AnkerMake M5 3D Printer

AnkerMake M5 3D Printer

4.3 Color LCD Screen; Automatic Leveling; PEI Soft Magnetic Steel Bed; 235 x 235 x 250mm Print Size

• 4.3 Color LCD Screen
• Automatic Leveling
• PEI Soft Magnetic Steel Bed
• 235 x 235 x 250mm Print Size

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The printer, once assembled, is rather large, and at a bit over 27 pounds, somewhat heavy, so plan on finding a suitable space for it and leaving it there. You'll note a module on both sides of the vertical gantry. The one on the left is where the filament feeds through, and a sensor there registers a "filament out" situation. A vertical LED glows a pulsing green during printing and turns red when an error is detected. 

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Assembling the printer is easy enough; I was done in less than 15 minutes. The main steps comprise fastening the gantry to the base with the included screws, and connecting cables routed through the bottom of the base and fastened with additional screws. The documentation suggests using one of the packaging-foam pieces to support the gantry while assembling the printer, which worked very well. Once the gantry and all of the cables are fastened, the last piece of assembly is fastening the filament holder on the left post of the gantry. The holder can be fastened horizontally, or you can fasten it vertically at the top of the gantry to save space.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The small toolkit AnkerMake includes is a very nice plus. Other than a few printer vendors that include a small tool drawer in the base of their printers, most 3D printers come with a plastic bag containing just a few key tools, such as an Allen wrench set and possibly a nozzle-cleaning tool. Anker goes all the way with its kit. The kit comes in a small plastic box and contains an Allen key bit holder, six hex bits, a double-headed open wrench, a side cutter (to snip filament), nozzle-cleaning tools, and a spare nozzle. It’s nice to have all of these at hand when assembling and using the M5. 

After I finished assembling the M5, my next step was to level the printer. This sets the Z-axis offset, which is the distance from the extruder nozzle from the print bed and between each layer. The leveling is automatic; you start it from the 4.3-inch color touch panel on the right gantry. This process takes about 10 minutes because it senses the level at 49 points (a 7x7 matrix) on the print bed and, if necessary, remembers the necessary offset at each point. This feature is becoming a common one in 3D FFF printers, a welcome change from having to level the extruder manually point-by-point, though most FFF printers do not level at 49 points. After the auto-leveling finished, I was ready to print.

Testing the AnkerMake M5: The Proof Is in the Printing

Relaying features and specifications about a 3D printer is a start, but not more useful than telling you what the printing experience and printed-object output is like. For starters: Creating a printable file is easy. Anker provides a proprietary slicer but claims compatibility with Simplify3D

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 and PrusaSlicer 2

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. All of my testing was conducted with AnkerMake’s own slicer.

If you’ve ever used a slicer, you’ll be comfortable using Anker’s. All of the necessary adjustments are available. In my testing, I used the out-of-the-box default settings, and for the most part was very happy with the results. The Anker slicer can use STL or OBJ files to generate Gcode, which is what the printer actually requires to print the model.

Printing the sliced model requires that you download it to the M5 through Wi-Fi, or load it onto a flash drive. The M5 has a USB Type-C port atop the extruder, which I used for my testing. I used a dual USB-A/USB-C flash drive, but adapters to use a USB-A drive with a USB-C port cost just a few dollars.

Wi-Fi is required if you want to monitor the printing in real-time, receive error reports from the device’s AI monitor, or create time-lapse recording of printing an object. To do any of these, you’ll require the smartphone AnkerMake app, which is available for both iOS and Android. Setting up the M5 on Wi-Fi also allows you to send the sliced model directly to the printer from the slicer by hitting the “PRINT” button rather than exporting it to a flash drive.

I would have liked more documentation around all this, though. That’s not to say that the small manual that accompanies the M5 is badly done, just that it pretty much ends where the machine is assembled. Anker should provide additional documentation on the slicer, and around troubleshooting.

I printed numerous objects, three of which can be used to test how well the printer’s parameters are dialed in. All slicers allow you to change different print parameters such as infill (the amount of printing material used in hollow objects). Higher infills result in a more solid object. Another often-adjusted setting is retraction, or how much the filament is pulled back into the printhead when the nozzle is lifted and moving from one place to another.

All of my testing was performed using the default settings on the slicer. (In practical use, if the print quality was not satisfactory, you would normally dial in slicer settings to fine-tune the output quality.) The three objects I tested with are a geometry panel, a small 3D Benchy boat, and a multiple test developed by Kickstarter and Autodesk. Only two of the three (3D Benchy and Kickstarter-Autodesk) have scoring rubrics to help determine how closely the print adheres to the actual model file. All three of these are available for download on the Thingiverse

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 web site, though the scoring and measuring descriptions are located on different sites. The geometry test object does not have a formal scoring or measuring description.

-EK/MS