Pick a First 3D Printer on Assembly and Levelling
This article may contain affiliate links. Its content is not affected by advertising.
In short
What defeats people starting with a 3D printer is not printing but assembly and bed levelling, and requiring 95% pre-assembled with automatic levelling shortens the road to a first print.
Why I chose it
The requirement came first: “turn a part in my head into a physical thing, on the spot”. The goal is printing what I drew in CAD at hand, without outsourcing.
What I chose was a FlashForge Adventurer 5M. The official specs are these.
- Build volume 220 × 220 × 220 mm — plenty for personal use
- Maximum print speed up to 600 mm/s (maximum acceleration 20,000 mm/s²)
- Extruder direct drive rated to 280°C. Quick-release nozzle
- Automatic levelling fully automatic
- Construction CoreXY, all-metal frame. Removable flexible PEI build plate
- Assembly roughly 95% pre-assembled
In short, its position is “an entry-level machine with automatic levelling and speed, removing the places beginners get stuck on the machine’s side”.
The setup worry was unfounded
I had braced for “first 3D printer = defeated by assembly”, and that did not happen.
95% pre-assembled means what it says: setup from unboxing is easy. There is almost no fiddly assembly, and thanks to automatic levelling I never hit the beginner’s failure of not getting the bed level.
A low barrier to getting the first print out really does matter for a first machine.
Where it got hard
Taking it apart when something goes wrong was quite hard.
Easy to get started with and easy to repair when broken are separate things. Arriving pre-assembled also means, turned around, that it is not built on the assumption you will open it up.
What to judge an entry machine on
Looking back, what mattered was not performance but a design that removes the places you get stuck.
Neither speed nor build volume hits its ceiling in the first few months. What you hit is assembly and levelling. Whether the machine takes those on decides how long until the first print exists.
And whether that first print exists decides whether you continue. That is why the axis for judging an entry machine is not performance.
Frequently asked questions
Q1How big a build volume does a first machine need?
220×220×220 mm was plenty for personal use. Situations needing more than that simply do not come up at the start.
Q2Does automatic levelling really help that much?
It does. It removes the classic beginner's failure of never getting the bed level, on the machine's side, and the experience of getting a first print out is entirely different.
Q3What about when something goes wrong?
Taking it apart was quite hard. Being easy to get started with and being easy to repair when broken are separate things, and that is worth factoring in.
What this article is based on
- Markdown file
Every claim in this article comes from the records above. The repositories we operate are private so we cannot link to them, but which file, which lines, and at which commit we read them is recorded for every article. Nothing here is written from guesswork.