FLSUN Q5 Delta Review - 2020 - (qq mini)

Hey folks, TechNibbers here. Today we're going to be taking a look at the FLsun Q5 Mini. So this is also known as the FLsun QQ Mini and it is a Delta printer. My first in the Delta Quadrant and it is so far so good. So we're going to jump right into our review of this machine right here and right now. All right, so let's quickly take a look at the specs for this printer here. We'll start with the bed. It is pretty fast to heat up and it doesn't have any leveling knobs on the bottom. The system is leveled with an automatic bed leveling system which is magnetic and attaches to the hot end and then it uses the probe to actually sense where the bed is on 27 different points. So the automatic bed leveling is really really well functioning. It also has a decent build size. It is about 200 by 200 by 200 so slightly less on the Z than an Ender 3 but the X and Y are pretty comparable. The adhesion to the build plate is amazing and in fact I did have trouble removing a couple of models at first. Once the build plate is a little bit broken in they do pop right off with cooling. A little bit about the extruder. It is a Titan extruder and it is equipped with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle. It can also be changed to what they recommend as 0.2 or 0.3 for finer printing. However the actual website doesn't say anything about switching to a larger nozzle. I wouldn't think that you would have a problem. You would just have to adjust in your slicing software accordingly. The maximum temperature on this guy is 270 C and it's set to handle all of the common print filaments such as ABS, PLA, PVA, and wood as well as flexible materials and hips which is pretty good. The Ender 3 goes up to around 255 reliably. It can be altered in the firmware but this guy is equipped to go to 270 right off of the bat. This printer has a 32-bit motherboard. It's equipped with a separate MOS module allowing for stable prints even at high speed and equipped with a touchscreen and Wi-Fi connection. The resume printing works pretty well and it does have save in case of power failure. All in all it's pretty strong as far as inner workings go and the mechanics are very very well thought out. It is a full metal frame. The printer is made out of stainless steel so it doesn't wobble or shake and this machine is probably the quietest machine that I have ever experienced as far as noise. Now you can upgrade this guy with some TMC 2208 silent stepper drivers and quiet it even more but while it's running pretty much the only noise that you'll hear is the fan. So let's take a quick look at some of the things that this machine is capable of. We're going to get a nice close look at some of these models we printed here. As you can see this is the Decepticon logo. This is a solid chunk 100% infill and still a little bit of glue on the back but we can wash that off. Yeah this actually came out really really well. Tight corners, fine lines, great detail. So can't really complain about that. I do have a few other models here as well we can take a look at. Let's check out the test models. Now you heard me say that I had some trouble with adhesion and I did. Things were sticking a little too well so I actually broke this removing it from the bed but other than that little part right there this model right here is very very well done. Top surfaces, fine lines, all that stuff's nice. The first model I printed was this cube here and we're going to get a nice close-up of this because you can see at the bottom I had a little wobble and also had a hard time getting this off the bed and took a chunk out of it. So after that I did start using a very very small amount of glue stick which made things a little bit easier to remove for the next few models. As I said once the bed got a little bit used to it things pop off pretty easily now and I'm not using the glue stick anymore. So there is one more test model that came with this printer that I printed and it's this guy right here and I want to ensure that you can see the fine details on these knobs. The threading came out pretty much flawlessly and these little nubs for the grip texture also came out amazing. So that was my first hint that the details on this were going to be awesome. So I did add a texture to an ice fishing rod that I'm making for my neighbor and it actually came out really really well. So these spikes are very very grippy, not painful to hold but that pattern is very very... there's some minute details in there that I'm not sure I could have gotten out of a cartesian machine. This is my pride and joy when it comes to the FL Sun Q5. Now I'll try to get you a good justified look. You see all those details in there? Tiny little things, things that can be missed easily. You see the ribs on the headdress there. Let's see if we can get it at a good angle. I might be in the light here as well. So as far as model quality goes, this is a 0.4 millimeter nozzle. This was done at 1.2 millimeter layer height and it is by far one of the best miniatures that I've seen come off of any of these machines. That being said, I did use a default profile built into Cura. It was not for this machine, it was for the full-size the FL Sun QQ but it worked amazingly well once I adjusted to that 200 by 200 by 200 millimeter build size. So we can take a peek over here at these models. The printer is just gorgeous. I mean I really have no complaints and it went together really really easily. So I do plan on releasing an assembly video for this. That'll be up shortly but as far as the review goes, this is hands down my favorite printer. I would take this over the Ender 3, over the TiVo Tarantula Pro, and a lot of my other printers any day. That is simply because it is super duper quiet. It has almost the same build size as those other printers but there is another advantage to printing with a Delta versus the Cartesian machine as well and that is the ability to print actual circles. That's right, this thing can go around. Now you get a lot better dimensional accuracy from a Delta printer like this when it comes to circles and holes than you do from a Cartesian machine and the reason for that is because it can actually get those curves correctly. The Cartesian machine is built to move left and right and up and down and this kind of leads to skewing in one direction of those holes. Now the difference is negligible in most cases but when printing something that's threaded like this and meant to fit it is actually a very big deal. So this is a significant advantage over say the Ender 3 or TiVo Tarantula Pro. So you're probably asking yourself why should you switch from a Cartesian machine to a Delta like this? Well other than the significant advantages that we've already talked about, let me show you exactly why I love this printer so much. So let's run a print. Turn the machine on, takes a second to power up. It does have a full color LCD screen and there are a ton of options to choose from. Now I know this is a little hard to read from down there on the camera so I'll read these to you. There's a preheat, a tool, a set, and a print option. Now if we go to the tool option you see there are a lot more options in here and in fact listed it says preheat, extrude, move, home, auto level, change, or more. So those are all pretty self-explanatory. You have your preheat, you have your extrusion, you can move the axes independently, you can home the whole thing, you can start the auto level process, or you can change the filament. The other option here is more and there are a couple more. So the size plus 01 or the size minus 01 that is going to take you down by millimeters. There are two curvature options. If you select one of those you can alter the curvature but we don't need to do that. Let's go ahead and go back. We're going to go to print and we're going to go ahead and print another one of these ice fishing handles but today I have some beautiful thermochromic filament so we'll put that in here and it should give us a nice visual idea of what's happening with this printer as we print it as well as letting us know when it's cooled down enough to remove from the build plate. So let's grab that filament. Now I do still have a little bit of the remaining filament from before in the Bowden tube and I'm going to go ahead and extrude that backwards out by using the change filament option but first I've chosen to select preheat and hit the PLA button which should raise the temperature of our hot end to around 210 degrees making it easier for us to remove that filament. The nice thing about the filament change feature on here is it does just run off the extruder and it will pull out everything that's left in the Bowden tube. So we're almost up to temp here. I'm going to hit unload and heating completed. Click confirm to start unloading and as you can see now you can't quite see it yet but the filament has actually broken so it's not going to come out that simply. That is a poor filament problem nothing wrong with the extruder so it's going to continue doing what it's doing. I'm going to go ahead and pull it out manually and then we will reload it using the proper process. And that is of course one of the hazards of working with cheap filament. I got like I think 20 pounds of this off eBay for about $45-$50 so it printed pretty nicely but if it sits too long it does break and I think it's a little dried out but there are other methods for getting this out of here. So what we're going to do it says unload filament completed click confirm for return. Confirm will not return filament it will return us to the previous menu and what we're going to do is take this filament. This filament is not cheap. Let me grab my clippers here and we will throw a little bit on once we get this into the extruder. So what happened there is it broke off just below the extruder so it wouldn't grab it and pull it all the way out. When you load it into the extruder and you hit that load button it feeds the filament all the way down this length of Bowden tube here and that's about the length that we need to extrude out of the bottom. So I'm going to adjust my camera so it's watching me purge the rest of this filament here and we will get going on the process. Now we're going to go ahead and hit the load button. Heat completed please load filament all we have to do is hit confirm and you should see it ejecting all of the extra filament out of the bottom there and it is pushing it out it's pushing it out at a rather fast pace now it's expecting there to be no filament in there so it is putting a lot of pressure on the hot end right now to load this because it's expecting it to be unloaded at the time but it is purging most of that stuff that we didn't want in there out of there and it looks like everything is working pretty well so judging from the looks inside the Bowden tube we made it to about here and we want to get the rest of that out of there so we're going to go ahead hit confirm back and then we'll go to the extrude button and what we're going to do is change this to 10 millimeters and extrude 10 millimeters in and it'll continue to extrude now this puts a little bit less pressure on the extruder you know you notice you don't hear it clicking like you did before and i know it's hard to see but there is a really really wispy fine strand of blue filament down here coming out so we need to go ahead and get it in there a little bit further until we see some nice white filament coming out now i know that you're saying but wait that filament is pink but like i said it's thermochromic so it's going to show up as white when it comes out the hot end all right so i've told it to extrude an additional 60 millimeters pretty soon we should get to that point where it's extruding our thermochromic and we should be about good so i will be right back all right so we are in the bowden tube we are all the way down to the hot end any minute now we should see it start mixing colors and transitioning into that heated white color might not have purged enough just yet it looks like it stopped let's do a couple more millimeters and it's funny this is about uh two feet of filament i can see it starting to lighten up and turn white but that line there that long length is probably about six to eight feet and that's because obviously it is no longer 1.75 millimeter diameter it is 0.4 millimeter diameter so there it goes starting to turn to white i think that will work because by the time we get to our actual print after doing a little bit of a brim we should be full on into the pink filament so and there you can see the filament there you can see one of my only complaints about this machine is that the spool holder is a little bit short from here to here and it won't fit wide spools i've come up with a pretty good system that works around that so that's not going to be an issue we're going to go ahead and go back to print hit my ice fishing handle and hit confirm it's going to now heat the bed to the temperature we require and then it should start printing let's go ahead and remove this little wisp here i will show you how well this guy does on printing round objects here we go beginning to lay down some filament it is really hard to see it first because of the transparent nature of the thermochromic there's still a little blue in there there we go that should work you'll start seeing a lot more white come out as it cools which the bottom part won't cool because it's touching the heated build plate but as it cools into the middle of the model you'll see it starting to turn pink we are going to fast forward this process so you can see a little bit further into the printing process how well it does but as you can see i have my camera which is attached to the microphone about a foot away from the printer and you hear that pretty much just the fan and in fact can't do this for too long i don't want it to overheat but you can tell what i'm talking about the only noise you get from this thing is that fan it is amazing my wife loves it and yeah we'll go ahead and now that it's starting to print the actual fishing rod jump ahead to a little bit further into this print and look at that beautiful smooth circular motion i know it seems a little jerky that's because as i said the camera is really close and it tends to wobble it a little bit but rest assured from where i'm sitting the machine is perfectly still and those corners are coming out smooth excuse me not corners those those rounds those curves you can see it's moving quite fast and it doesn't take long to start building up a model at all i did find that one of the easiest ways to remove this from the build plate was to get a tiny flat blade a razor blade and pry up one of the corners under which i could get my handy dandy spatula in order to pry the rest of the model free and here you can see it's built up quite a bit not quite done yet we are a little over halfway there and i will show you this model when it comes off the build plate but i did want to show you the temperature variance you can see in here so as you can see the bed still remains quite warm it is not quite too hot to the touch but warm enough to keep that thermochromic filament at a nice temperature so you can see the temperature difference right in here the nice thing about this is with this big of a difference in the open frame i'm using pla so we're not seeing any warping or cracking and the model is coming out phenomenally again it goes into that beautiful circular motion and everything seems to be coming out really really well and here it is in all its glory so came out pretty well i think we can take it off the build plate and get a closer look at it there we go and as you can see the brim needs to be removed but it looks pretty exact so very very happy with this printer that is going to be it for my review for the fl sun q5 delta the fl sun qq mini as it is otherwise known and as you can see we've gotten some beautiful models it was very simple to set up if you'd like to know how to set up your own cura profile i do have a video available for that on my page and there is a coupon down below for 10 percent off of your own fl sun q5 from banggood which is where i got mine and it came pretty quickly and arrived in great condition so as easy as this thing was to put together i think anybody would be missing out not to have one and that's going to be it guys technivirus out well that's it guys that's going to wrap up this video if you've noticed the shirt the merch is available go ahead and check out the teespring merch link down below it won't be available on a channel store until i reach 10 000 subscribers and so far i am just about to hit 5000 so it'll be a little while a couple more months before you see this on the actual channel but they are available now i have a couple other designs feel free to pop over there and check them out and know that any purchase through the teespring site definitely helps to promote our site here and increase the channel's ability to make videos in the future so we appreciate all your support don't forget to check out the teespring link check out our patreon link leave a like on this video and hit that subscribe button because we have a lot more coming at you in the coming days