East 3d Gecko 3D Printer Review Must Have 3D Printer

Now let’s get down to business

First of all, it came with no UK Mains Plug, this is a bit of a downside because we had to go out and purchase a kettle lead/PC cable or a travel adaptor, but we understand that most of the international company’s supplies the US Plugs so this makes it understandable. 

“so be warned you will receive a US plug.”

The East 3D Gecko comes well-packaged everything was secure in their sections and labelled nicely. There was no physical manual with our package. This might be updated by now. The instructions are a downloadable PDF File has beautiful colours, full pictures,

but does need a bit of improvement on explaining how to build your 3D printer. We have told this to East 3D, that we thought the instructions were a little bit hard to understand and they are in the process off fixing this.

We did notice on our Gecko that some parts do need to be deburred a small amount more, but “hey it keeps the cost down” so this is not a problem. The style and structure of the CoreXY 3D printer are high, it is a nice size (400mm*420mm*375mm), and we were reasonably impressed with the colour scheme. It also comes with a layer cooling fan. Not many Chinese printers come with this.

“So far we are very impressed With the Gecko.”

On the Gecko there are a few printed plastic parts and aluminium composite sheet for the panels, but it is mostly aluminium extrusion. It comes with linear rails on the x-axis but be careful the ball bearings can come out at each side when assembling, we have experienced this our self, searching all over the floor for them.

The extruder is direct, so it is suitable for flexible filaments also known as TPU. We have partially tested the flexible filament out, this you will see on our pictures. Don’t worry about the z rod bending as this is “ok” you need to apply to much pressure on this rod. This won’t make your 3D printer have any defects

“Please make sure that when building the printer everything is square to make sure everything is lined up properly.”

It took us roughly 15 hours to build this printer, but this was because we wanted to take our time making sure everything was square and secure. If you do rush it, you won’t get good results, ending up with more hassle because your printer will be all ready built and you may have to take it apart.

 

Some things we were not impressed with

The Print surface sticker is sort of like build tack does not like going above 60ºC if it does then the surface will bubble. So far we have concluded that most Chinese printers don’t have all that good of a print surface. Take this for an example the Tevo Tornado

The other thing is we wish they supplied a micro SD card extender because its a bit tricky to put the SD card in the slot, for the reasons are the control board is behind a thick sheet of aluminium composite and close to the top of the hole where you insert the card making it difficult to enter.

East 3D Gecko 3D Printers CoreXY Facebook Community

This group currently has over 420 members and two admins. They are Chay Chen and Chin Ming Keat. Chay Chen is the CEO of East 3D, he knows his stuff about 3D printers, and he is accommodating.

Something we are very impressed with is how active east 3D reps are on Facebook and how they always answer any of your questions or concerns. East 3D love listening to there customers even if it is a complaint, customer satisfaction all the way.

After receiving this printer for review, we can’t believe how great there support with there customers and us you can tell they want to build there community and there brand.

Now I will list some of the problems this group has helped us fix on our Gecko and some of the issues we managed to fix our self.

Problems We all hate

So we had a problem with the extruder it was over extruding “I’m no expert at this” we did have a few people that helped u. Ross Sage came to the rescue, and he found the issue which was the extruder steps needed adjusting and on simplify 3D we needed to lower the extrusion multiplier to 0.90 we had both of these set to high

The print surface was starting to bubble, a member of this group said “to keep the temperature of the heat bed lower to about 50ºC” this fixed the problem.

The belt kept slipping, but this was an easy issue for us to solve, all that we needed to do was make sure the straps were tight and the part the belt runs on needs to be fast and straight, or it will start to slip. So as you can see we did not have any significant problems with the East 3D Gecko.

It is Print Time

We did some small speed tests in vase mode at 600%, 700% and 800% speed, none of the models changed at all. They all finished with the same detail apart from the top section started to look bad at 700% speed.

We did see some layer lines but this was before we calibrated the extruder and changed extrusion multiplier, we also printed a big vase at 400% speed, turned out to be a good print but there was a small layer shift. I think this was because a wire got jammed and slightly moved the extruder off a little bit.

The reason why we call this a speed test is that in the gecko control pane, there is an option for changing “speed.”

using simplify 3D and generic filament at a layer high of 0.2

So we now decided not to let the big vase go to waste it took around 4 hours to print, at almost the full height of the Gecko “310mm”  The jar has now been prepped and painted vase that is functional and very beautiful in the house. 

East 3D does listen to there customers, reviewers and re-sellers and want to have a community behind them here is an example of a significant change they have added.

There was a massive problem with the older version of the gecko. The z axis’s only had two lifting points which meant a really off balance carriage. Since then they have fixed this issue by adding four lifting points to the transport which makes this printer more stronger and stable.

They even gave the upgraded parts to the customers who had the old version for free. Now, this is excellent customer support. This is what we look for in manufacturers five stars.

Hopefully by the time you read this article the issues we have had from the gecko they will all be fixed or corrected by east 3D. The most important thing we think needs changed is the instructions and the print surface so as you can see nothing major.

Conclusion

In the end, if you’re looking for a low-cost large format Core xy style 3D printer that is fast, accurate, quiet with a great community you can’t go wrong with the East 3D Gecko.