Sovol SV06 update, long, 3D printing
- The automatic bed levelling seems to be a bit buggy, it consistently is too close to the bed on the left, and too far from the bed on the right. I've corrected for now by manually turning the Z screws a bit, and now my prints are perfect.
I'm talking to support about a more permanent fix - the support response was a bit slow (a few days), but I did get a *useful* response, and they clearly actually read my e-mail, only asking me about things I hadn't already checked myself.
I think there's actually something wrong with how the (inductive) probe works, because it's always off by roughly the same amount, even when I deliberately skew the whole X axis carriage. I think it misdetects the bed location somehow.
- The Z-axis auto-calibration is kind of pointless due to a design fault in the carriage; the extruder connector will hit the frame before the carriage hits the end stop on one side. Hasn't affected prints so far though.
- Once the levelling is sorted out, the bed adhesion seems to be *very* good. I've had no curling even with nearly-full-bed prints where the description for the design explicitly says that they are prone to curling. Elephants foot is minimal.
Overall, print quality has been almost perfect; with the only obvious inaccuracy being that the perimeters are a bit jaggy vertically, seemingly due to tiny layer shifts (but not enough to notice unless looking for it). May just be a belt tensioning thing.
- The bed seems extremely evenly heated. Whereas my Ender 3 had a clear 'hotspot' in the middle, I can't detect any such differences on the SV06. I haven't used a thermal camera to confirm this, though. This probably is why things don't curl. Pretty impressed.
- Part cooling is very limited, it's not very good at it. It can do point-to-point overhangs very well, but as soon as you have unsupported lines, even just 1 line away from a support, it starts drooping.
- I have not yet gotten this up to the same printing speed as my Ender 3 without loss of printing quality, likely due to the bad part cooling. However, it is quiet enough that I don't mind letting it run all day long.
- It does seem to handle my crappy eSun filament much better than the Ender 3 did. I haven't measured this, but I get the sense that the nozzle temperature control is much more accurate/stable, as well as heating much faster.
- I have no idea where my filament dryer is (I bought it in a bundle). I assume it needs to ship from China, but I've not even gotten a shipping notification.
- Pause/resume and material change work reliably and cleanly; the "cut-off point" is not visible in the final print.
Overall, I'd say that I pretty much got what I ordered/expected - a Prusa clone at a quarter the price that's "fire and forget" (but without the fire), and with Pretty Good printing quality. I've not had a single print failure since correcting the levelling, not even in 8-hour full-bed-surface prints.
I haven't tested flexible filaments yet. That's the next thing on the list :)