K1 Long Term Review My Thoughts After One Year With The Creatlity K1 As My Primary 3D Printer

This is one of the first K1 printers, I bought the first day available. As an early adopter I understood that while I would be getting a much greater performing printer relative to my other slow bedslinger printers, there would also be some bugs to be worked out. And that was correct, both in the great and the bad. The good thing is that Creality support always stepped up sending new parts upon problems. What has your K1 experience been like? Please share with everyone in the comments.

First impressions –
This thing is fast and print quality is somehow better than my much slower printers. I mean like really fast!!! It’s mesmerizing to just stand there and watch it. The fans are quite loud but for that speed I’m fine with it. Plus My printers are in my print shed, not in my house, so I have no problem with it.
Noticed default settings significantly higher nozzle temperatures and lower bed temperatures than otherwise recommended by filament manufacturers. This I believe due to the filament moving so much quicker through the hot end, so the nozzle needed more heating energy to keep up and that ultimately the filament got to generally the same temperature as usual due to the hotter nozzle & much shorter time to heat each bit of filament due to much higher filament speed through the hotend.
Heating speeds and travel speeds even z-axis
Multi-start z-axis lead screws for increased speed
Nozzle heats way faster than my old printers, bed still takes its time
Higher temperatures
It’s great to have 300/100 capability. I do have some polycarbonate that requires 300/100, which is a super strong material. It’s tricky though as it’s so strong, plus it warps, so while parts with a smallish footprint on the bed can be awesome, large thick parts I found just pulled the print surface steel plate off the magnet bed. Then I thought I’d solve it by clamping all around the bed with binder clamps! And that solved the steel/magnet separation problem! BUT!!! A similar worse thing happened, which at 100c on the bed the adhesive softened between the print surface layer and the steel bed and peeled that apart, far worse problem!!! Luckily I was able to quickly while it was still hot enough, to remove the part from the surface and re-apply the print surface to the bed! It was quite scary as it was pretty ugly, to the point where I in fact had to peel back up much of it to get rid of a bunch of bubbles. Thankfully it came out just fine and I still use that same bed today, though it does look a bit like a spacecraft exterior that just went through atmospheric reentry burning, but it still works great!
The higher temps also allow for other great materials such as nylon, which I use for any time I need really strong parts, such as the hooks I made to hang my 45lb Olympic barbell on for overhead storage, safely. Basically I looked up the material strength for nylon, designed the hooks, ran them through my structural simulation software, looked at the predicted stress concentration numbers, then beefed up any location where there were stress risers, and applied a safety factor of like 4 to 1 to mitigate the interlayer adhesion issues of FDM printing, and also another 4:1 because it’s plastic and has a non-linear stress strain curve, in other words if it’s loaded lightly it’s strong, but the further you bring it towards failing, the weakening accelerates faster and faster as most plastics due, unlike most metals which tend to be “linear” meaning they are very predictable all the way up until they fail.
Filament on the rear
A bit annoying at first. In some cases a reach-around can in fact greatly add to some experiences, but in this case not so much. But once you’re print space is optimized for this it’s fine. It’s a little worse on the K1 Max, which I also have since added to my collection, but both are very workable, and you can always simply create an alternate filament mount. One alternate configuration I did which worked great if I didn’t mind the top cover off, was hanging from straight overhead and bypassing the cable chain. It’s working fine though still to this day I mostly print with the spool on the rear through the guide tube in the cable chain and it still does a great job unless I mess something up.
Print bed and included plastic spatula
The print bed is very nice untextured smooth surface, and with the included plastic spatula to not damage it, I find still this day to be an excellent combination. And it seems like a no brainer now, but the bed positioning screw heads in the rear are great for quickly dropping the plate on into the exact correct position.




Creality K1 and K1 Max are Klipper based CoreXY 3D Printers capable of very high speed accurate high quality 3D printing enabled by technologies such as input shaping and other leading edge technologies