If you are looking for a large 3D printer – you might have heard of the new, up and coming Comgrow T500.
I have spent the last few days testing this new printer, and in this article I will share with you all my results.
And no, I’m not going to be trying to move this thing again to record on my main set because it’s way too heavy and way too big for all my tables:
With a 500mm cubed build volume, this machine puts other “huge” 3d printers like the AnyCubic Kobra Max and the Elegoo Neptune 3 Max to shame.
But is it any good?
Get the T500 with early bird discount!What I Love About The T500
First of all, I have to say that despite being a bedslinger, the Comgrow T500 moves.
It does so by having a ridiculously rigid frame with CNC’d metal brackets – and by running Klipper with input shaping.
In other words, while the bed itself is heavier than insert yo-mama joke here, this thing manages to churn out a very respectable 25 minute benchy with surprisingly good quality.
What’s more, I love the use of open-source, easy-to-modify software such as KlipperScreen, and the MASSIVE touch-screen LCD.
It features a high-flow volcano-style hot-end, and just generally has solid build quality.
What I’d Change About The T500
With that said, there are a few things about the Comgrow T500 that I would change.
First, it ships with a comical 0.4mm nozzle, and while a few extra nozzles are included, the maximum is a 0.8mm nozzle.
I think that with a printer of this size, it really makes sense to tune it on larger nozzles, because printing this big with a 0.4mm nozzle is, well, it’s just silly.
But here’s the thing: even if you do try to swap to a 1.0 or 1.2mm nozzle, you’re in for a bad time.
First, the printer uses a strangely-shaped Volcano nozzle rather than the more standard V6 ones, and the housing of the toolhead is so close to the headbed, that if you use a slightly shorter nozzle, your print head will scrape along your prints constantly.
What’s more, the heater block seems to be inadequate, because I was severely limited by flow rates, and if I wanted to print with any reasonably fast speed, I needed to stick to a 0.8mm nozzle.
This could be improved by putting a CHT nozzle on there, but as I said, the tight clearance of the print head prohibited me from using any of the CHT nozzles I ordered for testing this printer. And, when I spoke to the folks at Comgrow, they told me they were still working on tuning pressure advance for 1.2mm nozzles.
So, that was a real bummer.
Personally, I feel like if you’re going to sell a printer THIS big, especially one where the headline feature is high speed large printing, you really should make sure that your hot-end can exceed 22mm3/s.
To be honest, I haven’t been able to get a very many successful prints off of this at the time of writing this except for the first benchy I printed, and hopefully this trash can.
I’m quite sure that if I spent more time on this tuning things like pressure advance, speeds, bed leveling, and profiles in OrcaSlicer, I could get this thing printing phenomenally well, but considering I have plenty of other printers that are nearly as big and just worked right out of the box without all these hassles, I just can’t justify spending any more time getting this thing to work.
Third, there’s these knobs on the top.
Don’t get me wrong: it makes sense to have a way to manually move Z, but by having the knobs stick out this far, they’ve made a printer that is impossible to find a home for even impossible-er?, and I honestly have NO idea where I’m going to put this thing moving forward.
Fourth, and this is a small one, but these cheapy metalic rail covers aren’t great, they bunch up, and one even fell off, which, on a printer at this price point, just felt like a bit of an insult.
But, to be honest, Comgrow DID let me know that they’re making a lot of changes to the printer before it goes into production.
Comgrow T500 Pricing
The official retail pricing of the T500 is $950.
Currently, Comgrow is offering a $250 discount to the first 100 orders, reducing the T500 pricing to just $699!
Get the T500 with early bird discount!
