 the JG Maker Artist D. It's a brand new printer, and if you're seeing this, that means it just got released on Kickstarter. My name's Jim, and this is the Edge of Tech. So like I said, we're checking out the JG Maker Artist D today. And if you're seeing this, that means the Kickstarter just kicked off, and we're allowed to release these videos. JG Maker graciously sent me one of the Artist D printers to test and give them feedback before production starts. And I tell you what, they've been listening, fixing some of the issues that we find, and I think the production model's gonna be great. So a couple things that I really like about the Artist D by JG Maker is that it has dual independent direct drive extruders. That means there's two extruders, they move individually by themselves, and they both have direct drive, no boat and tubes in this whole setup. I really like that because I'm actually working on a video where I'm testing three or four other printers that are direct drives, and I'm really loving them. Another thing I really like about the JG Maker Artist D is that it has an industrial linear rail on your X-Axis. Now a lot of people love linear rails, and some people don't, but I tell you what, this thing is strong and sturdy, and it's gonna hold up, and hopefully provide great prints for a long, long time. As you can see up above, we have both the spools up here, and they both have filament run-out sensors on them, which is really cool to see. This thing has a 32-bit silent board, and the printer itself is 300 by 300 by 340 in size. I think that's a really good size. It's kind of in between, like some of the bigger ones, and like an Ender 3. So it's kind of that printer where you're probably gonna find that most things you print would fit on this bed, unless you need something really, really large. Something that I really loved about this printer is this nozzle design. It's an amazing new design that I've not seen before. It can be changed with one hand as I've shown on Twitter and I've shown on Facebook. It is awesome. All you do is press this button right here. It allows the nozzle to drop out, you push the new one up, and you're good to go. It is a super cool nozzle. One of the coolest new features I've seen on a printer in a long time, and I think you're gonna love it. Another feature of the Artist D is that it has dual brush boxes, one for each extruder, that allows your extruder to come over and wipe the nozzle on that brush and get rid of any oozing it has before it goes to the bed. Now that means your nozzle's just not gonna be sitting here oozing all over while the other side's printing, and that's a really cool feature, and I think more printers should have that. As long as they're doing it safe, they definitely should have that. It has dual Z in the back with dual motors, and it's connected with a belt, as you'll see in a minute when we do the assembly. So the Z is all aligned, it runs together, and it stays together, which is a super good feature. Another thing about the Artist D is that it comes packed extremely well in a box that is absolutely huge. This box could fit a car tire in it, but it has a ton of packing material in it, everything was individually placed and packaged very well, and unless the shipper decides they're gonna destroy this box, I think everything's gonna hold up pretty good. Now there are a couple issues with the printer, being a pre-production model that we're testing and giving feedback to, and we'll get to that shortly, but first, let's jump into the build. So this is everything that comes inside the box. You get a box of goodies, instruction manual, a couple of spool holders, some ribbon cables, I believe these are the white boxes here. You get a couple of rolls of filament, they're small rolls, but they're bigger than normal, so that's awesome, and a couple of contrasting colors, which will be really cool for the two color prints. Of course, that is your gantry we'll put on, everything comes together, and this right here is the base, and this is how it looks straight out of the box. Inside the box, pretty much everything you need to put it together, and we're gonna do that now. So step number one is to take these four bolts here with the little lock washers, and we're gonna put our gantry on, and it actually sits right in here. That's pretty nice because it leaves a very little room for error, and it sits in there just like this. So when it's properly in here, it can't really move. As long as this part down here is machined correctly, this is always gonna stay straight. Hopefully this is all machined correctly, and this keeps itself where it needs to be, but what we're gonna do is take four bolts and come in from the bottom, and install those in there. So what I like to do is move this corner off, make sure it's balancing nicely, so you can get to both the bolt holes under here, and then they actually included this tool right here, which is really cool because this will make it so much easier to put these bolts in, because it's nice and long. So take your bolts and you're gonna push them up through. What I'm gonna do right now is just get them to the tight point, but not overly tight, and then I'm gonna get all four of them in and come back and snug them up. Okay, I got all four bolts in up underneath, and the gantry is secured onto the next step. So the next thing is the idler assembly, which is this piece right here, and they say to use a thumb screw, and I'm assuming that's this one right here. They don't have a picture of it that's very clear, but it's the only one that fits down far enough into it. So we are gonna use that thumb screw, we're gonna tighten it down, and now we have our idler for the belt here. Now we're gonna install our spool holders, and what that is is you take the spool holder itself and the spool holder mount, you're gonna use one of the silver thumb screws, and that should just turn right on like this, and you could probably hold it and tighten it if you want to. Now your spool holder's on, and I'm gonna do the other one the same way. Now what we need to do is install our spool holders, and it is gonna go in face to front like this, but the reason why I zoomed in close, because there's already pre-drilled holes here and in the top. So your spool holder has to go on a certain side, and it's gonna sit right in front of those pre-drilled holes. Then you're gonna grab some of the thumb screws, two on each one to be exact, and you are gonna find that hole, and you're gonna twist the thumb screw in, and that is how your filament holders attach to the frame, and there's only one spot it can go on, and you can't mix them up on the right or the left, because the spool holders need to face the front of the machine, and I'll show you the picture of that in a second. But you're gonna use these thumb screws to attach them to the frame. We're gonna do both of those and we'll move on. So once your spool holders are attached, they'll look just like this. So they are facing the front of the machine. There's a filament runout sensor on the front of each one, and now they're attached to the machine onto the next step. Next, we're gonna start cable connections, and if you look, everything is numbered on here. This is to make everything super easy, so all the cables should have numbers that correspond with each plug. I'm gonna cut these two cables here with some snips. Then if we look, that actually has a four, so I know that it plugs into number four over here. It should just snap in. This one has a three, so I know that should go into number three and snap in there. Down here's an eight and a seven, and both of those look like they snap into the base. I really like these connectors so far. They're much better than just the ribbon cable. It feels like a more solid connection, and I'm hoping they hold up a lot better than just ribbon cables here. Next, I'll work on filament runout sensors. Each one of those has its own cable, and we should just be able to snap those in, and on this one as well, you should just be able to push those in and make sure those connections are nice and tight. Next, what we wanna do is grab the cables that came in the packaging, and these are those right here, and each one has a number on it, so this number here is one, so we'll put one in the extruder right here. I'm gonna flip this up and put five right here, and you can see the black side of the cables here, so when this moves out, it does not get stuck in here, which is awesome, and we'll do the same thing for the other side. Now we jump to the back and we plug in our stepper motor here, and there's a little cable here that goes into the side like that, and it snaps in nicely, and we're gonna do the same for this side, and on this side we have the little black cable here that goes into the side. Then this cable here comes up, and that clips into the bed here, and it only goes in one way, and that clips into the back of the bed for your heating. So in the back here, it has your warning here, and it says the input is 110 volts, and when you peel this off, just be careful because on my model, it is actually stuck to the factory sticker that I want to stay on there. What's interesting is I don't see a place anywhere here to switch it to make sure that I'm on the US power, so I kind of, I turned the printer over, I looked on the side, and I don't see that. What I'm gonna do is plug it in and see if it works, and if not, we'll have to dig around and find us a switch. That brings us to the front of the machine here. I'm just gonna peel off the protective layer, and that's kind of a really nice, grippy, soft material right here for the bed. I like that a lot. There also is a big protective layer along the front here, and as you can see, it came off really nice, and this has a really nice look to it. It's really nice and shiny. Everything is really bright, and it says JG Maker, and this is the Artist D. So I quickly wanted to go over everything else that came with it. Again, we have the two colors of filament here. In PLA, there's an orange and a yellow. We have a USB cable. We have what looks to be a leveling card, so you use this to level. We have a replacement nozzle, and how these nozzles work is they actually insert into the bottom. You press a button and it pops out and you push the new one in, so that's kind of cool. We have a flush cutters that looks like it says it's made in the USA here. A cool little T-handle Allen wrench, an eight and a 10 millimeter wrench, a couple more Allen wrenches, a full-size SD card, and a scraper to get stuff off there. So it comes with a good assortment of things, especially some different tools maybe you didn't have like the T-handle here. When I pull these flush cuts out, they're really thick rubber, they're nice. Like I said, it does say they're made in the USA, so we'll check those out and see how they are, but that's everything else that came with the kit. What I need to do next is actually install our brush boxes here, and I did not do it where it asks us to do it in the instructions because it needs to install underneath here, like this. So what I wanna do is raise my X-Gantry up. It's a lot easier if you power your machine on and raise that up to a reasonable height, and then we can install our brush boxes on the right and the left. So I'm plugged in, and the first thing I notice is the fans on this are pretty loud. I'm not sure if they're really big fans or just really loud fans, but what I'm gonna do, motion, move axis, move Z, 10 millimeters, and let's just move that up quite a bit. As you can see, the Z is coming up. It's slow, but it's quiet to move, so that's nice. Now what I wanna do is turn off my steppers, and I wanna push in my extruders here. So I shut off the machine because it was pretty loud, but what we need to do is install our brush boxes here, and what these are actually gonna do is wipe the nozzle as it comes by. So you're gonna take the box that's labeled 10 here, and you're gonna put one of the bolts up through it. Then you're gonna take a washer and put that on. There's a little screw hole underneath there, and what