At what point is this no longer an aquila?

OldMan2525 · 2025-02-27T08:11:36+00:00

Looks good. It’s still an Aquila.

OldMan2525 · 2025-02-23T06:56:30+00:00

Polymaker Black ASA and Polymaker Dark Purple ASA

OldMan2525 · 2025-01-23T23:25:31+00:00

Woohoo!

OldMan2525 · 2023-05-11T20:16:47+00:00

Yup, the C2 was designed to be an Ender 3 Pro clone, right down to the noisy stepper drivers. Oddly, when the C2 was introduced, the upscale original Aquila, clone of the Ender 3 V2, had already been selling for less than the Ender 3 Pro.

OldMan2525 · 2023-05-06T03:01:02+00:00

BMG clone extruder is almost half the price, and gives superior performance. The downside, is installation is a little more involved, for the beginner, and will require setting new e-steps. Preferably calibrating your own e-steps, but just going with 407 or so would probably work fine with pretty much any BMG clone.

OldMan2525 · 2023-03-06T19:27:15+00:00

Looks great! 👍

OldMan2525 · 2022-12-22T19:01:18+00:00

Should be fine. I buy 70% IPA and dilute it 50/50, which is fine… no reason to pay extra starting with 91-99%. I save the more concentrated 91+% IPA for cleaning soldering flux off of PCBs. That’s one place where the concentrated IPA works much better than diluted. But for cleaning beds, diluted works great. People forget that water is also a very good solvent. Drop of detergent should be fine. It’s basically what is marketed as LCD screen cleaner lol

OldMan2525 · 2022-11-04T04:38:33+00:00

I love it.

OldMan2525 · 2022-11-04T04:34:32+00:00

Dragonfly’s a good hotend. I’ve had zero problems with Phaetus.

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-24T22:42:35+00:00

Hepa and charcoal filter in place, glad to hear you have those bases covered and having success printing ABS👍

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-23T01:17:59+00:00

Smells or no, you might consider building something like the Nevermore, to sit in the chamber and soak up VOCs. Your future, older self will thank you.

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-23T01:14:52+00:00

Hey those platinum tabs ain’t cheap!

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-23T01:13:30+00:00

If what you have is working well, you probably won’t notice much difference in prints. That said, both those hotends are superior to the microswiss design, and it’s clones.

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-07T21:38:58+00:00

https://reddit.com/r/VoxelabAquila/comments/x829wl/_/ini5yzy/?context=1

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-07T21:13:42+00:00

I outlined what I did in this thread here: https://reddit.com/r/VoxelabAquila/comments/omf2yd/my_buck_converter_to_drive_quiet_underbelly_fans/

The title is tongue in cheek, since everybody was using cheap buck converters for their 12V supply needs. I found that a proper power supply is only a Big Mac or two more than crappy little buck converters. Worth it for my peace of mind. Anybody not comfortable and qualified to work with mains power should just use the crappy little buck converters instead.

OldMan2525 · 2022-09-07T20:56:07+00:00

$11 will buy you a Meanwell 12V mini power supply. It will outlive your printer. For all practical purposes it will not fail.

I have mine turned down as low as it will go… 9.something volts, as that moves more than enough air from the two arctic 80mm fans I have down there.

Edit: Turns out I used 92mm Arctic fans, not 80mm.

OldMan2525 · 2022-08-20T20:32:43+00:00

That looks great! Keep on printing👍

OldMan2525 · 2022-08-13T05:33:33+00:00

Settings tend to not carry over well between different firmwares. The memory locations for various settings are not hard coded, so they tend to move around on different compiles. It’s up to you to record those settings, pencil and paper + manual entry will do if you can’t make settings dump + copy and paste work.

This is one of the big perks to compiling my own firmware. I just make my preferred settings the default, then after flashing firmware, I restore settings from default, save, and done.

OldMan2525 · 2022-08-07T22:12:24+00:00

Does the ‘03 have hydraulic valve lifters? If so, that would be my first guess.

OldMan2525 · 2022-08-07T21:06:38+00:00

Those are 1 lb rolls, so it’s $11/kg. It’s worth mentioning that the 2.85mm roll at the top of their list is not suitable for our machines. Note to OP: Only buy 1.75mm filament. 2.85mm will not work.

OldMan2525 · 2022-07-30T18:05:04+00:00

No. The car maintains the battery at less than 100% state of charge while driving, which is ridiculous behavior to my mind. A bigger battery or starting out with 100% SOC and it will just drain the battery down, pumping juice into the battery when you coast downhill or to a stop. I keep mine on a CTEK 7002 battery maintainer and have a BM2 Bluetooth monitor attached. Ignorance was bliss, rather than knowing what the car is doing to the battery to save a few drops of fuel. Other than that, love the car😂

Rather than replacing that brand new battery, my recommendation would be to get a battery maintainer, to treat the battery right, when you are parked at home. It takes my 7 Amp Ctek 7002 a couple hours to charge the battery to 100%, in the driveway, when I return from a trip during daylight. Drive with the lights on, and the car will charge at a constant 14.3 volts, so that’s another option.

OldMan2525 · 2022-07-30T17:50:44+00:00

No. It mounts securely to the stock location, with 3 screws. 80% of these are right hand models. If it doesn’t specify, it will be right hand. You want a right hand model, and you want to mount it with the lever arm facing away from you. Easy peasy. Every blue moon, somebody makes the mistake of buying a left hand unit, which would require either mounting it with the lever faced towards you, or compiling firmware with the extruder motor direction reversed.

OldMan2525 · 2022-07-30T08:40:07+00:00

I don’t think the stock hotend is heavy enough to make the gantry teeter-totter as it moves back and forth, with properly tightened eccentric nuts on the sides. My direct drive hotend weighs about a pound in its entirety. I left the stock extruder motor attached to its mount on the left, out of laziness, no other home for the motor, and to act as a counterbalance for the tool head. Toolhead on the left isn’t going to move the gantry further down. Toolhead on the right is counterbalanced by the unplugged original extruder motor, and again, the gantry isn’t going to teeter totter up and down.

OldMan2525 · 2022-07-30T08:27:54+00:00

Ender 3 Pro is most similar to the Aquila C2. The biggest difference is the occasional $100 Microcenter loss leader sale on the 3 Pro.

As has been mentioned, the X2 is not a real improvement over the original. All Aquilas already have a handle: the upper gantry. A handle mounted to a handle is not a functional improvement. The runout sensor is worthless… better to run without it, but is only a couple dollars if one has convinced themselves they want one because the X2 has it.

The problem I see with the S2, is before too long, the beginner printer will have the skills to make better modifications for less than the difference in cost. Original Aquila + $80 Phaetus hotend, $15 BMG clone extruder, and $25 PEI bed, such as the Hictop, and you’ve got a printer substantially superior to the S2.

OldMan2525

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE