Sorry for the late post today everyone. I thought I would get to make this post a lot earlier, but sadly things didn’t turn out how I hoped they would with the new toy I bought. Here it is in all it’s relatively (ok, extremely) cheap glory:

This is a Sovol SV06, a 3D printer that only cost me $150. It was refurbished by the company that originally sold it, and it has excellent reviews as the top pick for first time buyers on a budget. I figured if I broke it somehow, which is not unlikely, then it wouldn’t be terribly heartbreaking since it was so cheap to begin with. It arrived last night, I got to work on it this morning at around 6:30 AM and … I’ve been trying to get it to work all. Freaking. DAY.

After setting it up and lubricating everything made of metal since Sovol sent it to me dry as a dusty bone in the desert, I tried to print a calibration cube, a little box no bigger than a medium sized die. It laid down the first few layers and all was well. I had a big smile on my face because I thought the impossible had just happened to me. A piece of complicated technology I paid money for worked on the first try. Then, as the universe so consistently demands, it had some issues. Issues that looked like this:

And this:

And this …

Those two turd-looking things on the paper towel are pieces of plastic filament that melted into the planetary gear assembly that drives the extrusion mechanism. They were jammed in so hard I had to blast them with a heat gun till they were gooey to get anywhere. To be fair, that one was my bad. It only happened after I tried to fix the initial problem a few times and screwed something else up. I took a video of it, but deleted it due to all the cursing after I singed my knuckle hairs. It felt amazing when I finally got it out though. Trust me when I tell you it was like pulling the most satisfying booger ever. That was, when I thought I had found the ultimate problem. It quickly ceased to be quite so satisfying when it still wasn’t working after all that work.

And to think I was so pleased at the beginning because the first few layers of that first cube looked like this:

Which is not spectacular or anything (at least, I think. I don’t know, maybe it’s amazing), but it was progressing smoothly for a minute there. That’s the underside of the first failed calibration cube. The first of many, many failed calibration cubes. I tried everything I could find in the manual and on the internet to fix it. Changing variables in the print settings. Tightening lever arms to give the motor that draws the plastic filament in more traction. I even disassembled the entire print head to get at those planetary gears and the hotend so I could clear them up after accidentally jamming the whole thing with half-melted plastic. But finally. Finally, after almost twelve hours of troubleshooting, nay, BATTLE, I realized what the problem is. The greatest horror of the modern world!

Cheap manufacturing standards. (And also my own cheap affection for refurbished products. Sue me.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13wOsMayNgC2xrA5XjjmQJi6RJpgRS7SC/view?usp=sharing

If you watch this video you’ll see the terrible truth: The fan that’s supposed to keep the heatsink cool does absolutely nothing. An eight dollar fan that holds up the entire printer because without it you get all those stringy, disgusting cubes like I had when the heat creeps up into the plastic and melts it before it can make its way to the print bed. Easy fix though, right? Just put in a new fan. Well, I did that. Turns out the problem is even worse. It’s not the fan that’s broken, it’s the controller that sends instructions to the fan. The PCB that controls the fan is the most expensive single part of the entire assembly. The whole thing is busted, and there’s nothing I or anybody else can do about it. I think I’ll just have to get a new extruder, which will burn all the money I saved by buying it refurbished. I suppose this will just have to be a lesson to anyone who reads this. If it’s already cheap, it’s cheap for a reason. Just pay for the warrantee while you’re at it.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley