For my first private printer I chose Kobra 3. There were a few reasons. I was used to Prusa printers at the moment, but they were a bit too expensive for me, and I thought that Anycubic Slicer would be easy for me to master as it is a fork of PrusaSlicer. The announced speed of the Kobra sounded amazing and the print quality wasn’t that super important for me at that moment. And the main reason was that the Kobra was on sale then.

The very first problem I encountered was that the filament was sent in a different shipment and arrived a couple of weeks later than the printer. So in the beginning I only had the test piece several meters long, yet that was enough to print one of the provided samples. Speed was really amazing compared to Prusa Minis, which I was used to.

The second problem was that I didn’t do enough research and didn’t even think that this could be a case. It turned out that Anycubic Slicer doesn’t run on Linux and I don’t have any Windows devices. The internet told me that no slicers at the moment supported my printer. So I had to iterate through several different slicers, and just as expected they didn’t have the profile for the Kobra. Finally I stopped with Orca Slicer and some custom profile I found online and have been using it ever since.

It took me a bit of tinkering around to get everything to work properly, for example Prusas are way more precise. If I had to make two parts fit each other I didn’t have to add any margin, yet with Kobra it turned out I had to give at least 0.2 mm margin for rigid connectors and something about 0.5 mm, and that did take some trial and error to find out.

After all of this was figured out the printer was running smoothly for 7 months or so without any repairs or major changes in settings. That is until I decided to change support type in the slicer from standard trees to manual tree, some kind of trees where you explicitly choose areas to be supported. That was a long print, one of the first versions of the dog body and a few parts of legs, for around 6 hours, so I just ran it overnight. In the morning I came to check on the print and saw something weird: after half a centimeter the layers seemed to be all moved a centimeter to the side and there was a big hole on the side as if the nozzle melted into it like an icebreaker.

The body I threw in the trash and decided to print the leg pieces one by one, they worked out okayish, but the body with supports did exactly the same thing again, also all the prints were a bit offset from where I expected them to be on the print bed. After some investigation it turned out that the nozzle was severely bent, so much that I was surprised that it could print anything at all.

I bought a new nozzle, printed some legs and other pieces, everything was all right, until I tried to reprint that body with supports, obviously it got bent again.

After buying a new nozzle and printing the same piece with different supports I got a confirmation that the issue was in the generated G-code and was somehow connected to that support setting.

Other than all the stuff listed at the top, there weren’t any major difficulties with the printer; it was working pretty well, it just turned out to be a bit better to run it on the floor, as all the tables I have are too shaky.

This isn’t the end of my sufferings, but these are all the problems I got from the printer, about the rest of the stuff I will tell in the next logs.