Not much out about the latest machines. I quite fancy the look of the Bolt, but £££
I run a Creatr HS borrowed from a friend (too busy to spend time setting up the machine when his Zortrax is pretty much plug’n’play and his Ultimaker 2+ gives few problems) and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a noisy old beast of a machine, emitting a nasty howl when I try to push it beyond 80mm/s print speed (as set in S3D, no idea of actual). It’s built like a tank but the designers decided to clad it in large aluminium panels, ensuring that it amplifies the racket made by the steppers and extruder drives.
There are some other “interesting” bits to the design such as designing in 3 dirty great lead screws (proper stuff) and then synchronising them with a belt driving three, decidedly off-centre, toothed wheels (Z-wobble, anyone?). Not a particular fan of the print head design, either. I have also had issues with the 0.35 nozzles (0.5 nozzles with the pip end work brilliantly) and the cooling shroud, which only works from one side… Bed levelling is also a bit clunky.
However, when it’s set up correctly with material it likes (it’s a little fussy over PLAs) it can crank out some lovely large prints, or arrays of smaller parts, repeatedly. I’ve had good success with PolyMax (it particularly likes the orange filament for some reason) and some of the standard PLAs. Colorfabb PLA/PHA works a dream. PETs have been very good (nGen, XT, edge) and I have had great success with fresh Polysupport and dual material printing.
Old Polysupport (which seems to me to be >6 months) was the cause of the only problem that caused us to contact Leapfrog support. They sent out a replacement print head slide FOC without any quibbling at all.
The machine will quite merrily print large PolyMax items at 100 mm/s (S3D setpoint, no idea of actual) if your ears can stand it.
Buying spares is also satisfyingly easy and Leapfrog appear to be eager to offer support for a while after a machine is obsoleted (spares for the original Creatr still available).
Given that we are a few years on from the original designs and presuming they have learned how to solve some of the issues above, I wouldn’t have an issue with buying a Bolt. If I had the cash I’d splash out on one with a set of high-temp nozzles.
