Creality K1 Review Extended Edition

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This is the extended edition of my review - including all of the troubleshooting and prints. My previous video has my overall thoughts and opinion on this machine:    • CREALITY K1 Unboxing and Review  

I excluded the First-Layer Fiasco at 37:45 from my earlier unboxing and overview video because that was almost certainly caused by user error on my part. I did not think it would be fair to spend so much time documenting an issue that was caused by user error.

Also the footage that I had explaining it was missing audio and super confusing because I spent so long working on this. video in a continuous stretch that my microphone ran out of battery.

Finally, about 3AM the next morning, I was able to realize my mistake, and fix it by loosening the shaft collar again, applying upward force to the leadscrew while applying downward force to the shaft collar, and tightening the set screws to lock the shaft collar in place to eliminate slop. This restored the machine to its original condition from the factory, and brought the first layer back up to acceptable quality (maybe 8/10, so good enough but room for improvement.

So first layer quality timeline:
Everything before 33:36
8 out of 10 (factory condition) pretty skewed bed, but otherwise printed well. First layer OK but could use improvement.

Everything between 33:36 and 38:57
3 out of 10 (ruined by user error) Clear issues with front-left print quality. Caused by botched attempt to fix the skewed bed by loosening shaft collar and introducing slop on z-axis leadscrew.

Everything after 38:57
8 out of 10 (factory condition) Fixed the slop issue by re-tightening the shaft collar with upward force on leadscrew, and downward force on shaft collar. First layer still has room for improvement, but good enough to not cause even the slightest issue on any "real" prints that I printed during testing.

I hope Creality is able to improve the first layer quality, to get rid of the fine gaps in between lines. But it has not actually caused any print issues for me, and I am hopeful that this can be addressed in a firmware update.

To be clear, the belt-slipping technique I showed at 34:28, I believe is a good and valid way to re-level the bed if excess Z-travel is required to print the first layer.

However, in the lead-up to discovering that fix, I was trying all sorts of other things. One attempted fix that caused a lot of issues is when I loosened a part of the machine that I should not have loosened.

Specifically, the front 2 lead screws have a small shaft collar to constrain them and eliminate slop in the Z direction. I loosened those because I thought that would allow me to rotate the front-left lead screw relative to the other lead screws, and level out the bed.

Looking forward to more reviews and testing from others in the community. Also, to my dear Bambu Lab fanboys: Stay mad that creality actually made a good printer.

In this video I am reviewing Creality’s latest flagship printer, the Creality K1. #CrealityK1 #creality #creality3d
Will it be able to compete with the latest printers from Bambu Lab, such as the P1P and X1C? #P1P #bambulab #x1carbon

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This machine is taking #corexy corexy speed printing to the next level. It is fast, fully enclosed, wifi enabled, cloud enabled, has an all-metal hotend, ceramic heater block, and CAN bus for the toolhead. Is this the modern day Ender 3? Do you think the K1 is better than the prusa mk4, bambu lab x1 carbon, prusa xl, ender 3 s1 pro, and the bambu p1p?