Follow

new 3d printer, long 

Alright, so I got my new Sovol SV06 printer all set up and printing!

The goal was: buy a new auto-calibrated 3D printer that is quiet and Just Works, to replace my Ender 3, such that I don't have my executive dysfunction and noise sensitivity get in the way of doing prints anymore.

I paid around 250 EUR to "pre-order" it a week ago, with an estimated delivery date of January 15. Absurdly, it arrived today instead. Not sure what's up with that. But I'm not complaining!

The review notes so far:

- Physical setup was trivial, the instruction booklet is pretty good and clear, and the screws were bagged separately for each assembly step. The whole process only involved like 11 screws in total.

All tools are included, and the hex wrench thingems actually are of pretty decent quality! Except for the M3 one, which was a bit difficult to fit on the long side, though all the short sides have those rounded-off 'pivot balls' and that worked fine.

- They did forget to mention that you need to 'free' the printbed cable; I forgot this, and it got the bed stuck and caused bed levelling to fail. No damage though. The manual also doesn't mention belt tensioning, but it is easy; there are two adjustment knobs for this.

- First-time calibration is a bit of a hassle. Multiple independent steps that you need to activate manually, and you do need to manually calibrate the bed distance first-time. After that, automatic bed levelling (with mesh correction) *should* be good enough for future calibrations.

- It is *extremely* pleasant, from an auditory perspective. Nearly perfectly quiet steppers, and the 'singing' that the steppers do when you listen closely, sounds satisfying and not harsh.

The fans are unfortunately louder, and *somewhat* high-pitched; but they don't whine, and they are constant enough to become ignorable white noise.

- Loading filament is a breeze. It has a physical wheel on the extruder that you can use to feed new filament through to the nozzle. Curiously, some black filament came out when loading mine for the first time - I'm guessing that the extruder was probably factory-tested.

- The included GCODE is a Benchy. Not the cheapo printer dog :(

It's clearly underextruding on the infill and bottom layer, *but* the outer perimeters look very good. It hasn't gotten to the top layer yet. Extrusion is highly consistent, so they likely just used a misconfigured slicer.

Printing accuracy, so far, is looking quite good! I'll post an update with a benchy later.

· · Web · 2 · 1 · 4

new 3d printer, completed benchy! 

Gotta say, I'm positively surprised about the result! Slightly less clean print than my Ender 3, but pretty close. The bottom layer is clearly junk though, and it really does look like a slicer issue.

re: new 3d printer 

Okay, Sovol automatically gets a bonus point for this one. Finally, I won't need to dig the config out of some weird vendor-modded copy of Cura!

re: new 3d printer 

Update: it *does* get noisier when you push it harder speed-wise. But still way less whiny than the (original) Ender 3.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Pixietown

Small server part of the pixie.town infrastructure. Registration is closed.