chriswarkocki
patreon
The Wham Bam Mutant
🕑 Added 2021-01-25 23:18:35 +0000 UTCWell. I’m not impressed by the quality of the product or how it was shipped. Let’s get that out right away and move on to productive and constructive things.
Positives:
- Locks in without issue in any of the 3 included plates repeatedly.
- Seems intuitive enough to work with.
- Should be easy to develop hotends for the system with all the available mounting options.
- Lots of good accessories.
- The ptfe coupler is really really nice.
What needs to be addressed:
The white elephant here is the quality of the injection molding. Everything else seems to function as it should and well. Plates go on, plates go off.
For $149USD this cannot be what ships to customers. Mind you it ships FedEx from Shenzhen direct. This is not a USA product.
In the images above you see the issue with the injection molding process. Unevenness everywhere, tolerance changes, thickness changes, alignment issues, warping, pitting, and so on. You cannot in any way shape or form without a lot of work mount this to a printer and expect the hotend to be nearly perpendicular to the bed. It’s not possible.
As normal I used a super secret order person(s) to gather me up my order so I wouldn’t get anything cherry picked.
Packaging looked fine from the outside but the add on plates left their homes and were just free floating in the package.
Plates are not flat nor are they consistently flat between each other.
Along with being uneven completely cosmetic issues between the mount holes appear. And yes they are just cosmetic but what can’t be seen is that the mount holes are not even to each other so mounting something may get twisted which isn’t a major issue.
Why? The head itself being rotated along the nozzle as it’s point causes no printing issues. The nozzle is our center not everything else. As long as the hotend can be close to perpendicular to the bed you won’t notice issues.
Butttttttttt that’s the next set of problems.
Plate to mount don’t sit flush.
Mount isn’t square where it would attach to the axis.
Thickness from top of full assembly changes from top to bottom.
I want manual toolchanging to be a thing. I feel this is a great step forward BUT it has to be done with some care. Because the plates are not even it may cause the hotend to have tilt. This will make the nozzle lay layers down at a slight angle vs directly straight down. Print quality can and most likely will suffer.
I cannot recommend this product to anyone in its current state. Inside sources say improvements are coming but to those users who have spent $150 already will they get free upgrades? Why not wait for the new rolling to happen?
We’ve made headway and I applaud WhamBam and any manufacturer who will release new toolchanging options for us. I’ve shared my concerns publically on Twitter because I feel everyone should see what they could be getting and I hope the team at WhamBam look at the concerns pointed out and bring improvements.
My next step is to mount it and use it. I’m not giving up on it yet. I just hope I have given you all a little insight into this new product and hopefully we can get more toolchanger options as well as making newly released ones better for everyone.
