Ankermake M5

[cilyjr]

Taking advantage of the sale, I ordered an Ankermake M5 today.
It will be here by the end of the week. I'll give first impressions here a few days after I have some time to play with it.

 

[cdemoss01]

Taking advantage of the sale, I ordered an Ankermake M5 today.
It will be here by the end of the week. I'll give first impressions here a few days after I have some time to play with it.

Sounds good!

 

[cilyjr]

It showed up last night.
Unboxing and assembling was very easy. The foam inserts in the box hold the gantry at the proper height to easily bolt the base. That was a cool idea.
It took about 10 minutes to assemble.

I turned it on, got it hooked up to the Internet no issues you download an app to your phone, it finds the printer via Bluetooth then prompts you for your ssid and password. I did the auto leveling. There are no leveling screws it's all automatic. So no more sliding paper under the nozzle which was still required even with a BL touch.

Then it did a firmware update. It was automatic just clicked the button on the screen. 10 minutes later it was done.

I downloaded the slicer from their site the only one available was ankermake studio ( beta). I wanted to just slice an existing .stl of mine. I opened it in their software and used the easy mode fast. This was a PLA slice. Then I clicked print.
It beams it to the printer and it got moving. Man is it fast!
I printed the model in 25 minutes. This model (a pair of long tweezers) was taking about 3 and a bit hours on the creality s1 plus.
They looked good.
Green is the Ankermake


Now I loaded the machine with Overture black PETG.
Went to slice the model but started to become frustrated with their software. There was no preset for PETG. And no setting to create a new one from scratch. You can modify an existing but that was not what I wanted. After looking around I found if you selected all metal hotend there was 1 for PETG. I tried it using all their stock settings. It was a mess.
Went to bed.

Today I sliced a model in Cura (they have a preset for the M5). And did some searching in the 3d forums for tweaks. I've gotten 1 difficult PETG print out of it so far but am currently trying to dial it in.

As of now the printer seems pretty solid. I will continue to update here though.
The software needs a lot.

What I like is they are continually working to make it better. Time will tell.

 

[cilyjr]

After a week of playing with it, I've decided not to keep it.

I found the software difficult to use. It's inferior to Cura. Although based on it, you cannot do things that I would assume were simple like snap when rotating or moving objects. There's no search function in the settings bar so if you need to find a setting you need to open up Cura, find out where it is and then scroll down in anker slicer.

Although it printed PLA like a champ, I got exactly one successful PETG print out of it and even that had its errors. If I'm going to have that much frustration, I'm going to do it at the ender price point.

In the end I found the printer no better than my ender s1 pro.
It has fancy things like a camera and AI detection which helped me exactly zero times when I print messed up.
Although fancy, I would rather have a machine that properly prints.

I bought the machine through Amazon and right now they have a 60-day return because of Christmas. Will not exactly. It's until February 1st. The machine is going back.