We have a new printer, and it's a MONSTER.

Today has been bit of a faff-around-and-find-out day in the CA lab.

The new Anycubic 3D printing Anycubic Kobra K3 Max has arrived with its massive 420/420/500 build volume, that’s 88.2 litres!

I’ve not had to assemble a printer yet, as most of our current set up are CoreXY with the only two bed slingers being a pair of stalwart A1 minis. So I was a little apprehensive about setting this monster up, but the paper manual (gotta love a tactile instruction book rather than a sterile PDF) is well laid out, logical and easy to follow, this facilitated a brisk and trouble-free build taking well under 90 minutes.

The machine itself feels good quality. The tool head gantry is definitely made to take the extra heft that a print bed as large as this, moving at such high speed, will create.

It’s well finished overall with the only downside being the quality of the touchscreen, however, the usability of the App almost, so far at least, negates the need for a more upmarket HMI on the printer itself.

The commissioning took a little longer than planned as I think the machine was trying to update its firmware through its own WiFi connection and through the slicer program, but this was sorted by a quick system restore and an update solely from the slicer.

The slicer is very familiar to anyone that knows Prusa, so it was instinctively easy to use from the get-go, although it took around 30 minutes of system updates to get fully up and running.

I wanted to see how this behemoth stacked up against my X1Cs, so I set it to print a pre installed BENCHY. Anycubic claim that it only takes 18 minutes to print, much like the BambuLabs Ludicrous Speed test piece, so that was the bench(y)mark that I needed.

So as usual, I let the machine calibrate itself, loaded the supplied PLA and pressed print with no changes to anything.

The results?

Well TBH I’m extremely impressed! This is a big unit and due to workshop upgrades the only flat surface I had to assemble it on was a coffee table, that turns out is nowhere near as sturdy as I had thought it was (video in the comments). In under 20 minutes it deposited a very reasonably finished small boat on the print bed!

Now, I know it’s not perfect, and there’s some fettling required, but given that the green one was printed on a 256/256 CoreXY that is in an extremely sturdy cabinet and the black one was on a 420/420 bedslinger on a wobbly coffee table I’m extremely impressed!

Well done ANYCUBIC, if this beast carries on delivering like this it’ll be perfect for the bigger projects I’ve got coming up over the summer!

Just got to wait for the multi filament ACE Pro to turn up now!