Early in November I put down £800 to buy a new 3D printer. Before this i’d had a self built RepRap Mendel based machine which wasn’t really cutting it so I decided to buy a pre-built model.
I had a few criteria, I wanted a heated bed and I wanted Dual extruders. This narrowed the market somewhat and, obviously, increased the price too. After a long search and some substantial research I settled on the FlashForge Dreamer which I purchased from iMakr.com, the official UK distributor.
My first impressions were good, the printer was back ordered so took a week to come from China, but considering it’s journey the delivery times were easily acceptable. The printer was packaged well and came with a full set of tools for the small amount of assembly required.
I managed to make my first print within about an hour of unpacking it. This was pretty amazing and although the first print failed (the two-colour block was knocked from it’s position half way up) the print quality produced was everything i’d hoped for.
Since that point i’ve printed quite a lot of objects and the vast majority have been successful, and when they weren’t I could usually track it down and work out why it failed.
At this point I would have been able to recommend the Dreamer without any hesitation.
You can hear the But coming can’t you?
A week into ownership the printer started freezing whenever it tried to print. I managed to isolate the issue to anything that used the internal memory, any prints from USB or WIFI would exhibit the behaviour but printing from the SD Card would work fine.
I attempted to contact FlashForge to work out the issue. This resulted in a long wait for a reply, not entirely unreasonable they are on a different continent after all. The first question I was asked was when and where I bought my printer and for my serial number. I gave the information and waited. This time I hadn’t received anything for days and decided to follow up again.
This time I got a reply from someone else and had to supply the same information again, I got a reply the next day which informed me that I had to get support from iMakr but FlashForge passed my details across to them and I received an email from an iMakr employee telling me that my query had been passed to support.
So far so good, not the smoothest support system ever but forgivable. I then waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually I solved the issue thanks to some help from owners on the Google Group set up for FlashForge printers it turns out that the firmware is held on a micro-sd card on the underside of the printer and this can sometimes work loose – in my case the card had failed completely but replacing it solved my issues and I was happily printing again.
I never received a reply from iMakr – and, to be honest, I never chased them because the issue was fixed.
I’ve managed to produce some stunning prints from the Dreamer (I call him Henry), including parts to fix a friends MakiBox printer and a full Pipboy from Fallout.
Until a few days ago. The dreamer was printing happily and then suddenly started making a grinding noise. I stopped the print and tested everything I could think of but nothing could make it print again.
I’ve posted a question on the Google Group again, i’ve contacted iMakr but they appear to be closed until the new year and i’ve no confidence in them being able, or even willing, to help. And there’s obviously no point copying FlashForge directly because they’ll just insist I talk to iMakr.
So whilst i’d like to recommend the Dreamer I just can’t. Until the reliability and support are fixed there’s just no way I can suggest paying nearly £1000 for this printer (the price has risen since I purchased), especially when printers like the Lulzbot taz is just a few hundred more and seems to be a far more reliable and well supported printer.