Anet A8?

[TheWW1FlyingAce]

In my case the extruded aluminum frame definitely had an effect on my print quality. Before the upgrade when I printed out the Maker's Muse tolerance test the .15 and .2 sections were fused, and the .3 section was tight, after the upgrade all of the sections were loose. This is specially noticeable when printing tall items, as the X axis tends to get sloppy on the A8 the higher you go. Right now the results I'm getting from the A8 with the extruded aluminum frame are comparable or better than the results I see from people online with much more expensive machines like the original Prusa i3.

 

[CMS_1961]

WW1Flying Ace

That extruded aluminum does look awesome and imagine its now a rigid and sturdy machine!! Nice job on that!!!

 

[TheWW1FlyingAce]

There are a couple of things I think anyone who has an A8 should do to improve the safety of this printer.

The first is to buy some Kapton (polyimide) tape and wrap it around the heater block and the wires coming out of the heater block. This will help insulate the heater block and will allow the hot end temperature to be more stable, but it will also help keep the heater cartridge and thermistor in the heater block in case the grub screws that hold them in place become loose.

The second is to replace the standard firmware with Marlin. The standard firmware disables some of the thermal safety features that Marlin has that would have avoided some of the fires that have been seen with the A8 printers. Marlin includes sample configuration files for the A8 so it is relatively easy to do the upgrade. I would recommend the tip of the 1.1.x branch - go to https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin, select "Branch: 1.1.x" from the dropdown, and select the "Clone or Download" button to download the release. Don't use the 1.1.9 release .zip file from the "Releases" tab - it has some bugs in the thermal protection behavior.

 

[Shurakair]

There are a couple of things I think anyone who has an A8 should do to improve the safety of this printer.
... replace the standard firmware with Marlin.

I agree that the stock firmware isn't the best.
I use the Skynet3D version which is a version of Marlin specifically targeted at the Anet A8 hardware
https://github.com/thijsk/Skynet3d

 

[TheWW1FlyingAce]

I agree that the stock firmware isn't the best.
I use the Skynet3D version which is a version of Marlin specifically targeted at the Anet A8 hardware
https://github.com/thijsk/Skynet3d

Marlin now supports the A8 directly, and is much more up-to-date - Skynet hasn't been updated in over a year.