Flashforge Adventurer 5M (AKA "The Mrs. Left me unsupervised with an amazon order")

[chaos_engineer]

I've had a Monoprice Voxel/Flashforge Adventurer 3 for a few months that was gifted to me by a buddy. Great printer, but it was slow and really only liked PLA. So I've been kinda looking for a faster upgrade that could handle other filament types. Found a great deal the on the Adventurer 5M (299USD Amazon Prime deal) and jumped on it.

Setup was a breeze, I had it out, leveled, and printing in about 15 minutes from delivery. Here's the first benchy, which took 14 minutes.

Quick vid in action. Real time.

https://imgur.com/a/bZLP3wy

Today it moved to it's permanent home. First mod is to relocate the spool holder from the rear to the side. Running that now, and also testing ABS. So far, so good.

it's a lot louder than the voxel, but I can quiet it down if I enclose it.

I'll post some periodic updates as I live with it and see how I feel over time.

 

[chaos_engineer]

Bed adhesion on the textured plate has been a bit of a pain. Some filament works fine, some filament loses adhesion halfway through a print. Spent the weekend methodically working through various permutations to try and find a "one size fits all" solution with the included flashprint slicer software without much success. Late Sunday I switched to a version of Orca slicer that's been customized for Flashforge printers. It's got a LOT more fine-grained control of settings and importantly, allows for individual customized profiles for specific filaments. I can tune temps, speeds, whether or not I want a raft, z offsets, and all kinds of other stuff I haven't learned about yet. It's made the difference and I'm getting a lot less spaghetti the last couple of days.

I got some adhesive, but I'm not going to use it except as a last resort.

 

[chaos_engineer]

How not to change filament. On the AD5M, to change, you clip the filament at the top of the extruder, run the last bit through as you add your new filament, and carry on.

Well, I clipped wrong.

I spent several hours trying to chase down the problem thinking I had messed up settings or something because load/change worked fine, but as soon as I tried to run a print the feeder stopped working. Wasn't until I started tearing it down to see if I had some kind of a gear problem that I found the culprit.

Lesson learned, and back to printing critters.

 

[Redbrickman]

Congrats on your new machine, I'm sure you will have a lot of fun with it. With regards to bed adhesion if you are using a PEI plate then I struggled at first with adhesion on my Voron but found out it was down to proper cleaning of the plate. Everyone says use IPA but that is not the whole answer. IPA will clean it but also leaves a film sometimes. The solution is to wash the plate with ordinary dish soap, rinse and then dry with a clean pice of kitchen towel. When drying it and aferwards do not touch the printing surface with your fingers.
First layer squish also plays a big part and with ABS you sometimes have to move the nozzle a little higher than with PLA.

I would only print ABS with the machine enclosed, to prevent warping and also to cut down on the fumes and VOC particles.

If you intend to print ASA/ABS regularly I'd consider adding a filter. There are several designs which might have a suitable version for your machine. Google Nevermore Filter and Bento Box filter for more info.