Drucker 5 Plus 3D

1st 3D printer. My son suggested the larger version.

Product arrived with corner of box damaged, however the excellent packaging kept the printer safe.

Setup was easy and perhaps I got lucky with It. Other than the first print all prints were perfect. (I learned on the first print to shut energy saver off, mine is in basement and I need to keep bed heated entire printing time.)

Going to install a couple small upgrades I found on line, like hot bed strain relief and a spool holder with bearings for less resistance.

Don’t think it’s overly loud, but will look into the silent board.

Overall, very impressed, no regrets.

It is my first #D printer. I was expecting startup issues, but that was really no problem. The first thing I did was making a 3DBenchy, and then I saw the only and first problem. Bed leveling! But the video delivered by Creality was great and now it is working fine! Thank you!

Right out of the box, I can tell there may be an alignment issue and there's not much I can do to fix that due to machining of parts. I was able to add shims to fix this and it rolled great after.

The T8 lead screw nuts are squealing so bad I had to shut it down. I tried realigning everything, squared up the rest of the frame, loosened everything and then re-tightened, but it only made it worse. I have some anti backlash nuts coming that should fix this issue.

I was expecting a silent board with TMC2209's or at least 08's but if they're on the new board, they don't have silentchop enabled. The screen options are fairly limited. You can't adjust your preheat temp to suit your needs.

All in all, after hearing this machine run for awhile with the motors running noisy, I have no choice but to upgrade to a 32bit board and change out the screen.

I bought this as an upgrade from the Ender 3 Pro and couldn't have been happier. The build volume is much better for larger prints. Shame it doesn't come with a mean well power supply and silent board as this would have made it the perfect printer. I ordered the upgraded silent board straight away and what a difference :) Shame about the fans now but compared to before, massive difference. This is the only upgrade I have done and it has worked perfectly as is. I don't see the need for any more upgrades and would recommend if you want to print bigger. I will get a new Ender 3 V2 when they are back in stock as I sold my other and regret it. Worth having 2 printers on the go to save time. I printed the Lego Man on it and looks great

I am currently printing Covid-19 face masks for healthcare professionals and both this printer and my Ender 3 are currently dedicated to this, running 7 days a week, 16 hours a day and sometimes longer, for the last two months.

Other than replacing the extruder with a cheap all-metal unit, fitting the Creality silent board and replacing the lead screw brass bearings with cheap delrin bearings (to remove z axis backlash) the printer is running stock.

The only real gripe I have is that after discovering Octoprint introduces artifacts even when hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4, I'm back to printing from SD. The problem here is that unlike the Ender 3, the Ender 5 + stock firmware doesn't have a refresh SD option. If you add a standard SD to micro SD adapter cable, like I did with the E3, then if you change the SD card the printer doesn't pick this up and the lack of a refresh option means you can't update the list of files to print without unplugging and replugging the adapter cable into the controller board - which kind of negates the whole purpose. If Creality could add this feature I'd be overjoyed.

The only other problem I've had is that sometimes I'll get a temperature trip warning during hot-end warmup to 255 degrees. This I think is a firmware issue because if I heat the hotend to 240 then 250 then 255 I don't get the error - and I've never had it fail during printing either.

Print quality is excellent. The slight Y axis ringing on the Ender 3 which is a consequence of the large moving Y bed mass (with a glass plate fitted) is not evident on the Ender 5 and the solidity of the mechanical design is excellent - I think this is clearly the way to build large-format printers. Bed stability and flatness are very good. Using a 25mm square piece of 0.5mm thick thermal silicone sheet in each corner, you do not need any clips to secure the glass plate.