Originally Posted by
Rick Kirchner
My Qidi is acceptable - for the most part. The standard hotends with a Capricorn tube work OK, but I worry about long prints with ABS and the tube melting and clogging (got.a 12 hr one going now). I bought their all-metal hot end and it leaks like a sieve. You need a separate power supply/controller setup so you can work on the thing on the bench, otherwise it has to be done on top of the printer, and that's a PITA. Otherwise, once it cools you cant's effectively work on it.
The Qidi produces decent functional prints at .4 to 1.0 nozzle sizes, but getting a really nice surface finish can be a challenge. Small stuff with a .1 or .2 nozzle is fiddly. The fact that it has an enclosure and a heavy cubic frame really helps, but the cheap extruder is the limitation, both in quality and speed. I cant push it to more than 70mm/s. There's a user group on FB that has adapted high quality extruders to the machine, and that's OK, I just want to be able to buy one as a kit. I didn't buy a printer to spend all my time modding it.
Most of the printers work OK with PLA but if you are using PETG, ABS, Nylon, or filled materials they take a lot more tuning.