you need to do is screw that up in and tighten it in. And as you can see, we have 10 and 10 here. The other side is nine, and we're gonna do the same thing for the other side. So as you can see, I got both brush boxes on. I did leave the stickers on for now. I'll probably take them off later, but they are adjustable back and forth. So once we get going, we might have to adjust them a little bit, but they're both on. The next thing we have to do is power this thing on, get the bed level according to the instructions. I'm gonna level the bed and not show you guys that because it's the same, it's just the wheels underneath. So this is the card that came with it. It goes upside down and pushes in right on the right side of the machine. So as you can see, the filament is loaded. It goes down through the filament runout sensors and then down into the hot end, right through the top of the extruders just like that. You just push it right through and when it starts extruding out the bottom, you know you're loaded. Now we're gonna do an auto home of the machine and just make sure everything homes correctly. So it should raise, the extruders should go to each side. The bed should go backwards and then our excantry should come down and we'll just see how that works. Now we're home and we're ready to do a test print. All right, that's it. You saw how easy this thing was. It is super easy to assemble. I love how everything is numbered. All the little stickers that number everything that show you where everything goes, more printers need to do that. It makes it really easy. Now I already told you about a lot of the things that I love about this printer before we did the assembly. Here's a couple things that could be improved and in fact, they are being improved because JGMaker is listening to us and a lot of things that had issues are improved for the production models. Number one, the ZN stop absolutely did not work for me. It is a very bad design. It was hard to adjust. It was hard to level the bed and that is something I didn't like. Now I know Brian over at BB3D designed a new ZN stop mount and he's been using that very successfully and I know they did reach out and say they fixed that for production. So I'm hoping that all the production models you see won't have that issue. Another thing I didn't like is that the center of the bed is actually bolted to the carriage. I don't really care for that because if you twist any of your wheels, it actually only allows the outsides to flex which actually could warp your bed and I did see that when I tightened them all the way down you could see the corners of the bed actually warp. Now that being said, when they fixed the ZN stop you should never have to tighten these things all the way down. You should never see that problem. It's just an issue I saw in the pre-production model. Another thing that concerns me and I'm told they should be fixed for production is that the fans in this thing are extremely loud. I mean, it sounds like a jet's taking off. Everything else is completely quiet and maybe that's why the fans are so loud but they are super loud and I am told that they are gonna quiet them down in the production model so I really hope they do. So who's this printer for? Well, I can tell you in my opinion it's not a great printer for your very first 3D printer. You wanna be an experienced 3D printer owner before you jump into something like this because the IDEX, the dual independent extruders here does take some tweaking and fine tuning before you can get it to work right and it can be kind of frustrating if you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to get everything aligned. So I would not recommend this for your very first 3D printer. Anybody else who has 3D printing experience has a printer or two laying around and wants to jump into something a lot more advanced this would be great for you and I think at the Kickstarter price this model could be great as your first IDEX printer as well. That brings me to the last point I'm gonna make because I don't wanna keep this video too long but do I recommend this printer? To be honest with you, I'm not recommending it and I'm not not recommending it. I have a pre-production model that we were asked to test and give our feedback to. I say, check out the specs. If it's something that you wanna dive into if you have the time to dive into it because I didn't have a lot of time to tune this thing yet. Some of the other guys out there have this thing printing amazingly well but they had some time to do it. Personally, I didn't have enough time yet to dial this in to where I want it and I'm hoping to be able to do that after this video. If you have the time and you wanna play with it and you wanna learn IDEX you wanna build the profile because there's not really a lot out there yet because it's a brand new printer, right? This could be the printer for you. Study the size, study the features. This thing is absolutely packed full of features for the price that they're offering it. If you need another printer, you want another printer if you want something to play with and learn your two color prints I think that this could be the printer from you. Again, I'm not gonna recommend it. I'm not gonna not recommend it. I'd say do your research first. I hope the Kickstarter's successful and if you order one I hope you get an amazing one and I hope it prints just as good. It's like 3D Maker Noobs out there because his is printing amazing. Thanks again to JG Maker for sending me the pre-production model of the artist D. I really appreciate you showing us the D here and allowing me and trusting me and my channel to bring some information out to you guys. I hope you learned something today and as always, keep printing. Hey everybody, if you liked the video give me that thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed yet, hit the subscribe button and the little bell right over here if you wanna get notified on Mondays when we go live for hotmakes or anytime we put out a great video. Thank you guys for watching. You rock.