designed machines and have way too many little issues.

 

Compared to the Creality printers the Makerbots are disappointing. The Makerbot's have weak extruders. They have small spur gears with small drive motors. This results in the Makerbot's jamming very easily and recovering from a jam being difficult, sometimes even requiring disassembly of the extruder which is not a task most Kettering students should try to do. The Creality printers on the other hand have extruders powerful enough to rip filament apart. 

 

The extruders that work "well" on the Makerbots:

1C and LABS, they jam the least.

 

The 1XA extruders jam more than the 1C or LABS. I would not recommend using them. 

 

Materials that don't jam much:

ABS-R especially, Rapid Rinse most of the time

 

Materials that jam a lot:

ABS, PLA, PVA, SR-30, e.t.c.

 

I think part of the reason that the SR-30 and PVA support materials jam so much is that our spools are old. I have tried drying the PVA with the drying cycle that the Makerbots have and it doesn't help. PVA still jams easily enough that it cannot be used. The SR-30 also jams too much to be printed with.

 

I think I ran at least 30 prints this term on the makerbots. They only succeed if I was using ABS-R as the build material and Rapid Rinse as the support material if I was using support material at all. I got annoyed for a while with dealing with the jams of support materials so I ended up using the Makerbots with just ABS-R and no support filament for a while. The makerbots are a bit faster than the creality printers and I have overall had more print reliability than the Crealities seem to have since layer shifts and other errors happen very rarely on the Makerbots. 

 

We have a ton of Makerbot ABS and PLA, I would run those spools on other printers because the Makerbots just jam with ABS and PLA.

 

In terms of slicing the printers only print reliably if you don't change the default settings from makerbot in terms of layer height and things of that nature. Turning off supports, changing the raft size and thickness are completely fine. I have had to make rafts wider and thicker to have prints not warp and be a little easier to remove from the raft. 

 

Overall they are decent printers when using ABS-R with either the 1C or LABS extruder and using Rapid Rinse on the 2XA extruder as the support material if using support material at all. I would only recommend printing with ABS-R in terms of model materials.

 

I would get rid of the PVA and SR-30 that we have because it just jams and nothing I have tried has made it work better.

 

On the makerbot closest to the other printers the Z axis usually stutters when starting a print and requires a restart of the printer before starting a print. On the other makerbot the support material bay occasionally stops being able to recognize spools. This requires unplugging the cables on the bottom of the bay door and restarting the printer. Sometimes this procedure from Makerbot needs to be done multiple times."