Discarded DaVinci Jr 1.0w repaired

The story must be told on how I acquired this XYZ DaVinci Jr. 1.0W to truly appreciate it. And so I will tell the story before getting into the repairs and issues it had.

Where I do all of my repairs and restorations is at a storage facility. I'm there often and one day I heard a loud crash of glass. Naturally I went to investigate and make sure no one was hurt. In rounding the corner I could see that in unloading a pickup truck, they had dropped a large curved glass piece of furniture, the glass had broken but no one was hurt. It's one of those end cabinets to a very large wall unit for TV's etc. In seeing everyone was all right I went about my business and thought nothing of it.

A couple days later management asked for my help in moving some things left by someone to the dumpster. Furniture and what not he couldn't get by himself. As always, I agreed.

There in the middle of the hallway was the  entire wall unit including the broken glass end piece, some other boxes and furniture. Apparently they were just tossing it off their truck to get rid of it leaving it for others to clean up. Go figure...

Amongst the furniture was a large box that says XYZ on it. I didn't recognize the brand name so it meant nothing to me. Until the person I was helping grabbed the box, part of the lid came open and I saw the filament tube sticking out of whatever was inside. He was just about to toss it and I yelled, "Stop! Don't throw that! Let me look at what that is..."

Sure enough, inside was the XYZ DaVinci Jr 1.0w you see at the start of this post. It was this close to being smashed!

Whether it worked or not I didn't know but I was sure I could fix it if it didn't. After all, I did completely rebuild my Geetech 3D printer and it runs sweeet!

The manager was more than happy to let me have it for helping him out as well as some of the furniture I either gave away or donated locally. It saves them the trouble and spares room in the dumpster.

In getting the XYZ box back to my micro work shop/storage area it was time to see what is what with this thing.

Inside, the 3D printer, instructions, heat bed adhesion sheets, a roll of filament flopping around inside the 3D printer and the AC Power Adapter. There feeder tube pulled out of the extruder. The case wasn't broken. In fact, parts of the case like the LED readout panel still had the plastic film on it.

"Hmmh? This thing looks pretty new." I thought. "Why would they throw it out?", I questioned. There has to be something seriously wrong with it.

Well, let's set it up and just see.

First thing I noticed was the filament was dry as a bone. It's so brittle it's like super dried out spaghetti. It kept breaking inside the feeder tube and outside as you'll see in a moment.

I of course did a little research on the DaVinci Jr 1.0w. Saw it uses priority filament spools so I would have to try and use what filament was with it for now.

There was also an SD card that came with it but as I was to discover, it was toast. Unreadable and unrepairable. So I replaced it with one I had on hand.

I downloaded the software to my laptop which apparently is also priority. Updated the 3D printer itself.

I discovered it also had a extruder jam. A really bad one too. Filament broke of inside of the extruder. What I nightmare to get it unjammed!

I also noticed, as mentioned by just about everyone online, the couplers that hold the feeder tube are weak. They don't hold the feeder tube and the tube keeps popping out.

They're cheap crap ones apparently and I'll replace them with good ones like I did on my Geetech printer.

Between the feeder tube constantly popping out and the filament breaking into little pieces it was frustrating I'll admit. As you can see in trying to "change spool", the filament broke on both ends of the feeder tube. Below you can see one broken end circled.

Given all this, I can only imagine the previous owner just got frustrated with it and tossed it. Or at least that may have been part of the reason.

It took a couple hours overall to finally get it squared away, extruding correctly. Not fixed, but working.

It auto leveled just fine, XYZ movements were just fine. Homed as it should.. it was time to run a test print.

I did have to babysit the feeder tube the entire print but..  it printed.

And the print wasn't half bad considering the filament I was working with and the feeder tube trying to pop out during the print. Not near as good as my Geetech but a decent print.

There are some things I like about the DaVinci Jr. I do like the LED internal lighting which is something I was considering adding to my Geetech.

And the nice full front gull wing door. The wireless feature is cool. I like that it's fully enclosed.

I'm not to keen on the heat bed tape they provide. It works, too good in my view. Lol
(I thought I was going to have to break out a hammer and chisel to remove the print once it was finished printing.)

I don't particularly like the fact the feeder tube sticks out the top the way it does.

And for a couple reasons.. Given the finished box nature of the printer, it's just out of place sticking out the top. It's not essentially appealing. Second and most importantly, it tends to be bent too much or too sharp of a curve once the extruder gets close to the filament spool.

But it's not a bad printer overall. It has the potential to be a good beginner printer I feel with some minor upgrades, better filament and some fine tuning. With those done, I'll bet it will produce a fine print.

Now the cool factor about this whole thing is... Look at the total life hours of use this printer has had... read it and weep!

That's right.. 3 freaking hours! And that's with the last print, my print, of 33 minutes. That's a good find and save from the landfill. But it doesn't say much for XYZ if someone got frustrated and tossed out a brand new 3D printer after only two and a half hours of use.

There's not much to a 3D printer to begin with. There's only so cheap in quality you can go. Cheap crap filament especially when it's priority is not a good thing. Nor are cheap quality feeder tube couplers.

Good thing is, there's very little filament used on this roll. So I'll re-spool it with a better quality filament and have another go at printing with it. Then look offer hacks to get around having to use the priority spools and filament as well as the priority software if possible.

Finds or saves if you will, don't come along like this every day. But I'm grateful when they do. It's yet another tool to be creative with.

And even if I decide not to keep it once I add the upgrades I mentioned and tweak it out some more. I'll be able to sell it at a very affordable price to someone else helping them.

After all I do have to replenish what I'm spending on repairs and refurbishing things in order to continue to put items like this back in service.

If I do decide to sell it, hopefully I'll have made it something that someone won't want to kick to the curb 2 1/2 hrs later.

Till next time,
Stay creative, stay Happy.
Cheers...