FlashForge Finder – 3D Printer (Buyer’s Guide)

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FlashForge Finder- Setup & Review

Hey guys welcome back to another 3d printing video and in this video we’re gonna be looking at this Forge finder and most importantly how the prints come out out of this machine so let’s get started so this is your first time here I got this printer on eBay for a really good price that was a customer returned parts only sale and have had a few issues so all that is resolved and the printer is back to its original state and now it’s printing so with that said let’s take a look at the first thing I had to do to this thing to even get started so here we are at the back of the printer and as you can see I have a whole spool holder up here and the reason I needed this is because the original spool holder that comes with the flesh forged does not fit any of the normal spools and so I did a very simple modification here well before I show you this let’s look at this original spool holder here so this is the spools that it comes with I don’t know if you can tell but that’s quite a bit smaller it’s smaller in diameter and also smaller in the width here so it’s just a completely different kind of spool that just won’t work unless you have exactly you know this size so after thinking about how I should do this I decided to go this route and the reason for that is because I can always remove this very easily and plus it’s very minimalistic I like when things are simple and work easily so let me just take this thing apart so I can show you guys so this is a spool holder from the reality under teeth so what I did is I just thread it into here flush with the bottom and then just put it on some glue 86-thousand glue which this stuff just peels right off but it’s very sturdy as you can see I can move the whole printer with it I can even pick up the whole printer so so here I just have a couple caps and the reason I have these here it makes it work you know this pool has a good surface area to sit on and also common dates this next piece which I 3d printed so this is just a cylinder and what this is for it’s just a spacer for here and then to fit in here so this pool is you know centered because if you if I just put this pool on like that this pool wobbles on there a lot so this pool just nicely goes on there just like that and we got ourselves a nice little spool holder so I’ve printed a bunch of stuff already and the spool holder works perfectly and here on the top you can see how it’s being fed almost directly into the extruder here and that’s pretty much all this printer needs is just that external spool holder somewhere everything else on this printer is it ready to go and doesn’t really need any other upgrades so as you can see guys so far this printer is something that you can just take out of the box and start using so this is a great beginners machine and so far my overall impression of this machine is very friendly and easy to use so before I show you all the little prints that I’ve made on this machine let’s check out how easy it is to operate so our little plug in the back is on and all you got to do is just click this thing and it powers up as you guys saw down there the light turns on and our screen comes up and then our light turns off because I have that off in the settings and here’s what the menu we start with so here we have a build a preheat and tools so preheat if you want to get your nozzle here up to temperature build is internal storage what you already put in the printer or you can plug in a USB on the side here or you can do it through the cloud option so under tools we have quite a few options here here’s where you will load and unload your filament so whatever you load it it’ll preheat and then it’ll extrude and unload would simply heat it up here’s where you will level the bed which works fairly okay but for me hasn’t been perfect so I will manually adjust it after it here we have a home button if you push this everything goes home meaning the all the accesses here we have manual controls where you can move everything manually just by clicking these buttons here so so down here we have settings and that’s going to be all your settings like language Wi-Fi on the cloud extruder calibration and the startup sound now if you noticed I turned off my startup sound because I don’t like that little music that it plays in the beginning so here we have a status button and that just kind of gives us basic information and we have the about and on the about that you tells you all about your printer and most importantly how much you’ve used it and as you can see guys I have 48 hours on here already when I first powered this printer on we only had two hours so we already have 48 and I and I feel like I’m just only starting so yeah it’s cool that it tracks your hours there so later you can see how many hours you printed so this printer is very very kid-friendly so if you’re thinking about a printer for children or even teens I would say this is a great printer to start with alright so I want to change my red PLA here to something else so what we’re gonna do is we’re going to hit the filament button here and unload and what that’s going to do is it’s gonna preheat the nozzle here once it’s hot enough we’ll able to pull this out so here on the extruder arm part there’s a little button that you push and what I like to do is I like to push the filament in a little bit so it comes out the bottom and then pull it out fairly quickly and when you do that you know you get a pretty clean in here if you pull it out too slow you might get too stringy and all kinds of craziness so good to kind of quickly pull it out so here we have a blue roll of filament so normally when the extruder is already preheated I’ll go ahead and put the new filament in now you can go back and go into the settings and do the you know load filament and all that does is just make the extruder in here a drive where it pushes this down on its own and also a tip is make sure your end is nice and sharp so cut it on an angle that way it goes in easy but sometimes that’s an issue too so once I get it in there I’ll just once it stops I’ll push on it a little bit and when I do that you guys can see my fear is going down slowly so what’s happening is the filaments already coming out the other side and you can see that right there it’s you know seeping out so as simple as that so after you got your filament in and you got your bed level to which you just follow the wizard on here it’s pretty simple so leveling the bed is kind of a big deal and it’ll take a learning curve to get used to but if you want to get a good print especially if it’s your first time using the printer and things like that print with the raft mode on your slicer and we’re gonna take a couple seconds and look at the slicer here in a minute but when you do transfer your file into the printer you will find it in the old internal storage sure and you can see here all the things that I have on here that I’ve printed so far so all you’re going to do is just hit on that and then you’re gonna have you know couple options here you’re gonna click on build and you’ve got yourself a build start it tells you how much time you got left there so I’m gonna go ahead and stop it since we’re not printing that let’s go ahead and move to the slicer and I’ll show you guys real quick how that process goes alright so what you’re looking at is the flash print is what they call it I guess a program flash print and this is what it looks like when you first come in so you get a little box here and that is the size of the printer here when you install this program it’ll ask you you know what printer are using and all that stuff so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get started to this page here so here on the top we have a few buttons here is where you’re gonna load in the model this is the supports before the model and this is where you’re gonna print it or I guess slice it they call it so are you gonna you know make the file for the printer here on the side we have the View button and if you click on it you get you know more options of where you want to be so if you want to go top view you know you can do that or you just use your mouse here to you know scroll around so here you can move the objects so let’s go ahead and bring an object so I’m gonna load something in here so let’s just say a bench II since we know everyone knows what that is pretty much so if you wanted to move your bench II if you put your air on it and just click it you can move it like that when you’re in the move book setting here or you can you know move it manually like that this rotates the model in different directions or you can also rotate it here manually you want a perfect rotation here we have scale and also if you click on it and drag you can scale it as you can see we can make a pretty big Vinci now whenever you see that little grayed out area right there that comes up that means it doesn’t fit anymore so once it doesn’t fit it Gray’s out like that so this will be the maximum Vinci we can print but in case you get the idea actually we’re still grayed out from the back there sir so yeah very simple software to use as you can see you guys and here we have a cut button which is really cool if you wanted to cut something in half and print it sitting down or something so here are the settings for that so let’s say our we want some supports for our vinci for all those overhangs so what we’re gonna do is come over here on the top click support and then out of support and it’s going to generate a bunch of supports everywhere now the reason the supports are like this is because this the option I chose want the ones that are original with this thing it is the tree like you can have that supports you just click on auto again and there goes those so you can kind of experiment with what kind of supports you like better and which ones are easier to take off so once you get your model where you want it and stuff like that how you want it then what you’re going to do is you’re going to click on this print button so what you see right here this is the expert mode and I have this turned on if you want the expert boat so you’re gonna click on file and then preferences and then you’re gonna click on print and then here it says printing window type expert mode or basic so let’s go back to basic cuz that’s what most of you guys will see and use and this is where you can set up all the different parameters for the printer this printer has a few choices here we’ve got PLA conductive PLA and flexible material so because this thing has a looks to be appeared like a direct extruder drive it should do really good with flexible filament and here you can enable supports or disable them and then the raft what I was talking about earlier if you don’t have your bed level there you don’t understand how to level the bed right away and don’t have it perfect then you can use the raft mode here which will print a raft underneath your model and then print the model on top of that here we have the quality of the print meaning the resolution how detailed it is so I recommend printing everything in high unless you gotta go absolutely faster you can go in standard low is probably not a good option to print it but maybe still okay depending on the part and what you’re doing so I like to print and high hyper just takes way too long it does look a little better but the time is considerably higher so high seems to be the best for me at least all around her so if you’re gonna use a rafter you don’t need to use any of this stuff if you are not using a raft and you want to use a brim that just put