Best commercial grade 3D Printer in New Zealand

Some of you may have noted I'm very much into 3D modelling, 3D Animation, CAD, etc. Its been my hobby for years since I was a teenage kid.

3D Printing is the next logical step to 3D design so I've owned many 3d printers over the years, mainly filament based, called FDM / FFF type.

It all started when desktop 3d printing started to get more popular, from the Makerbot days.

Back then 3D Printing was in its infancy, in New Zealand in particular as a smaller country we had no local players.
Of course times have changed now.

The 3D Printers I have owned & used extremely thoroughly:

Makerbot Replicator

UP Plus (Afinia)

Wanhao i3

FlashForge Adventurer

FlashForge Creator 3 Pro Independant Dual Head

Creatbot F430

And some I have owned but very quickly moved on from:

Dremel

Anet A8

Tevo Tarantula

Creality CR10

FlashForge Inventor

If you don't want to read the full article but just want to know my current personal favourite 3d printer, its the Creatbot F430 3D Printer. However this is a very serious 'Toy'.
I class it as a semi-industrial & rather commercial machine.

Sometimes if I want to print a simpler part, particularly with dual colour or in multi material or with soluble support, then I prefer this FlashForge Creator 3 Pro which I feel is the best Desktop grade Professional 3d printer that is cheaper. 

I can sing praises on these machine all day long. The F430 in particular is everything I wanted in a 3d printer.

I was a little concerned about buying such an expensive machine at first because there were not many reviews for it.
But now I understand that the target market for these machines isn't hobbyists buying $500 Ender 3 & posting youtube videos.
This is serious shit, designed for people who want to make money from 3d printing, or save lots of money with 3d printing, a business user or serious designer - like me haha. 

Initially I bought it because it was big as I wanted to experiment with 3d Printing some speaker enclosures.
Most of you will see my long history of obsession with speakers, & designing speakers finally got boring enough that I started to dabble on enclose design.

I've got a lot to share on that front as well, but that's another post as I get time.

The idea of printing exotic filaments was very interesting because PEEK has resonance characterists similar to wood.

But when I heard the price of PEEK I shat my pants - quite frankly I didn't think I would be able to afford PEEK & all those fancy plastic names they were touting, but I thought well, may as well future proof yourself right.

One day PEEK will be cheap enough to 3d print speaker enclosures & I'll be all set for it!

The local company was prepared to give me a free course on how to 3d print all that hightech stuff as well so I thought to myself at least I know they're not bullshitting me when they say it will 3d print any filament currently available including peek.

At first I though if its 'FREE it probably isn't & I'll be listening to a sales pitch with more products thrown at me.

Turns out the chap who runs the business actually knows a thing or 2 about 3d printers. So I actually really enjoyed the training session & we hit on a lot of interesting topics, pretty technical fellow, not your average suit wearing sales idiot.

Check out their 3D Printer Store NZ website where I got it from.

I got given a really thorough run down on the free Creatware program that comes with the machine. Granted it looks like a hack out of an older version of Cura so nothing spectacular, but regardless it was good to understand the nitty gritty of how to use the numbers to get the result you want.
Then once you get it it doesn't really matter what program you use.

The machine is built like a bloody tank. I mean shit it weighs so much I said to the guy how the hell will I get it back out of the car. Luckily my neighbour is also quite intrigued with 3d printing etc so he was all to keen to help & excited to see it work.

This machine has automatic bed levelling - trust me when you have a glass bed that big, its never going to be perfect. You can level all you want, but somewhere, something is going to be off.

The machine compensates for this quite nicely. Nothing spectacular, but hey, I was happy that one headache around constantly worrying about levelling was finally over.

My first print straight after I took the beast home was a 6 hour long platform jack. It came out perfect.
I then jumped right into Carbon Fiber Nylon because I've always loved the matted look of carbon & how 3d prints look less 3d printed with the layers when you use CF.

The machine has 2 heads & really easy to change nozzle sizes.

So I bumped on a 0.8mm nozzle that pours a shit load of material out, making some nice chunky carbon reinforced parts.

Man they are STRONG.

All in all I'm really happy with the Creatbot F430 3D Printer & I highly recommend it to anyone particularly in New Zealand.
I bought mine here from 3D Printing Services (also called 3D Printer Store now a days) based in Auckland & get the free training - I highly recommend them.

The owner is really passionate about helping people & actually took a keen interest in the speaker enclosures I wanted to develop.

He even sliced one of the stl files for me with his recommended settings & gave me lots of ready settings for different materials & nozzles & what not - really you could see that passion for 3d printing was there.

Great folks to work with.

And man the amount of different filaments they have in stock is insane.
I was blown away by what they stock right here in little New Zealand & the amount of support they offer on how to 3d print each & every one of those materials!

Of course no 3D printer is perfect though.

Like a month later, the levelling probe stopped working. And the stupid thing is that without this probe working the whole unit becomes useless. Can't home & can't start print jobs.

I didn't realise this 1 Z axi levelling probe was the master of all rings. I expected end stop switches for all axi so when it stopped like this I was worried.

I phoned 3d printing services & like a minute later I have a new probe being sent my way.

Turns out the probes are magnetic solenoid driven or something so if you print a lot of long hot prints in winter with the heated chamber turned on like I do then the probes demagnetise.

No fuss though, the next day the probe was here & it was 5 mins to change it.

The head part was a bit fiddly. Stupid cover on the back of the head, what a dumb design.
But anyway it was easy fix & all back to printing again.

Been a few months now & this new probe has not given me any grief.

I've put at least 2 larger enclosure prints of 60 hrs each using their PLA Filament & they came out amazing. Check out their 3kg rolls those are perfect for these big prints.

I'm now saving up to start on that same big enclosure with their PETG & other Carbon Fiber filaments to see how the harmonics sounds.

I particularly love their Nylon CF & really want to try make a speaker with it but bloody hell those rolls are $85 per KG. Thats basically $85 for EACH speaker.

That a bit rich to be honest, but the materials are bloody amazing quality.
The CF parts I printed parts look as good as machined parts - they don't look 3d printed at all. And you pay for that!

Anyway I felt I'll share my favorite 3d printer now that I have owned it for enough time to have an informed opinion.

Luckily 3D Printing Services actually carry it in stock.
I also phoned another company in NZ who had listed it as in stock but turns out they Drop Ship from China haha & there is a so called order delay - whatever.. and they even charge like a thousand dollars more than 3D Printing service up in Auckland.

I was a bit apprehensive at first because it is the most expensive 3d printer I have ever bought, but worth every dollar.

This F430 really is the bomb - I couldn't find anything in NZ or even Australia that comes close to it!

If you want the Best 3D Printer in New Zealand - hands down the Creatbot F430 from 3D Printer Store is my recommendation.