I’m a user of the K1 Max in a small scale electronics prototyping lab setting. Even when keeping with maintenance I’m finding the machines degradation excessive. After over a year I’m finding belts disintegrating, cable headers crumbling, display needed to be replaced, etc.
I’m thinking of upgrading to the K2 Plus now, but fear I’ll see the same issues in a short time. Is durability/longevity something that was improved on in the K2 Plus design? Any experience from owners of the K2 Plus is much appreciated.
Had mine for about a year (910 hours print time) now and while I’ve had my fair share of problems none have been due to “degradation”. The only parts I have replaced are a cable (my fault see below) and a nozzle which I broke during a “blob of death’ incident. The filament cutter went a bit blunt but I managed to resharpen it on a CBN abrasive wheel.
Most problems have been with the CFS and of my making by not dealing with blockages in a systematic manner. The main problem turned out to be crimping and damaging a cable inside the CFS during reassembly following taking the CFS apart after a blockage. This took two months to full resolve with Creality although I could still print from the outboard printer position and filament positions 1 @ 4 during this time.
A similar thing happened on an extruder cable when replacing the extruder following an extruder blockage. This took two weeks to resolve but I was able to affect a temporary repair while a new cable was being sent. The temp repair worked so well I have not bothered to install the new cable, In hindsight this part of the extruder did not even need to be removed from the printer to clear the blockage.
The most common issue in the first months of use was mostly due to poor plate adhesion. This gave me a “blob of death” which took a couple of hours to recover from but it was not too bad. I’ve since learned that thorough wiping plate with IPA solves the vast majority of adhesion issues.
Most extruder blockages happened with PETG but this was resolved with a flow calibration and upping the nozzle temperature by 5º. interesting I found I still had some blockages using white PETG which were fixed but upping the nozzle by another 5º;
I’ve had an intermittent poor connection on the hot end issue but I think that is now solved by crimping the connectors a big tighter. I think this was also cause by not being careful enough when removing the hot end following the blob of death.
Other issues involving poor print quality ended up being caused mainly by using cheap old filament given to me. It turned out it was about 10 years old and needed a lot more drying time than I normally use.
The other time of significant irritation was in Jan of this year after upgrading to the next firmware which resulted in a spate of “system errors”. After wasting 2 weeks on trying to solve this I went back to previous firmware and have no system errors since.
I have had very good service from Creality, Timely responses, generous with parts, and mostly clear instructions. Much better than dealing with them with my CR10s Pro2 problems which I still have and use and it too is now running trouble free.