Afinia H-Series 3D Printer - Model H479

This machine is possibly the best you can get for the money and it does pretty much work well right out of the box but with some flaws to deal with that are pretty obvious. First off, the temperature control for the base is pretty whacked, the temperature probe is right next to the heating unit so the only place the base reaches the proper temperature is the little chunk of metal between the heating element and the probe. The edges of the platform are rarely much above room temperature cutting your effective printing area to pretty much the very center of the base and according to my thermometer even it is 20 degrees cooler than it should be. This exacerbates the next problem.The base plate is not straight and level. In fact it is impossible to square up the base using the leveling screws because the damned thing is basically round. Each of the four corners droop like a willow tree's branches, placing it on a piece of glass shows each corner is 1mm above and one corner is up 2mm. When the base is heated, it makes it even worse. I'm not the only one with this problem as a bunch of folks on various forums are complaining about not being able to level the base correctly with three screws. You can get the center and three corners pretty close but one corner will be way off. If you are looking for any sort of precision with it in this condition, forget it. Printing anything larger than 2" x 2" will likely peel away from the base, maybe ruining the print, maybe not.

After seeing this demonstrated at a trade show with lots of other printers we were impressed enough by the quality in FINE mode and the price to research it more. One day later we ordered one and are waiting for it to arrive.This will be used for prototype and low volume parts for our company.I'll update this review after we've printed our first parts.Update:The package arrived today, minor shipping damage but the printer works fine. The clips that hold the perf-board on are a bit of a pain and if you get them more than just a little on to the perf-board the print head hits them when printing the calibration pattern which uses most of the print area.I plan to replace the metal table with a longer one with built-in clips that I'll make in our machine shop. This will allow removing the perf-board/glass from the front by just releasing a clamp. It will also just grab the edges so the print head won't have anything to hit.With the 0.15mm print resolution the output looks very nice, just like I saw at the show.It would be nice if you could tell it to wait for the table to pre-heat for some amount of time before automatically starting the print. As it is, you need to turn on the pre-heat for "1 hour" and before the hour is up you manually start the print.You need to be careful to hold the platform when turning off the power or it will drop and hit bottom fairly hard. I saw a note about this so was ready for it.It's quite quiet running and the ABS odor isn't bad, so we'll be putting this in the office instead of the shop.Update: I added some pictures above, I see two of them were approved. Been printing a lot of parts, working flawlessly even on a 9 hour print when it was left running overnight.Edit 2014-01-03: Yesterday I noticed the platform wasn't heating and discovered the connector on the heater had burned up. I took a picture and sent it to Afinia support. I've now got an exchange in progress for both the heater and the board it was plugged into. My cost is shipping the bum parts to them ($6) plus air shipping on the replacement part back to me ($13). Five * customer support!

I bought this machine and every item for it to make small plastic prototypes. It has not once made a single part that was useable every part comes out warped or cracked badly after a few rolls of different brand materials i contacted the manufacturer the first issue is its NOT compatible with newest OS X mountain lion on MAC. Next issue is the print surface does not heat the part at all so it causes the parts to deform badly for example a 78mm diameter part was warped over 1/16 of an inch and when you need to make an accurate part thats not even partialy acceptable. And when i contacted the company whos selling them they said oh the color you are using is almost impossible to print with (octave black abs). So being determined to make my 1700$ investment work i bought the temperature switch the glass lens the kapton tape and the garolite plate the nylon plastic everything! I tried the tape after wasting half a roll trying to get it to lay flat the glass broke to bits. So now i have a printer than looks cool when its running but makes useless parts if you want to make anything bigger than 1inch in any direction find a different machine or deal with bent parts. Last but not least the other issue i have is the parts printed out even on solid setting are not solid at all they have a grid pattern printed in them so no parts are solid or structurally sound so if you wanted to make a new small plastic bushing for a kids toy its not able to do it because the part would warp crack or just not be solid and handle the job. If you want this machine to make a used part good luck i have been using it daily trying new things and different setups and settings all give me same results warped more or less and cracks some hidden some not. And the support material printed to hold some of the parts is stronger than some of the parts. I went to the extent of getting a ridiculously expensive 3d cad program just to draw stl files and use this machine inhave had zero luck with it and wish i didnt buy it at all! I should have saved the money and bought one with an enclosure and a larger print area.