Today I am going to be reviewing the BIBO Dual Extrusion 3D Printer. This is a printer that I have had my eyes on a few times over the last year. For a printer that is fully enclosed with dual extrusion and is not a kit printer, the price tag of around $850 new from Amazon seemed really to good to be true. I was pretty surprised with how little content I was able to find on this machine, considering what it had to offer and how many positive reviews this printer does have on Amazon. At first, I thought it was likely to good to be true and that potentially the reviews were not legitimate. However, after having this printer for about a month now I can really see why so many people had great things to say about this 3D Printer.
The BIBO 3D printer came packaged incredibly well, with a full 1kg spool of PLA included in the box. Getting the machine out and setup was a breeze. After cutting a few zip ties and leveling the 3 bed screws I was just about ready to get printing. This machine does come with an acrylic enclosure which is one of the few things that you do have to assemble. There were some simple instructions that came with the machine but nothing in depth on how to assemble the top. I went ahead and popped the SD card that came included with the machine to see if there were any instructions.
This SD card has to be one of the most loaded ones to come with any 3D printer I have ever received. On the card were folders with assembly videos for all of the parts of the printer as well as videos for how to assemble the front door and top of the printer. On top of that came Simplify settings, Cura settings, Repetier settings, Cura software, printing tips, test gcode, and a WiFi app for Android. I only used a few of the things included on the card but I would always prefer to have more information about the machine and software then the typical lacking information. This was already a huge thumbs up for BIBO from me.
After getting the top on the printer I hopped over to Cura to slice a print of the T800 Terminator Skull. This was a large print and I wanted to dive right in on this machine. I saved the file to the SD card, popped it into the printer, navigated through the simple touch screen interface and was off. Overall, the print turned out great. There where a few issues with a tiny beam that fell over and a few other smaller imperfections, but after looking at the gcode I determined was my fault due to my slicer settings.
After that print, I wanted to test out a dual extrusion print. I loaded up another spool of PLA I had laying around and sliced a multicolored Octopus file that I found on Thingiverse. I started this print watched the first layer and came back a few hours later to a completed print. This print had serious issues, and after looking closer I found out that my old brittle PLA had snapped off and that is what cause the failure. I then went ahead and loaded the filament again and restarted the print. This one was looking beautiful, but halfway through the print I got a temperature error. After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that the heater cartridge on the second hotend was dead.
I contacted BIBO and within a few hours (yes I said hours), I had gotten a response. Braden from BIBO reached out with apologies as well as recommendations on how to troubleshoot. Since I am quite familiar with 3D printers I had already decided the part needed to be replaced. Luckily BIBO sent a replacement heater cartridge that I was able to swap out in about 20 minutes. Once completed, I fired the print back up and this time it completed beautifully. I was very happy with the end result. I followed this with another smaller PLA print that turned out great, before hopping over to some ABS.
I printed out an adjustable wrench in ABS along with a carabiner that turned out fantastic. I did try printing a much larger ABS print but that one failed. The quality looked great, but it has some very small details that where just not able to complete. I then wanted to try to print in some very flexible TPU that I had which although started out great, did end up jamming. (I have tried printing this material on multiple machines with no success). Around this time, my Mosaic Palette 2 showed up which I was eager to test out. I printed a 4 color chameleon as well as a random spliced succulent owl that turned out great.
This printer also comes with a diode laser engraver attachment. I was not particularly interested in this before but thought I could use this for some cool projects. I swapped out the dual hotends for the laser engraver which was very easy and followed the instructions on how to get the laser setup. Within about 20 minutes, I was ready to run my first job. Using inkscape and a plugin that came on the SD card, I was able to generate gcode for the laser quite easily. I did a 20 minute engrave on a piece of plywood I had laying around which turned out nicely as well as a globe onto a piece of black acrylic. I do plan on using this more in the future to engrave things that I have CNC’d out.
The BIBO Touch does a lot of things right. For the price, the dual extruding, laser engraving, fully enclosed, touch screened printer is a seriously solid machine. The only things that I could have wished was for a heater cartridge that worked well out of the box, a slightly larger build volume (it is 214 x 186 x 160mm) and the fan on this machine (at least mine) can be quite noisy. The printer has features such as power outage resume, filament runout sensors, and can get up to 270C for higher temperature materials. If you are looking at this for a first printer or to upgrade from a lower priced single extrusion machine, at $850 it is hard to ignore the BIBO Dual Extruder 3D Printer.
I have not yet tried using water soluble support material, but the company claims it can print in PVA and I have no reason to believe otherwise. To find out more about the BIBO Touch or to purchase one for yourself. Follow the link HERE.
