Anycubic Kossel Linear Plus Trigorilla: Setup and Review

Say hello to the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus! Having previously owned and printed on a BIQU Magician printer, this was put aside as I was more used to the Cartesian style printer (CR10S in this case).  I recently won a competition for a Tevo Little Monster, I thought it may be best for me to get back into a delta printer world before I receive it, but with a bigger size and with more features than the BIQU.

Let’s get started…

The Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus comes in a kit form. Nicely packaged in an oblong box, with everything having its own place and all snug and secure.

You get with it:

• 1KG PLA Filament
• Grease (for linear rails)
• Spatula
• Metal Ruler
• Gloves
• Cutters
• USB Cable

The provided instructions are laid out well and in colour with images too! So, it is easy to follow as well as having numbered bags with the nuts and bolts, so you know where to start with first.

Step 1

The first step to building the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus is the bottom and the linear rails. Please wear the supplied gloves when handling the linear rails – They are greasy!

Upon opening the linear rails, there are some black stoppers at either end to stop the block from sliding off.  However, one of mine came off, resulting in a block coming off and losing a couple of the bearings.  Fear not!  Anycubic supplies some spare bearings within the packing for the linear rails. 

I would advise leaving these little black stoppers in until later. After putting these in and installing, it started to take shape…

Step 2

This step is to now install the top of the printer and the endstops.

You will need to insert the end plugs on the wires of the endstops, but don’t do this until you have fed the wire through the frame and back underneath.  I put mine on after feeding through the frame, so I had to loosen the screws holding the bottom on the frame so I can slide these up to get the wire through the holes!  A piece of wire comes supplied of which you can use to  secure the wires and pull them through.  However, I was able to just feed them through as they were.

Ensure the endstop points to the right hand side when installing as per pic.

This is how the wires should feed through from the underneath for each endstop. Now you can connect the plugs!  So far so good…

Step 3

It’s time to install the Extruder arms!

Four bolts are used to secure each arm to the linear blocks, easy!  Now the tricky part, which is installing the rubber belt.  This comes as one whole roll, so once you have installed one side, you will then need to cut it so you can carry on with the others.

Tip!

A neat tip when installing the belt to the bottom gear, is to just create a loop and hook it over the gear.  This will save you feeding the whole lot through the bottom!  Unfortunately, you can’t really do this with the top one.  Once you have secured the belt to the block, you can proceed to cut to length.  They may seem a little loose, but the spring clips will help tighten this slightly.

Installing the clips was a bit of a challenge as they are tight  You will struggle just using your fingers for this step, unless you like to be wounded!  Use the supplied cutters to hold and bend it over the rubber belt whilst holding with your other hand.  The instructions state to have it 3cm down from the bottom of the block, which is where the stopper screw is, so no need to measure.  Just use that as a guide.  This step is now complete!

Step 4

Now comes the screen installation. Short and sweet this step, just 2 bolts!

Step 5

Next up is the spool holder and the extruder motor.  Again, another easy step but ensure the extruder motor is at the right height as per the instructions.  Then, insert the PTFE tub onto the extruder itself.

Step 6

Lets get some power!  The cable for this goes in-between the bottom base and is ready to be wired up to the board.

Are you wired yet?

You should now have what looks like a 3D printer! If not, go back to Step 1.

The instructions for the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus have a detailed wire diagram for you to follow.  This is easy to read and understand.  Just take each, one at a time.

 LCD                           Power Supply          Extruder motors                 Endstops

The wiring is now complete!  It does look messy, but you can use some elastic bands/cable ties to keep things together and out of the way.  A downside of this I feel is that the wires are exposed.  It would be good to have kept them all together and enclosed, but that’s what 3D printing is for right!?

Now that we have most of the electricals installed, the final piece of the jigsaw is the heated bed.

Once plugged in to the board, it then just kinda clips/sits on to the bottom frame.  It holds well and doesn’t move.  You also get a build surface to stick on to help with adhesion to your prints.

We now have a fully built Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus 3D printer! Give yourself a pat on the back!

Any problems during the build?

Yes, I only had one issue along the way whilst building.  One of the linear blocks had slid off resulting in me losing a couple of bearings as the stopper had come off one of the linear arms.  You can easily resolve this with the spare bearings that are included. After you have the arms installed you can remove these stoppers. This isn’t mentioned, but if you don’t remove and then try to print, you won’t be able to home your printer. The small round plastic part are the stoppers as the left picture shows.

First things first…

Before you power on, check to make sure you have the correct voltage set for your region!

After powering on, the first step is to set the bed leveling.  This is a 2 step process as it measures the Z position.

First install the magnetized bed leveling sensor which just sits by the nozzle on the magnetic plate that is there and plug it in.

On the menu screen, go to Auto Leveling Bed > Measure Z Pos. This will home the printer and will measure 69 points on the bed to get the Z position, rehome and then reboot.  The next step is to then start the leveling process.

On the menu screen, go to Auto Leveling Bed > Prepare Leveling> Begin Leveling. Again, this checks 69 points on the bed which result in the Z offset position.  Once finished, the printer will rehome and then the extruder should be just above the print bed.  Once both processes have been completed, go back into the menu options: Auto Leveling Bed > Prepare Leveling. Look at the Z Offset figure and if this is different to the New Z Offset, you need to change it to match the New Z Offset. If there are 0.01 difference between them, you don’t need to change it.  Just leave it as is.

Lets get printing!

I found a slicer profile from the Anycubic Kossel 3D Printer Facebook group and loaded this into Simplify3D. My first print was going to be the xyz calibration cube. However, I ran into some issues!  I fed the filament into the extruder, and it appeared that I got a clog straight away! Nothing I could do would clear it, so I had to take the hotend apart.  I didn’t mind as it gives me more of an insight of the parts.

There is a small PTFE tube that sits in the top of the heatsink on the inside, see the picture to the left.  The shape of this is like a cone slanting down as once I had put all back together, I could feel the filament catch on something inside preventing me from pushing it further down.  Perseverance paid off and I was able to get the filament all the way through.

Getting the print started was easy.  As with pretty much any other printer, save the file to SD card, insert into the printer and choose to print from SD.  The good thing with the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus is that it detects when you insert and take out the card so you don’t need to initiate it each time.

Printed yet?

After selecting my file to print, some of the filament would feed through at the start, however, as it progressed, I noticed the extruder motor wasn’t moving.  Therefore, no filament was being fed through.  I was still able to manually push the filament so I know there wasn’t a clog. Perhaps it was the motor?  I swapped the cables over with another motor and it did the same thing.

I plugged the motor into a different axis and the motor was working.  Baffled, I seeked help online and with those from Inov3D and it was suggested to swap a stepper driver over.  Anycubic shipped the Kossel Plus with a spare stepper driver in the E1 socket.  So, after some battle to pull them out in order to swap over, I started my print again and it is now working!  I have yet to test this stepper driver to double check this is the issue.

Unfortunately, due to bad bed adhesion, I stopped the print for this and went through the Bed Leveling process again.  This time, I decided to start printing upgrades for my printer instead.  These were more of the aesthetic type of upgrades.

I have started off with printing covers for the bottom corners and I am using Eryone Silk Gold PLA filament.  I will be going for a Black & Gold themed look.

As you can see, I have great bed adhesion.  The infill is looking good too, as well as the colour.

The print has finished and after removing the print the build surface has taken the shine away from my filament!  Not good!  So, my options are to reprint using a raft perhaps or just print on another printer with a different build surface.  Quite disappointing! Bear in mind, that if you are using a shiny filament, its most likely the shine will go when using this print surface, so it may be worth investing in some glass or mirror if you want to keep that shine.

My thoughts?

Having never built a 3D printer in kit form (apart from the Ender 3, which is almost a kit) I found it relatively easy to put the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus together thanks to the detailed instructions. All the parts for the printer felt and looked of high quality and nothing was missing either. The spares that were also included in this kit were great!

When it comes to printing, the bed leveling procedure can be a bit long, especially if you have to do it more than once but once you have the Z Offset saved, you shouldn’t have any issues with leveling going forward and as the bed is static, not on springs, there is no movement so you wouldn’t need to level each time.

The actual printing of the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus isn’t the quietest, but also not the loudest. I would say it is of a normal volume. If you were to install TMC2208 stepper drivers or similar and place on a foam surface this could well make it quieter. Would dampers work? I don’t know, but something I may look into. The quality produced is great so far…clear layer lines, no blobs or zits…just smoothness! The speed is pretty quick too, especially as it is a delta printer, these are designed for speed.

The added extras were pretty good too. You get a metal ruler, a large spatula, some cutters, a pair of latex gloves and some grease for the linear rails. I would advise using the gloves when handling the linear rails as they are greasy.

The Anycubic Kossel Plus Specs

Printing Technology: FDM
Max Printing Speed: 80 mm/s.
Leveling Type: Auto Leveling
Travel Speed: 150 mm/s
Printer Dimensions: 380x380x680 mm
Build size: φ230×300 mm
Glass platform size: Dia: 240 mm; thickness: 3 mm
Layer resolution: 0.1-0.4 mm
Position Accuracy: 0.1 mm
Data input format: GCode, STL, OBJ, DAE, AMF
Print temperature(PLA): Max 260℃
Connection Ways: USB/SD
Slicer software: Cura
Cura output Formats: GCode
Software language: Chinese/English
Power supply: AC 100-240V, 50/60Hz, 1.5A
Rated power: 48W

What’s Next for the Anycubic Kossel Plus?

I am currently printing more upgrades for this and I will be using various materials to see how they handle. With the build surface texture, it will be interesting to see what differences there are so look out for a future article based on this for the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus!

If you have made it this far through this article, let me shake your hand!

I hope you have found this informative and useful but if you do have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them.

If you are interested in buying the Trigorilla Anycubic Kossel Plus, please click here!

Thanks for reading!

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