Starting With the Creator Pro

Setup went well.  Instructions in the manual were good enough.  

Plate leveling went well also.  The card included with the box that you can use for leveling is nice.

With my Finder I printed a filament tube guide from Thingiverse:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1582238

The bad thing is that the connector side snapped, but the good news it still worked.

I'm not sure if it's Flashforge's filament but the filament snapped TWICE while I was loading it!

Loading the PLA filament into the right extruder was fairly straight forward and just like the Finder.

What's interesting is that the filament that came out was kind of red and merged with my green filament.  I assume this shows the printer was tested with red filament before it came out of the factory.

 Differences moving up from the Finder to Creator Pro:

1. Interface:  definitely not as nice as the Finder's touch screen.  But this is just cosmetic preferences.
2. Build plate leveling knobs - not as easy to get at like the Finder.  Partially obstructed by the metal build plate.  Not a huge issue, just different than the Finder.
3. Heating the build plate will mean it will take longer to print but this is the sacrifice for not having parts lift.  You can turn this option off I think.
4. You can't remove the build plate so tougher parts have to be muscled on top of the build plate inside the machine.  I'm concerned this can put off my z-axis.

Patience...steeper learning curve but it will all pay off in the end.

Day 0 with the Flashforge Creator Pro

Picked up the 2016 Flashforge Creator Pro and Simplify 3D from Digitmakers today!  Also grabbed some filament including glow-in-the-dark and PLA+ to play with.  Lots of learning to do in my summer!

Opening the box there's the Quick Start Guide to go through that also has instructions on how to unpack to Creator Pro.

 It was pretty stuck in the box, but with my wife's help we got the whole thing out.

 And here's what the extruder unit looks like before I put it to work.  Good bye clean extruders!

 I had noted the heating block was bigger on one extruder and emailed Digitmakers about it.  It's not a problem.

 Now the top of the Creator Pro has this chunk of styrofoam in it that is holding the spool holders and some cables and tools.  The diagram shows it lifting out pretty easy but for me this was a HUGE problem.  It was so jammed in there it took me 10 minutes to wrestle with it to get it out.  Definitely not as easy to set up as a Flashforge Finder!

 One thing I should point out is that it comes with a fan that will blow onto your print surface.  I didn't even see this pointed out on the website or pictures before I bought the printer so it was a most welcome surpise!

That's all for today!  I'm going to print some Thingiverse mods before I put the Creator Pro to work.  I'll put that up in the next post!