Sovol SV04 IDEX 3D Printer, Independent Dual Extruder 3D Printer with All Metal Direct Drive 32-bit Silent Motherboard Auto Leveling, Larger Build Volume 300 x 300 x 400mm

I wanted to share my recent service experience. I purchased an SV04 in August of 2022 (it is now March 2023). I've used the machine fairly heavily and love it. If you have just bought one, follow the setup and calibration process. It takes several hours to dial everything in, but then it prints great. A couple of weeks ago, a print failed. There were large gaps in the model for close to 100 layers and then there was no extrusion at all. I looked over the machine and found that when attempting to extrude, the stepper motor was just vibrating back and forth. I contacted Sovol through Amazon and the next morning I had an email instructing me to check the resistance of the stepper motor. They provided written instruction and two images showing the process. I checked the resistance as instructed and found that both checks had the same value (20.3) which means the motor was OK. I replied to Sovol and they responded the next day, that I should replace the wire from extruder 1 with the wire from extruder 2 and run a test print. It worked. This meant that it was the wire, not the control board. I reported this result, and they shipped me a new wire. It was not available in the US, so it took about a week to arrive. Meanwhile, I was able to use my printer as a single extruder, which was great. I'm very happy with my service experience with Sovol. And for anybody considering buying from Sovol, I can tell you that my experience with service and with my SV04 has been great. I've included the test images in case anybody needs to test their extruder motors.

i guess you get what you pay for. This printer worked well for basic stuff, for a few months. Now its basically a big paper weight. the version of the firmware on the printer is the same as on their website although i know others that have similar printer with newer firmware, but you can't that from Sovol because they won't respond. When the printer boots up all seems well until I attempt to use the leveling programs on the machine, when attempting to “auto home” the printer will center the extruder over the bed but will not move downwards on the z-axis. The printer then believes wherever it is on the z-axis is 0 and will fail to take bed topography through the measuring program, and fail to level the z-axis through the z axis leveling program. Along with this, when I attempt to use the manual leveling program none of the extruders will move to any of the five points they are supposed to. They simply stay exactly where they are no matter which button I press. On the rare occasion that the printer will lower the z-axis and auto home itself, when attempting to take bed leveling measurements the printer stops moving downwards towards the bed at measure point 3, or 4, and fails the measurement program. Along with the inability to level and measure the bed and z-axis, the printer also is unable to utilize just the second extruder. When I set the printer to 2nd extruder only, and use a gcode that is on a 2nd extruder only setting, the machine never starts the print. These functions are the reason I purchased this printer and are vital to its everyday use so without them I cannot utilize the functionality of the printer at all. Poor design and extremely poor support.

Update 5/13/22 . After having constant leveling issues, I sent it back. I hated that because after if first layer goes down well, it's going to print very well. Just something in the Z-adjust/auto level feature has problems on my machine. I want to reorder this one because there isn't a better machine with these features, at a better price. But I won't. Had two problems on power on, a loose X axis belt, and one of the dual Z steppers didn't work. Packed it up to return that night, but by the next morning decided to at least try to fix. After all, I enjoy working on 3d printers. 5-6 screws, opened up the bottom and found the loose stepper motor cable. It had unplugged somehow. Then 4 screws removed the extruder where I found the holder for the belt had been left loose. Both were very simple fixes. Updating the firmware, Leveling and alignment of the printer went well. I took my time, read the instructions, and watched the Sovol videos included on the SD card. Firmware updating and leveling was very similar to my previous Ender 3 Pro printer. Alignment of the 2nd head was new to me, and I iterated on printing the comb and flat cube alignment prints to get the hang of it. I had best luck aligning with the flat cube model. My first single print head print looked as good as my best print from my old printer. As for two head printing, took me two tries, I had a slicer problem. Re-sliced, and printed the pizza model perfect. Most impressive for me was that I have never seen such a beautiful first layer, must be due to the auto leveling with the BL touch clone. I have only used PLA so far. There is no stringing. The benchy tugboat prints very well. The only minor flaw is a faint angled line across the roof of the cabin. I have not tried to adjust the settings, but looking through 3d print diagnosis pages on the web, suggest I try additional z-lift in the slicer. I am happy with the printer. Everything works well once those initial bug were squashed. Love the auto leveling, like the display, and the print bed seems huge! The only thing I miss, comparing to my printer is that I could buy any piece of the Ender printer online. Sovol does not even offer the SV04 extruder/hotend parts online. I hope they fix that. I have heard of possible replacement hotheads, but with this working so well, I'd like to keep it stock.

