Anybody with a 5th Gen having consistent success???

[TobyCWood]

This is for the sake of those googling about the 5th Gen Makerbots.

Has anyone out there had consistent success?

If so, PLEASE post!

[Jon Wong]

My buddy has had no problems at all. I'm extremely jealous! The two he received from his school district were purchased this month. I have two as well. My Rep 2 is working flawlessly, while the 5th Gen is basically a glorified paperweight. He's had some very minute errors, such as partial jamming, but he has been operational 100% for the past 2-3 weeks now.

[TobyCWood]

Which model?

[Jon Wong]

He's got two Gen 5's. I warned him of their inconsistency, but he seems to be 100% fine so far. Maybe he does not tinker with the machine like I do, haha.

[Eric Albert]

I have a Mini - it works fairly consistently but I've had one extruder jam (fixed it myself) and I have issues with objects warping off the front portion of the build plate, even with the raft.  The issue seems to be that there is too much backlash between the Z axis carrier and the rear panel, leading to the front of the build plate leaning downward.  Just gently putting pressure on the front of the plate gives a great deal of play - far too much for reliable performance.  I have an easy fix for this I'm going to try - if that works well, I'll post it with instructions.  As I was an early order, it took several firmware and desktop updates to get WiFi working and updates themselves to load.  I have made perhaps 80-90 parts on it so far with more to come.

[Samantha]

Mine has been working great, we've done around 50 prints and only about 5 have failed mostly due to non-adhesion of the print bed. The extruders clogged on us 2-3 times but we've been able to either push it through with the filament end, or on one tricky one I stuck a guitar string up the nozzle. We had a lot of warping issues earlier since we couldn't level the print bed, but a software updated fixed that so now I only really see it when I forget to level the bed. We did a small production run of centerpieces for my wedding of 25 round circular bases, ended up printing around 30 to replace some that were warped. 

I find overall it prints slow so we've been using these settings to speed things up:

8% infill, 2 shells, .3 or .4mm layer height, and we've upped the speed for some prints as well (sorry forgot to save the speed settings for reference).

Overall my main complaint is that the thing is pretty noisy, so that's preventing me from doing more overnight prints until I can make some sort of sound-reduction box to put on it. 

[Phil H]

Since I received the revised extruder I've had zero problems with my desktop 5th gen. Not sure how many hours I've been printing for in total but I'd guess at around 50 since the change and it's working flawlessly.

[Ryan Carlyle]

You say "working great" and then you describe "pretty crappy"  :-)

[Samantha]

Haha, I guess my expectations for a 3d printer were appropriately managed then. My previous printers were cupcake cnc and printrbot simple beta, so compared to those (which had about a 50-80% failure rate for prints) this is basically plug and play. I guess more of what I was trying to say is that a lot of the initial bugs have been worked out that I've encountered, we haven't a clog since getting the updated extruder design and the software update fixed the warp issues, so NOW it is working great.  

[Brandon]

We've had "meh" success with our 5th Gen Replicator.

We started out pretty well out of the box. First few prints looked great and then the quality seemingly started to drop at an exponential rate until the extruder jammed entirely. Had a replacement sent out and we've been ok ever since. Most of our prints are just small, simple trinkets with a print time of an hour or two so we're also not pushing the printer to its limits either. Our biggest, longest print to date was a slightly modified 'Filament Duck' spool holder to hold spools purchased from MonoPrice. It took about 12 hours and came out perfectly much to my surprise as I was a little wary about leaving it to run overnight. Other larger prints (4 - 5 hours) typically have small imperfections which, to my understanding, should be unacceptable at this price point but it doesn't really bother us or our customers.

Small prints are pretty much perfect almost every time though.

Personally, I'm disappointed in it and I'm glad I didn't have to spend my own money on it. In the grand scheme of things though, it's getting the job done.

[Jeremy Rosser]

I have had a lot of luck. Still on my original extruder. Most prints that do. It come out well are just poorly designed. The simple ones I create or high quality ones I find one line come out great. There is a free lizard stl no the soolideoodle site. Came out amazing. Makes me love the 5th gen. Still I think it is not up the the quality of the rep 2

[TobyCWood]

Great... you bring me up, then ya let me down... :-(

It IS good to see some success with the Gen5 machines though. But at the premium price I would still REQUIRE more reliability.

[scott spencer]

It has been nothing but a nightmare!!! Ok so 6 days after I got it in May the extruder clogged.  I was able to fix it, makerbot told me to keep it because it took them almost 3 weeks to get me a new one. Once I cleared the clog it worked great for a while and then it started clicking, by then my replacement extruder had arrived and I started using that for about 2 weeks or so and then I was getting Thermocouple errors, Error 57,65 so I called them back yet again and they sent me another extruder.  The errors stopped but it started clicking also. So by then my 3 extruder had arrived and It kept pausing during prints telling me that I was out of filament. so they sent me yet another extruder and this one started clicking right out of the box. I wanted my money back and they would not give it back to me, they said that wanted me to send the printer in so they could look at it. I sent it back to them and they fixed  a loose gantry belt and replaced 1 clogged extruder, (that same extruder that I got with the printer that I fixed).  Well last night I spent 3 hours just trying to get it to print, with no luck.  The Build Plate would not level. The right knob was turned all the way to the point where it fell off, and it was still not level.  It looks like it got jarred during shipping, I did get it fix buy lightly pushing on the left side of the build plate till it Clicked, Then i was able to level it with no issues. But when it prints now it prints in the air. UGH...so now I have to call Makerbot back on Monday and tell them that it doesn’t work again. Now they did do a firmware update so late last night I downgraded the firmware to the previous version to see if that will fix my air printing. I am still going to call Makerbot Monday.  I really thing I got a printer that is a lemon. 

 

On a side note they sent me stuff that they had printed with my printer, and I can tell it was still clicking because there are spots on the prints that are really thin like when it clicks because it did not extrude filament.  I think at this point I just want a Brand new Printer or My Money Back. This printer is a Lemon. 

 

On a side note the extruders that clicked would print a raft with no issues, it only clicked when it printed the actual product 

[William Gantt]

Read my experiences with the Z-18, above.. They mirror yours. If the problems were only with the firmware and extruders, it'd be fine. But the fact that it's not user serviceable and the basic hardware of the body seems to be janky, it makes it a total lemon.

[David Ballard]

please see my post and it's entire contents- it's a little long, but shows some things that might be relevent

5th Gen, things i've learned to make it work great! or How I learned to stop being let down by my 3k investment...

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/makerbot-users/FZlYOUOukeg/discussion

[Shane Thiede]

It's been up and down for me. After I downgraded the firmware to 1.2 and turned off filament error detection, things have been going smoothly! I printed a 24 hour chess set that turned out pretty well. I'm still on my first extruder, too.

Of course, I'm now starting to get the loud clacking noise of crap adhesion, so we'll see where things go from here. 

On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 6:13:36 PM UTC-4, TobyCWood wrote:

[LB engg]

After replacing the extruder for a second time and updating to the newest firmware and makerbot desktop the Z18 is working as it should.  I have printed close to 100 hours with the new extruder with no errors.  I have also slowed the extruder and traveling speed down by 5 mm/s each which has reduced the amount of "cobwebs" significantly. 

On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 5:13:36 PM UTC-5, TobyCWood wrote: