New Taz 5 Owner unboxing experience

New Taz 5 owner here, nice to meet you all. I received my Taz 5 a few days ago and wanted to share some concerns with the unboxing, just in case it might help some others.

First and foremost after spending time setting up and tuning the printer, I am in love. It is fast, solid, and produces wonderful prints. It will be replacing my RepRapPro multicolor as my primary printer and so far it is doing that job very well.

For the unboxing, the printer was packed very well, and arrived without any damage to the packing materials. Most of the issues I experienced seem to be related to the factory assembly and testing of the machine. I suspect Lulzbot has a large demand for the new Taz 5 and might be a little overwhelmed.

Issues:

#1 - One of the glass bed holders was badly bent, and made it impossible to level the bed. I had to print a replacement holder on my older printer. Once I print the replacement leveling the bed was easy. The fact that this made the bed unlevelable surprised me as the bed is supposedly leveled at the factory for the test print, there is no way the printer would have passed that test.

#2 - The X-axis belt pinion was very loose. The pinion would freely rotate 10 degrees on the shaft. This also would not have allowed the test print to succeed. I tightened the pinion allen screws and had no further issues with this.

#3 - The left Z-axis lead screw nut was bound so tight the motor would miss 3/4 of its steps. This was the biggest issue. In reviewing the forum, this seems to be a common issue and customer support recommends loosening some of the lead screw mounting screws to remove the binding. I did not want loose screws on my new printer so instead I used brass shim material to create a 0.1" shim for the back side of the lead screw mount. This removed all binding and allowed all screws to remain tight.

What concerns me most about this is that with these issues there should have been no way for the test print to have completed, so I am wondering if the octopus that was shipped with my printer really came from my printer?

I knew that the Taz was focused towards the more advanced group of users and that I would be taking it apart to upgrade it at some point, but still I expected the full product to have had a little more QC on it before going out the door, not just checking the boxes on the included QC sheet.

In summary, I love my Taz. It is a first class 3D printer and I would recommend it to anyone. Also Lulzbot has first class support and a huge helpful user base that also makes it easy to recommend to anyone. But had I been a more novice user, I might have returned the printer fearing the quality based on my unboxing experience.

Lulzbot - Keep up the great work and thanks for the awesome printer!

Steven

Good writeup and appreciate actionable feedback. I am within a week or so of ordering my next 3D printer, have my eye on the TAZ5 and posted some questions about it the other day. Maybe by waiting a couple of weeks the staff at Lulzbot will see your post and implement tighter QC controls.

The octopus that shipped with your machine was printed on your machine. I know of no exception to this ever in the history of our company.

I will investigate how the issues you saw occurred. Can you send me your serial number to moe@alephobjects.com, please?

Thanks,

-Jeff

Jeff – Email send as requested. Thanks for looking into this.

PinballHack – Looks like Lulzbot has already seen this and are looking into it. Like I said above, their customer service is top notch.

Steven

If you have sales questions, email sales@lulzbot.com. If you have support questions, email support@lulzbot.com. We don’t answer every thread in the forum, so it can be missed if you just posted here.

-Jeff

Well, I had just the opposite reaction. Mine was spot on and well built. I saw no obvious flaws or problems during assembly and I put a tightening on every screw/nut I could find. None seemed to have needed it.

I got mine on Feb 24th. I was printing within an hour of opening the box. (well, thats a lie I opened the box at work but couldn’t do anything with it until I got home!).

Bed leveling went like a breeze (used a digital depth gauge that I use for measuring ammo lengths during reloading). Bed leveled within 1/1000th at each corner and middle. That bad boy is absolutely flat.

Except for few exceptions where I was usually at fault, its done just fine since I set it up. In fact its still sitting on the temporary desk. Too busy printing to stop and move it to its final perch.

My unboxing experience was more along the lines of Wolfie’s write-up.

Solidly built, up and printing within the hour. Octopus print came out just like the one from the factory. Even though I’m getting really good prints, my bed however seems to bow / sag in the middle. But that just goes to show the effectiveness of the PEI.

Just got a depth gauge, so I’m going to check the bed soon. When the hotend is at the corners, I set the Z-axis so a business card barely slides through. But when I get into the center of the bed, the business card slides freely with little to no resistance. The sag luckily is not affecting ABS prints when the bed is at 100C and filament at 245C.

Glad to hear I am the anomaly! Now that I have everything tuned up I am very happy.

Here is a Roctopus hi-five! (NOTE: This was print at 0.075mm layer height with 1.75mm PLA through the 3mm hexagon hotend!)

New TAZ 5 owner here as well. I did have a question about the Z axis calibration. I see above some of you have used digital depth gauges. I can’t seem to find anywhere in the manual about what depth measurement to use? The only info I find is a “business card”. Also does anyone have a link to a decent depth gauge that can be used for this purpose? Thanks!

I bought a cheap digital gauge from Amazon… Prime had it here in two days. Fits this bracket found on Thingiverse (you’ll need a 1/4" or M6 screw).

Haven’t actually tried using it… But my thought was to:

• Attach the gauge, and home the nozzle
• Zero out the gauge
• Probe by moving to the corners of the bed on one edge
• Adjust corners until gauge is back to zero… should work for a completely flat bed.
• Move gauge to other edge, perform the probe / adjust
• Probe the center as a check.

EDIT: The printed dial gauge mount didn’t slide with the toolhead on the X-Axis. Once one side was level, I had to manually move the dial guage to the other edge side of the toolhead to check the other edge.

I think there’s a better write up floating around the forums.

I really like this mount.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:551366

That dial gauge holder looks good also… would require the toolhead to be removed. But on the plus side the carrier would allow control of X-axis movement.

Im a new user as well and had to replace the front right screws with longer ones in order to level the bed. Prints fine but thought it was strange and unnecessary to have to do that. Almost was gonna send it back.

I changed my leveling setup to this one: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:627331

It provides a larger adjustment range and tool-less adjustment. I am really happy with it. Prior to this update, my right rear adjuster was always adjusted to its upper limit.

Hmm… did you try to adjust the Z-stop before swapping out the screws? Seems strange that you’d have to swap the screws.

I found that pressing down on the corners made sure they were moving… mine felt a bit bound possibly from the storage or shipping.

@nopick - That’s a great find. I like the idea of having a knob on the bottom because the toolhead can block the adjustment screw in certain positions. I was going to print some low profile knobs with 2.5hex for the existing setup.

Here’s the response from Manufacturing about the issues OP raised in the initial post:

As always we assume that we could have caused these problems ourselves that the customer saw. With that in mind I discuss with the TAZ team as what we could have missed and how we could improve.

One of the glass bed holders was badly bent.

• There are the bed-holders where the bed rest on and fingers that hold down the bed. Without pictures we assume that the one of the fingers got bent. We are still not sure how a finger could be bent instead of broken. But as Seth mentioned we could have forgotten to tape the bed down.
  Corrective Action: > retrained/reminded our packers to follow the process steps which were written and taped on the wall in front of their work station, the check and re-check.
  
  
  The X-axis belt pinion was very loose.
• from the final assembly team’s experience if the X-axis pulley was that loose we would have seen weirdnesses in our octopus when layers were put down and/or a tilted Octopus which it was inspected by at least 2 person - Cal technician & the packer. The set screws were also tightened by the X-Axis assembly operator and then checked and tightened again (if need be) by the CAL technician. But of course we could have missed both.
  Corrective Action: > retrained/reminded those who were trained on the X-Axis station to always tighten the 2 set screws on the pulleys and the CAL technician to 100% check and tighten all set screws before Cal and burn-in. An optional improvement here is to also go for torque wrench with R&D-predetermined torque for X-axis and other set screws.
  
  
  The left Z-axis lead screw nut was bound so tight the motor would miss 3/4 of its steps.
• To avoid escapes on Z-axis binding issue, besides the selected square Z-nut, good thermal inserts and the added grease, each machine does go through 5 steps to ensure no-Z issue/or expose z-issue: Z-exercise/test during the Final Assembly step, Z-movement during the CAL, Burn-In with specific Z-burning g-code, printing Octopus, and lastly moving to shipping position. But it could be that this machine did perfectly through all 5 steps and still had z-binding at customer.
  Corrective Action: > retrained/reminded FA technicians to be super vigilant on any sign of z-challenges and if a machine had to be finessed to get over the Z-problem set it aside for R&D inspection and not to ship it out, lastly ensure that we do not accidentally skip the burn-in and go straight to octopus.

Other recommendation:

• CSR might want to stay in touch with this customer just in case this machine is inherently prone to z-binding issue so that we can react/help quickly.

Thanks,

-Jeff

Sigh. I have rewritten this post a few times trying to improve my tone, but have been unsuccessful, so here is the short version.

First I am not new to this technology. I have many 3D printers and I use them daily to support my friends in the special needs community and their unique needs. I own and run 2 CNC mills (Bridgeport, Taig), a 9" Southbend lathe and a software consulting company. All this to say, the technology is not new, I am used to setting up machines that have tolerances measured in the thousandths of an inch, and with owning my own company I am sensitive to the complexity of operations Lulzbot has to deal with, and the importance of solid customer support.

Up until this response by Lulzbot I have been beyond impressed with the company and how they treat their customers before and after the sale. I wrote this unboxing thread not to seek anything from Lulzbot, but to inform new users what kinds of complications they might run into, and possible solutions to those problems. I made sure to highlight that if there was something they could not handle Lulzbot customer support would be sure to help them make things right. When I mentioned that I was in doubt that the octopus in my box came from my printer, it was based on the fact that my printer as delivered could not print that octopus.

When a Lulzbot representative offered to take a look into things via my serial number I of course provided him any information he needed, not because I was looking for anything as I had already solved all my problems, but because if it could help track down any holes in the QC process it was worth my time to help out so that another customer would have a better unboxing experience.

When I saw the response from Engineering I was appalled that it was not sanitized before posting it to a public forum as it is very aggressive towards the customer (me). It opens with a statement saying they approach everything as a fault on their end, then pointed out every reason why they did not believe me. I suspect I am adding tone to the engineering report, but as I am the customer who expected his $2,200 turn key printer to work with minimal assembly and calibration, my reaction is of the most important to Lulzbot. It pissed me off. It took a customer that was beyond happy, recommending the company to everyone who asked, to a pissed off dude.

Of course I had the issues I wrote about, why would I spend time documenting the issues and resolutions if it did not happen?

I am going to close this post with some supporting pictures and additional information, then go print some kick butt stuff on my TAZ 5.

One of the glass bed holders was badly bent.

It was not the tab, it was the holder. Yes the bed was taped. I am assuming that the tape was too aggressively applied which compressed the bed holder past the point of the spring, which caused the holder to bend the holes where the 2 screws go through it to the point of delamination. Fortunately this also caused the tab to spin out of the way and kept the glass from cracking. Unfortunately I did not take a picture of the part before tossing it as I had a new one printed up on my other printer in 15 minutes.

The X-axis belt pinion was very loose.

I have attached the picture which shows the octopus where this was happening. You can clearly see it in the body section. My assumption based on what the engineering report said was that the set screw was not tightened into the center of the shaft flat but was caught on the very edge of the flat. This would have allowed the printer to work during QC but was dislodged during shipping or final assembly. This moved the set screw into the open flat area which allowed the many degrees of slippage.

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I have attached a picture of the octopus that was print before I fixed the Z and one that was print after. As you can see in the picture the first octopus was 0.064" shorter. Thats 1.63mm, or about 5.5 layers short. The left Z axis was the one that was bound so it actually missed closer to 12 layers worth of movement to cause that discrepancy. When I homed the printer after that print the right size of the bed showed a large gap when moving the hotend over it. Pulling out the height gauge you could see that the X beams were no longer parallel to the Y plane, this proved the left Z binding. My assumption based on the engineering report is that the Z axis is very touchy, this makes sense as lead screw nuts tolerate very little misalignment. I am in Virginia, the printer was tested in Colorado. Maybe there was enough difference in humidity, barometric pressure, etc that cause the binding. What is clear is that the TAZ needs some better alignment capabilities for the Z leadscrew nut.

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Happy Printing!
Steven

While I agree Lulzbot is committed to producing a good product and good customer service, my box opening experience was not so good. Apparently the top layer of protective foam was missing and the box was smashed. I was afraid the printer was severely damaged, but damage was not immediately obvious.

The print head was loose and rattling around in the box. The frame was far from square- the top was about half an inch off of square (see picture). After squaring the frame, the print head carriage was so far off level that the zeroing the Z axis jammed at an inch above the bed. Fortunately tech support was very helpful. The first print was not very pretty, but the second was much better. The third was not very good either. I’ve stopped printing until I build an enclosure so I can remove that as a source of issues.

Hopefully I’ll be able to tune the issues out of the machine.

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Quickly, to address Uptime’s post: that does not look like a box that came from us. Our box is a different shape. Did you get it on ebay or something?

wantmys2000,

Sorry you didn’t like the tone of the report.

-Jeff