What's new
What's new

New to us, MarkForged MarkII

Fig

Plastic
Joined
Jan 3, 2008
Location
Colorado
Hi Guys,
I have personally been tracking the MF technology for the past 2 years. We has some samples of a clip that we were trying to reproduce in nylon and the results were less than impressive on the intricate details we had designed for molding. We passed at the time, but fast forward another year and a half and I came across this printer on the good ol internet flea market. I purchased it to finally get to the bottom of its limitations and to do some rather etreme testing of the components in suspension and engine components (pulley and similar mounting) Just thought I would post up as I am sure many people are interested in a real world review. I know a lot of aerospace companies that have purchased them but I have not gotten much feedback, as if they just got them on a budget windfall. Almost no consumer reivews on youtube, I will fix that with a video series. Link to follow once I get the first video up.

First observations:
-intial setup was easy, easy to load material and dial in print head height.
-Eiger (the print slicer and studio) is pretty easy to use, but I wish it had a more advanced mode to be more selective on the fiber geometry as well as allow post simulation. Currently its an educated guess as to how stiff or strong something will be. Trial an error should not be build into the process, it should be able to export to a parasolid with various bodies based on material properties. Since MF controls the materials, you do get cost estimates build in, that is nice for ROI and material conservation.
-Pure nylon has some serious limitations and MF has pretty much abandoned it as a primary material. The new ONYX material is much more stable but I will find out when I get there. Nylon absorbs water and that makes its shelf life short without a nice helping of dessicant. Good thing we are in CO. The nylon leaves a lot of hairs ssimilar to a hot glue gun, trails and bubbles.
-First print was a taper stud with threads modeled, printed flat. overall results were OK but as I found in our sample pring long ago, the support bonds all too well to the model making it a cut and fine tune extraction. 5/8-18 threads were pretty good but the M14-1.5 were very undersized. Assuming this is due to the peaks fo the threads missing.
-The second print was the same stud but vertical. About 1/3 of the way through I stopped it because the support was inadequate and the stud was doing a hula dance on each print.
-3rd and 4th attempts were our first fresh designs for a pulley bracket. And the prints failed but didn't fail. The print head got stuck, but the control just kinda timed out, cooled the heads down and just stated that the print head had a heater timeout. Bottom line I think that nylon had accumulated on the print head and on a more detailed area of the model, the nylon cooled on the print head and stuck it to the model. I took at nice cap of nylon off the print head and it printed the next round.

The part that came off has several layers of fiberglas reinforcement and it does feel quite stong. I plan on doing more metal embedding, hybridizing with sheetmetal and aiming for structural functional parts. But this is what I have for now. I don't come on the forum too often, but might more to deliver feedback.
20171219_163508.jpg
20171219_233057_HDR.jpg20171223_162937.jpg
 
I have been interested in the Mark Forged printer with the onyx material myself. Just not enough to pull the trigger on it.

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk
 
So you were the guy that bought that one, eh? I was watching that, hoping the price would come down a little more.

Very interesting to hear your experience with it. The finish on those parts does not look particularly good, certainly not like the glossy photos on the Markforged website. Prints on my $2000 printer in ABS look much better than that, but of course should not be as strong.

Please continue to post your experiences with it, especially with the Onyx and carbon materials. We all want to know!
 
So you were the guy that bought that one, eh? I was watching that, hoping the price would come down a little more.

Very interesting to hear your experience with it. The finish on those parts does not look particularly good, certainly not like the glossy photos on the Markforged website. Prints on my $2000 printer in ABS look much better than that, but of course should not be as strong.

Please continue to post your experiences with it, especially with the Onyx and carbon materials. We all want to know!
Yep, I got it, still a good chunk of money but with the material and local pickup I felt like I had to satify my curiosity, even it it is just to make softjaws.

Agreed on the nylon finish and that was my opinion with the early prints we sampled as well on the MK1. I think nylon is just too tricky to turn off as it has hot glue like properties. From what I gather the onyx is supposed to be quite a bit more stable and it makes sense as the linear thermal conductance of carbon is close to the best. Working on my first video so I will post up once I am done.
 
Just bumping the thread to say thanks for this, looking forward to seeing more.
Always super valuable to see reviews of this stuff from "regular" customers with actual manufacturing experience.
We deal a lot with reverse-engineering and reproducting automotive stuff, often plastic, so I've been watching this machine for a while.
 








 
Back
Top