stuff around it and here on the here on the bottom you can see there’s more options if you want to see what you know a little bit more in detail what’s going on you can kind of go in here and go through all the settings you know what kind of infill you have and you know the temperature you can adjust here and if you found you know the settings you like you can click save configuration and it’ll always be the same when you come back so here on the top when you click OK over here this will preview the slice this will go ahead and print it if you have it already connected to your computer or whatever but usually we just leave it on preview so if we push OK it’s going to try to save it and it’s gonna slice it so right now it’s working and slicing the model here we have a really huge bin Qi so this is gonna be a little bit longer than normal actually a lot longer than normal so there it goes it has been sliced and you have a little bar here on the side where you can drag it’s gonna be a little laggy sorry guys this file is or the slice is large so the computer is lagging a bit but you can see the you know the process that it’s going through so that’s pretty neat so over here on the side you have some information you know it tells you how much time this will take 13 hours in 24 minutes and how much filament it’ll use and if you click on this button here it’ll tell you a little bit more information and about how much usually I like to look at this number here how much grams it’s gonna take from my filament bail my filament roll so if you want to go back and release lice this thing you’ll click back and if you want to go ahead and print you’ll click on print and here is where you need to connect the printer so you can either use the file that will saved onto the computer when we sliced it and then take it to the printer through you know USB flash drive or you can go ahead and connect your USB cable from the computer to the printer and then connect it and then it’ll send it to the printer and start printing so as you can see guys all this is very simple and not hard and it’s all automated pretty well so this software is very very easy to use or beginners so that’ll be it for the slicer here hopefully all this made sense a bit and as you can see guys you can get started pretty quick with this printer alright so now I want to show you some of the things that I’ve printed so this was one of the first prints that came out of this printer actually this one right here you can see there’s like a little bit of under extrusion right there but other than that it actually printed pretty good right off the bat there so and it was on a raft that’s what the bottom looks like so then shortly after that I printed another one here and it turned out pretty good now there is a little bit of a line through here and at first I was confused why that line was there but then I realized that the slicing software actually compresses the model down because the size doesn’t match exactly and so I don’t know if it makes sense but it squishes it so one of the lines or one of the layers squishes into the other layer so right after that I decided to print a Vinci just just like it was I was curious how it would come out and this is the PLA that was inside the machine that came with it and as you can see it is really stringy kind of there’s a lot of layer lines on here surprisingly the bottom turned out alright but look at those layer lines they’re pretty heavy and I can feel them like pretty hard there so so after installing the spool holder I was able to use other filaments and this filament here I know very well but I still have a weird looking squash line right here and it’s popping out so it seems like it’s compressing my model down because the layer huh the layers don’t match or something I’m not sure but other than that I mean the details are there has just kind of stringy and got a little blobs here in there so so this is the second one I print so after doing a little more tweaking I went ahead and printed this third one and as you can see it’s much better now on the sidewall here you can see the reflection you know we got a much better finish there without anything too weird there is something funny going on right here in the front but I’m not sure exactly what happened there something happened so I thought I would print another model and this is where this little frog comes in or maybe he’s not that little but he’s a pretty good size it actually turned out way better than I thought it would especially here on the bad guys you can see it’s pretty uniform so overall the structure looks pretty good but I don’t know if you guys noticed there you can see some pitting in the and the body there’s like little holes here in there area and that’s from under extrusion and the problem with that was my own doing which I installed this little tube here to go through the filament so the filament can go through it before it goes into the extruder in here so it kind of guides it and I think what was happening is it would snag on the filament but overall he looks really good and the part that surprises me is the under the chin here this is a pretty steep area here you can see but it printed very nice now below that it’s a little rough but that’s understandable how steep that is so so overall I was still a little frustrated and I printed a bunch of retraction tests so hopefully you can see them but these are all the retraction testing I did and as you can see that a lot of them have you know pretty terrible retraction problems so after praying a bunch of him and trying to tune it in this one right here is the best I got and as you can see it’s pretty good overall there’s a little bit of hairs on the top so so after figuring out the you know little hair problems I decided to print another Vinci and this time guys it actually turned out