Overall, this is a good and reliable printer. The SV04 is much more advanced than my 7 year old FT-5. The SV04 heats fast, accepts a variety of materials (I've had success with PLA, PVA, and PETG), and mine had an automatic Z-leveling mechanism compared to some older online reviews with manual leveling. Negatives are the filament runout sensors are too narrow (tolerances too tight), printing platform is mildly warped (can be calibrated out), and the printer is slower than I'd like (60mm/s seems reliable). Spend the time to calibrate and don't be afraid to deviate from the instructions to really dial things in. Once calibrated, the SV04 does a more consistent job than my old printer. This printer could be improved, but not enough to knock a star off at this price range. Lessons learned: - Use a small purge tower to counter oozing and avoid having little filament noodles attach to 2-material prints. Sovol slicer doesn't handle purge towers well so get stock Cura and import Sovol profiles. The wipers on either side of the printer sometimes don't fully remove ooze. - REMEMBER TO SET THE RIGHT PRINTER MODE BEFORE BEGINNING A PRINT. If you skip this step, the print heads may collide! Name your print files single, twin, mirror, or dual to help remind you. - Calibrate multiple times. Once you dial in the X and Y offsets, the IDEX system works great! I had no problems printing PLA with PVA supports for a custom 3D art project. It did take 3 calibrations to nail the values. Z offset screw on the second print head may need to be adjusted by hand during a print.

It's extremely hard to level, the included build plate adheres to parts too much and wouldn't let the test parts them off without scraping hard. So, after a weekend printing about a dozen alingment parts I finally got it close to aligned on the xy, but the z keeps giving me issues and the z alingment nut is awful since it barely has any adjustment room. I gave up when the cooling fan bearing failed on my first real attempt to print something other than the demo parts. Also the demo fox has a lot of strings, the default profile is junk or the included pla is too poor.

So I have owned this printer for about 4 months. And after owning a good printer do you really see how bad this one can be, sure for a dual color if you want to fight and hate something you used to love doing for a cheap price it's good. Below will be a list of issues that i have had 1. The customer service only work at night US time so you may get someone to email you may once a day maybe. 2. When asking for them to send you a part or anything, they want you to jump over hoops. Like my temp was super off on one of the hotends so this is what they asked me to do "Thank you for your email. For the problem of the hot end, we would recommend you to do the following steps: 1. Please use a multimeter to measure whether the resistance of the thermistor of the nozzle is about 100k ohms. Method: Turn the gear of the multimeter to the 200KΩ gear, and the positive and negative poles of the multimeter are on the ports of the thermistor wire. 2. The thermistor may be broken if the resistance difference is big, which will affect the temperature measurement. Please provide us your test result to help us confirm your problem. After confirmation, we will provide quick and correct solutions to you. We are looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for your cooperation and understanding. Best regards," Like I really understand that you want to be sure something is broken before fixing. it, but really I have to own a multimeter and WANT to play around with the MB hoping that i don't break something for them to even try to work with me on fixing it. 3rd issue the hotends are cheap like super cheap CHEAP if you dont melt your filament and push a little before pulling out it fast it will break, and you have to take the hotend apart to just clean out the broken part that will stop the filament from feeding. 4th the power off and on auto restart of print does not work not once. I have lost a 5 day print that "should" have started right back. and it did not. I really understand that this issue can be hard to get around but me having to go out and buying a 100$ UPC for a printer that should have started on its own is just not right. 5th I told them my fans didnt work and were making some crazy sounds. After sending 3 videos and 2 pics they finely sent me 2 fans... one was the wrong one..... lucky for me tho one of the fans they sent also came broken cables just fell out..... no joke. I messaged and told them just to make a note.. 6th, all I asked for was 1 to return something that was broken and just not working for me. I have had issue after issue, I even asked just for a replacement. Nope! BIG NOPE they will not take it back at all i asked within 1 month of having the printer. If they would b/c i was already having so many issues. Then I said its fine, just send me some new extruder's b/c maybe i just a set of bad ones. BIG nope after telling me they are going to replace is when i was sent “fans” .... so no don't buy this or do perhaps i just happened to get a bad apple. And i 1000% understand that can happen but refusing to replace something that is broken or i spend more time trying to fix then printing just does not seem right.

