BIQU Magician Delta 3D Printer Review – A pocket rocket?

BIQU Magician Lipstick-Sized Delta Rostock 3D Printer

  Well, let me start off saying first impressions of this BIQU Magician printer seem great! Good quality packing it comes in. A great big cylindrical tube! You could use this as a stool, or even a place to put your printer on…this to me is a good indicator from the start of the quality you’re about to receive. As for the cheap price of £179 from Amazon!

What do you get?

The BIQU Magician comes neatly packed inside with a top and bottom sturdy foam platform to absorb any knocks during transit. It is all shrink wrapped up, with the belts cable tied so they don’t get damaged either. It comes with the following:

• 250g spool of white filament
• Full colour instructions
• Power pack
• Spool holder
• Flexible build plate
• Glue stick
• USB Cable
• SD Card with .obj files on and instructions
• Spare nozzles & various other bits
• Allen keys
• Levelling sensor + extra pads
• Scraper

Setup for the BIQU Magician was a breeze. Firstly, after you have unwrapped everything, screw the spool holder on the top and secure your filament. Secondly, use the auto levelling sensor, pre-heat your PLA and away you go! That’s all there is to it.

Regarding the levelling sensor, the instructions are incorrect as to how to connect it and which side to place the sticky pad! On the black connector, you will see some embossed writing, put this face down on your desk and then apply the stick pad on the other end.

When connecting to the BIQU Magician, ensure bits of the metal terminals are the same way and that you have a cold nozzle. The BIQU has a handy function within its menu options  to test this further if needed. Go to Operation > Endstops. This will show you the X,Y & Z endstops as well as the levelling, All you need to do is press the buttons on the end stops to initiate them and you’ll see the icons light up red on the screen to indicate they are working.

The printer itself…

The printer looks great and kind of futuristic in a way with its exposed metal rods, it’s jagged belts and the spacey blue touchscreen.

It comes with a spool holder which you have to attach. For me personally, it’s not the greatest! For a start, you’d only be able to use the filament spool that comes with it (Unless you modify it by cutting off the plastic plug bit) but it doesn’t seem secure and could easily get your filament in a tangle. I decided to print a replacement spool holder which is much, much better! (available on Thingiverse)

Loading the filament can be tricky at first as you need a good aim to get it into the hole by the extruder gears, but it’s easy enough after some practice. The touchscreen is vibrant and very responsive with a vast array of options to choose from such as pre-heating PLA, cool down which turns all fans on to cool down the extruder.

You can change your offsets, feed the filament through increments as well as the X & Y axis. You can view the contents of the SD card so you can choose what to print and also the auto levelling feature.

The BIQU Magician can be classed as quite noisy, but for me it gives out a robotic sound. However, I find it quite musical I think! I have no issues with that. I don’t believe you can apply dampers to the motors as they are smaller than your usual Nemo 7 stepper motors.

Time for printing!

After slicing your file using which ever software you have, save this to the SD card. Insert into the slot on the front which is loaded straight away onto the screen where you can then choose your print. I’d advise giving these short names, or something at the start of the filename for ease of finding!

Tap on your file you want to print and the BIQU Magician will heat up the PLA quite quickly and then start your print. As the print bed is non-heated, and uses a flexible plate, first adhesion can be hit and miss, so with the glue stick that is provided, you can lay some of this down before hand. Once printing, you can watch in awe as it produces your creation!

I printed the Robot Maker which comes pre-loaded on the SD Card

Not bad for an out the box print! Obviously, playing around with some of the settings within your slicer would produce even more outstanding results! I have used the BIQU Magician to print various other items and upgrades for my CR-10S.

Overall

To sum up, the BIQU Magician is a fantastic little printer for the money. If you ever want to get in to 3D printing, this is a great starting point! However, limited in its capabilities, you will gain an understanding on how to print, how to adjust prints to make them better. When you feel ready, you can upgrade to a bigger printer, of which you can use this to print upgrades for it!

I hope you have enjoyed reading my review, and any comments are welcome on anything I may have missed. If you would like me to include anything in future articles, let me know. Happy printing!