really good like there’s no wisps or hairs pretty much anywhere and it actually finally looks good so I was pretty happy that I got to this point and I think this is the best that it will be and you can see here on the wall the wall is also very nice now those lines that you see that’s just a miss coloring of the plastic for some reason but that’s actually flat and it’s actually very smooth like if I run my finger on that it’s very even so we still do have an issue here in the front a little bit just a little bit but overall it’s very good so I’m very happy with how this looks like after this I got a little more confidence to print something bigger and I started printing a statue but I went ahead and stopped it and if you guys can see that there is some kind of weird under extrusion right there so I was a little bit discouraged because I didn’t know what was going on I thought I had everything figured out so I went ahead and restarted it thinking that maybe my filament mount here was giving me trouble but sure enough it was not because I had the exact same lines up here on the second one I tried to pray here so you can see here them together that those lines are exactly in the same spot so I said well what the heck let’s just keep on printing so I kept printing and over here this piece is actually broken off because it was barely holding on but you can see that it had a pretty bad under extrusion where it almost didn’t stick so it was weird how it was okay and then it was not okay and then when I got to this part it was just terrible as you can see like it was just going all bad so that’s when I decided to stop it and I wanted to give up on this I thought I’m gonna print something else and see if it works and that’s when this little baby owl comes in and as you can see this looks a million times better and there’s no nothing weird going on here everything’s perfect no under extrusion or whatever and not only that I was blown away that you can see it here on his feathers there’s like little indentions there of like a feather look I mean that is a very fine detail and it’s all over him and it turned out really good obviously here the overhangs you know kind of failed a bit but that’s you know that’s pretty normal for that steep of an angle so and by the way guys all these prints that I’m showing you were all printed in 0.12 layer height so after seeing this I’ll turn out this good I knew that my last print had some kind of issue so I went and downloaded the STL file again and Reis lysed it and sure enough this is what we got so after I read unloaded the STL file and resized it I got perfection so what happened was my slice the file that went to the printer was corrupt and that’s what was making all those lines and doing all that weird stuff and you can see you guys that is very nice and like I said those lines that you see right there I think it might be even the filament I’m not sure exactly what’s causing the discoloration of shiny and then matte but if you can look at the light the shadows you can see how smooth that isn’t it so there’s no steps here it’s just the discoloration on the filament for some reason but you can see here on his nose and never wear that and honestly I wasn’t expecting this good of a detail from this printer I thought this printer you know it was more of a kind of beginner printer you know kids can use but this is actually a very viable printer that can be used for actual more serious I guess work so this is kind of a cute little thing it’s like a slug and it’s made out of like these connectors here that move so this was like a really nice little print and that just shows you you know that it’s capable of detailed print even though the tolerances on this are pretty huge but you know praying something like this is not an issue for this printer either so this is a really cute thing and you can print this out the kids love this this is actually super fun to play with so you can print this out for your kids alright so the next thing I did was I wanted to try out the vase mode sometimes there’ll be a situation where you want to print something like this you know what the hollow inside now as you can see on the reflection there it turned out amazing overall now that said there’s an issue and I don’t know if this is my fault but here on the top it actually tried to make a layer a single layer on the top which I don’t understand why top phase mode you know leaves the top out but maybe not in this circumstance because you know if you were printing a statue you would obviously wanted to go to the top and finish setting thing that I didn’t know how to adjust so I still have to learn but these would be easy and out just to break off as you can see they’re just literally they’re just like little hairs that pop off and there we go there’s no more top so that was super easy to take off so this printer does very very good with vase mode also as you can see now what you’re seeing is the height here and this is almost the maximum height that this printer can do which is about 102 millimeters I think this face was so I think it lets you go to about 104 so just to kind of give you an idea you know this is the maximum height alright so what I’m going to do next is I want to print something a little bit more practical here on this printer so let’s go ahead and load our file here so these are pliers I’m not sure how they are gonna turn out but they’re just like a pair of pliers needlenose pliers and you can see guys this is pretty much you know from one end to the other barely fitting on the bed here so so let’s click on print so it’s gonna ask us how we want to do it obviously we want it on high here and we’re gonna look at all our options here and everything that looks pretty good maybe the infill needs to be a little bit more since these are pliers it might be used we’re just gonna make