Setup for the printer was easy and precise. I currently run 10 printers and own two of these. They work great out of the box, but there are some life improvements you can add such as cable holders and rods to make it a little more steady for your preference. Setup super easy, follow the directions and then loosen the bed to 80% do a gantry line up, then do Z end stop, then align both heads manually, rinse and repeat till the heads are lined up in the center and then level the bed. Proceed to do the calibration stl and get the off set correct. Their YouTube video really helped me on this. Print Quality is great once you get your settings dialed in, there can be blobs, but if you get your wipe settings correct and the nozzles hit the wipe coming out correctly it starts to clean up. In my photos I am using white and black and the settings I did had minimal cross over and allowed it to come out this way. Bed quality is great I ordered a different bed but I still use the one that came with the printer because it works so well. Heat up time for the printer is quick, it has a 500W power supply and heats up quick. Hot ends are very different, they are compact and use titan parts. each one is inverted though. parts will need to be ordered from sovol for some of them. They now have an all metal heatbreak addition too! Overall with these printers I am happy with my first printer I ordered on prime day. My second one I still need to further tune.

I've been printing for 7 years on a prusa i3 and ender 3. I had trouble keeping the bed level and auto leveled. Instructions never specified that there was 4 small set screws on extruder 2 to allow for the z axis adjustment AFTER seeting bed level with extruder 1. So i ended up prying it upband down, gauging the rods holding it. Z axis offset reset itself somehow and after auto homing... on my second print, it gauged a line into the bed plate. I set the priming line in cura to 5mm from 0...so future prints didn't prime there (impossible now to pull up filament from groove) but it didn't work. There is an override in firmware to where it lays that priming line. The bed plate it comes with has TOO MUCH ADHESION. Parts are very hard to get off hot or cold. Worst when cold. Several parts stuck so much they broke coming off. One calibration cube stuck so well, i had to scrape it hard to get it off and it left gauge marks on plate..see pics. There is some kind of glitch (that others on reddit have) with painfully slow bed and extruder head movement at random times. Extruder moveS at 1mm/sec movement from resting position when doing dual mode. That adds lots of time to print and since it's moving so slow, the filament is oozing creating ooze noodles on print skin. Nobody can find a solution. I did get a few prints from single mode..1 print from mirror mode and 1 from dual mode. All came out nice. Dual mode took an hour to get heads aligned, still needs a 1mm y axis offset. My last print on it that cemented the decision to return, is extruder already started grinding my filament and 4 vase prints stop extruding halfway through. .8mm nozzle, 30mm/sec, 225°c, spiralize mode, pla+. I preheated extruder and tried to manually feed it, and it's grinding and won't grab it well. I cleaned teeth on gear... adjusted tension to as tight as it would go and it only feeds for a minute before grinding. It needs a better gear and tension. Titan clones seem to be known for this. I started out on direct drive but have been using bowden for the past 4 years. I'm going back to bowden. The only great thing is the touch screen interface. Also note.. for placement purposes , this print has a foot print of 26inch by 26inch and 32inch tall .. It's huge.

Inicialmente tive alguns problemas com o alinhamento do equipamento. A Sovol me prestou completa assistência. Durante as tentativas algumas peças foram danificadas e prontamente enviadas em garantia pelo fabricante sem nenhuma discussão! Atitudes assim fazem a diferença! Sobre o equipamento, realmente é um bom custo x benefício. Montagem sólida, impressão estável, boa qualidade de componentes. O fato de possuir dois hotends torna a experiência um pouco mais complexa em termos de alinhamentos e nivelamentos, mas é o trabalho necessário para um resultado mais complexo. Abaixo uma foto de algumas impressões feitas na SV-04 Idex. Esse tipo de equipamento abre um série de opções de fabricação que são impossíveis com uma impressora de filamento único. Gostei bastante do resultado.

Sobre o serviço prestado: perfeito, chegou em exatamente 7 dias, (dentro do prazo). E em perfeitas condições. Sobre o modelo: muito bom, uso ela com o fatiador prusaslicer e nele é possível pintar cada parte do modelo 3D onde vai ser feito com cada extrusora. Tive um pouquinho de dificudade para nivelar a mesa, mas não é tão difícil, após montar e nivelar é só alegria, a impressora é otima!

Didnt work properly at first. Instructions not easy to find. Managed to get a few things printed. Couldnt get it to calibrate correctly. Now it doesnt print at all. wont go to home position. No help from sellers. Waste of money for me.

A impressora é boa mas eu acho que me venderam um produto usado. Já havia restos de filamento na extrusora 1, ela já estava alinhada com os eixos X/Y, o display tinha alguns arranhões e o cabo de alimentação do eixo X veio sujo... Tentei contato com o vendedor e ele nem me respondeu

Depois de ajustada imprime muito bem em baixas velocidades e é silenciosa. Compensa bastante.