After building so many prusa style machines I was excited to get the Tronxy X5 in. The Tronxy X5 has the same movement mechanism as the DaVinci 1.0 or an Ultimaker style machine where the bed moves up and down instead of the hotend. When I got this machine in a few months ago it was by no means new on the market and had been out for at least a year. There is actually a completely revamped bigger version of the machine called the Tronxy X5S that uses a CoreXY design but goes for about $350 which is quite a bit more expensive than this $200 dollar machine.
I really was not sure what to expect with this machine, as there was not an abundance of information on it like some of the other 3D printers I have reviewed. I liked that it had an all aluminum frame and seemed like it would be very easy to add an enclosure to due to its cubed design. I had seen a video or two mentioning that the bed was not very secure while printing and that it did have vibration issues but for the price I was still excited to see how this printer could perform.
I had planned on building this printer on stream so I went ahead and laid out all of the parts the night before. There was no paperwork on how to assemble and the assembly instructions where on a memory card that was included with the machine. The build was extremely frustrating due to poor labeling which made me have to backtrack and redo things I had done multiple times. I streamed for about 3-4 hours before giving up for the night. The next morning I woke up early determined to complete the printer and I was able to finish assembly in about another 3-4 hours.
It was much easier to build the printer while not on stream but that does not change the fact that the instructions were extremely poor. Once assembled I printed out a tiny cube that turned out decent not great but not terrible for an initial print. I then tried to print bigger so I found a pretty good sized model of Bowser on Thingiverse that I attempted to print. This was a disaster the bed had such extreme vibration that the nozzle would snag the infill and cause the stepper motor to skip steps. This happened twice with the same model before I decided to slow down the printer.
I slowed the printer down to 50mms and printed out a rocket. The rocket turned out pretty damn good with no skipped steps at all. I then went and revisited the Bowser model a 3rd time with my new speeds and was pleasantly surprised that the model turned out near perfect. I followed that up with a print of a Batman bust that turned out immaculate, I was pretty shocked by how good it turned out on this printer running stock and just slowed down.
After having it now for a couple of months it has been able to perform quite well on most prints as long as I stick to the 50mms speed. I do think that the printer was designed poorly in that regard and that with a bit more thought it could have been able to print quicker without sacrificing much quality. I do plan on printing out some frame braces for the aluminum extrusions along with potentially modifying the bed to have a second lead screw and motor on the opposite side but I am still debating it.
In the end I do feel that this printer is very cheap being under $200 but that does not mean it should have the issue with the bed. There are lots of sub $200 printers that do not have this issue. This printer can be a great printer for someone that wants to have some fun upgrading and tweaking it and with the open cube everything is easy to access and there is plenty of room to mount addons. If you have a bit more to spend but want the cube design I would highly recommend taking a look at the newer Tronxy X5S that was released toward the end of 2017.
Find out more or purchase the TronXY X5 here:
https://goo.gl/MD8w8J