that 20% temperature is very important so since we’re doing just PLA I think 200 will be perfect and that looks pretty good overall so that’s all we need to do the next thing would just click okay safe so what you’re gonna want to do is hit that print but I’m gonna be using a USB cable that connects to the printer and here you can see where the printer connects and here is your you know if you want to bring it in with a little flash drive so after the printer powers on I can go back to my computer over here and I’m gonna hit print and it’s gonna ask to connect so you’re gonna click connect so if you already we’re connected is gonna give you a warning like something’s wrong just okay it and push print again and now it sends the file over here as you saw that it says please wait and now it knows what we’re printing exactly right there so it has started the printer so now she’s gonna heat up and then it’s gonna start pretty so I totally forgot to put some glue on here I need to go ahead and do that so the printer is printing right now and you can see that it has 2 hours and 41 minutes and if you click on this button here you can see what has happened so far so it’s been 23 minutes and so started so much you traveled on z-axis they’re not very far and how much filament you used in the printing speed and apparently you can adjust the printing speed by clicking on it and then adjusting it here so you can hear turn on your light on and off which we’re gonna keep it off because we’re doing a time-lapse and speaking about time lapses I have a GoPro right here set up and I’ll show you guys that at the end of the and how I got that GoPro set up so it’s kind of hard to see anything here from the top but see if we can get a little peek you can see our parts are getting pretty pretty well all right and the print is done and it took three hours and seven minutes I’m just gonna push okay there I ran a time-lapse and I built this little rig here that I have just off of the parts I had from a GoPro which is really cool because it’s just this little teeth here and they’ll I just grab them to the bottom of the bed like that so maybe later eventually I’ll build a special bracket but for now this seems to work pretty decently well I’m not sure exactly what happened guys but I don’t think I leveled the bed good enough and maybe didn’t put enough glue on my shirt but that’s what happens but in any case that printed and it looks pretty good so here’s the bottom what it looks like so I guess these just kind of go together and you can tell here that we had some kind of issue Hunt’s look I think our supports didn’t print like they’re supposed to or something I did something wrong but I’m still learning a slicer so this is the first time I’d do something like this but technically this should just click into here and it looks like our tolerances are not right or something or because this stuff lifted off the bed a little bit here in there it’s just not fitting like it’s supposed to maybe I can try to smash it together right there cuz it’s going in kind of but just not going in all the way all right let’s see if we can just put some pressure on this there we go so now we went in but I’m not sure if it’s gonna operate I have a feeling you might break oh yeah it’s super yeah it’s okay I just broke it well there we go it was going but it was going really rough maybe I shouldn’t wield it up a bit okay so that was kind of a fail but mostly I think that was my fault because I didn’t I didn’t start the print right you guys get the idea you could build pretty neat stuff with this printers alright guys and this is the flashforge finder as as you saw you know we got really really good print quality on this thing and you know it’s so friendly to use right out of the box the touchscreen is definitely one of my favorite things and there’s not much out rating you need to do or at all basically it has everything you need the only thing is the spool holder but that’s not too hard to rig something up so obviously the only thing you’ll be able to print with this predators PLA because of the you know non heated bed and that brings it kind of tubes downfall is because it does not have a heated bed so it’s not as friendly with different materials and even as you saw you know our little pliers there didn’t want to stake so but that might have been just my own fault leveling it so you really got to have some good adhesion to the bed but other than that this thing is a winner in my opinion and it’ll print and print and probably accommodate pretty much everything you’d ever want to build especially for a starter printer this is a great place to start for sure and for kids this would be just amazing I guess of all ages so yeah this printer has been a little bit of a journey for me from unboxing it to repairing it you know to getting it to print good like I like it so now I finally got it where I can just send anything to it and it’ll print it out for me and that’s kind of exciting because now I can hand this thing off to my son and see if he can you know use this thing and enjoy it because I’d like him to get into this kind of stuff so because kids have great imaginations and they can build pretty interesting things so so overall I’d give this printer a big thumbs up alright guys so if you enjoyed this video then hit that like button and if you want to see more videos like this I got a lot more 3d printing stuff coming up we’re going to be unboxing a new printer again soon and there’s other things going on also on the side that will be popping up eventually so stay tuned for all those things guys so if you enjoy videos like this and you want to see more and you’re not subscribed and hit that subscribe button and as always guys thanks for watching and I’ll see you on the next one peace.



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