Is the Anycubic i3 Mega a good printer? Where do you buy it? How do you set it up? How does it perform in the long-term test?

Intended use

I would like to build my own sensors for the rooms. A combination thing including a smoke detector. All on a D1 Mini basis. It doesn’t matter. You need a 3D printer for that, because suitable housings are really expensive and look stupid. The Anycubic i3 Mega should have paid for itself after this campaign, because it „only“ costs 164 euros. Use this amount to search for smoke detectors, room thermostats and H&T devices. You’ll easily find a thousand euros in the buzzer.

Anycubic i3 Mega

After careful consideration, I chose the Anycubic i3 Mega. Only this one fulfils all my requirements. No, that’s nonsense of course. The thing was on sale for 150 euros – and the whole world is celebrating it as the best 3D printer up to 600 euros. So you’d be stupid not to buy it.

But the test report from China-Gadgets was the deciding factor for me. I initially wanted to buy the device from Aliexpress for 152 euros, but Alipay, my credit card and I just weren’t friends. So I bought it on Ebay directly from the manufacturer using PayPal (also via credit card). It fits.

Ordered on Wednesday 01/01/2020, delivered on Saturday 04/01/2020. Not bad for such a short holiday week.

Unboxing

The box had no additional outer packaging, but the Anycubic i3 Mega was really well packaged. The people at Anycubic really seem to love their products, because there is no other explanation for the good packaging, the flawless build quality and, above all, the quality and scope of the accessories and spare parts. They want you to have fun with the appliance straight away. Assembly really only takes five minutes and you only need the tools supplied, which are also impeccably finished.

Cut open the box and…. aaaaahhh! Now that’s some neat packaging!

Super. Nothing damaged!

And even a full kilo of PLA filament included! Vacuum-sealed and with a silica gel cushion inside so that the material cannot absorb moisture.

Jo, that’s all. Eight screws, three plugs and the print bed (X-Y axis) and Z axis are connected.

The power supply unit was already set to 230 volts. Nice.

This is a needle that can be used to clean a blocked nozzle.

The spatula is awesome! Super quality!

The tools are also useful. However, you only need two of the four Allen keys for assembly.

„Think big, make bigger!„? Well, at 21 x 21 x 20.5 cm, this is actually the end of the line. 🙂

And a Transformer? Why? Why only? 😀

Leveling

And there it is now, ready for levelling.

I didn’t manage it quite so well, in my opinion. The glass plate had a bulge in the centre. Of course, it was cold outside, so I had to let the Anycubic i3 Mega acclimatise first anyway. Electronics don’t particularly like it when components are switched on frozen. Condensation and electricity are also not a good mix.
Nevertheless, the levelling did not fit. 🙁
So I preheated the plate and then measured it again. Hmmm, a little too tight in the centre, a little too loose at the corners.

I also took the opportunity to scratch the hotbed. Crap.

Only a piece of paper can fit into the gap.

That was the best I could do. Anyway, so I put in the supplied SD card and fire!
The pair of owls is also a good benchmark.

First print

The bed heats up.

And now also the hotend, the print head.

I had pushed the filament up to the print head. This is new and was therefore empty. The first printout therefore looks alarmingly thin.

Fortunately, it got better straight away. But that also explains why these 3D printers still do a „lap of honour“ around the object before printing begins.

Yay! Niiiice!

Temperatures are stable and the current X / Y / Z values are shown meaninglessly on the display.

The models are usually hollow on the inside. This saves material.

The Anycubic i3 Mega was ready in just 1.20 hours.

The final result

Taraaaa! The pair of owls! Tiny but really super clean print for the first time. I’m delighted!

You can’t complain about that.

Clean work.

Once again the owl woman from the front. Fits! As before: The thing is actually very small. You can’t see the lines immediately with the naked eye.

The filament from Anycubic also seems to be really good. They haven’t included any rubbish. Edit: This is actually filament from Sunlu.

You can only see a small speck at the top of the cylinder.

There is also an unclean edge on the rim.

The Anycubic i3 Mega is louder than I thought, but also faster. Most YouTube videos only show time-lapse videos without sound. That’s why I made one myself.

The sound is not quite as loud as you can hear in the video. As we know, volume decreases with distance squared and the mobile phone is obviously extremely sensitive. Nevertheless, you don’t want to be in the same room with the device when it’s printing for several hours.

Create your own models?

I have written instructions on how to design and print your own 3D models quickly and easily.

Conclusion after 2.5 years

The Anycubic i3 Mega is my workhorse. It prints and prints and prints. It is extremely reliable. Even after the move, it started up immediately. Dusted off and checked the levelling, that was all that was necessary.

And about the levelling mentioned above: Oh yes, the bed has a small bulge in the middle. So what? Even large parts still print very acceptably. But I’m also not someone who prints dust catchers like the two owls. As a rule, I print functional parts, not decorative trinkets.

Once the nozzle clogged due to bad filament. It was a matter of five minutes to replace the nozzle with one of the ones supplied.

You don’t need the spatula. Simply wait until the bed has cooled down after printing, then the print is loose and can simply be lifted.

After just a few prints, it had already paid for itself. There are countless spare parts available for free download on Thingiverse. I also designed a few. The self-designed brackets for the power distribution in the heating circuit manifolds alone saved us over 240 euros. In the end, the Anycubic i3 Mega has already saved us more than ten times its purchase price.

I am extremely satisfied with the Anycubic i3 Mega. But apart from replacing the fans, I haven’t tinkered with this 3D printer yet. In the forums and Facebook groups, the very people who „optimised“ the Anycubic i3 Mega keep having problems with it. Let it be! Buy it, build it, print it – that’s the way to go!

In principle, this 3D printer is still available to buy. The price is also still the same at Anycubic on Ebay. For 150 euros you can get an Anycubic i3 Mega S. I can only recommend buying it there to anyone. If it’s not on offer there, you can simply ask. They can usually do something about the price. Customer returns are often available for as little as 100 euros. But I can’t say whether they will work as expected.

Update after 5 years

In the meantime, I have equipped the Anycubic i3 Mega with Klipper on a Raspberry and thus raised it to a completely different level. As a hardware upgrade, I gave it quiet drivers and a BL-Touch, which levels up the bed considerably. The rest remained almost the same, especially the extruder and hotend. It’s also great that it now has a cheap webcam from Logitech, which can be used to monitor the print and automatically cancel misprints. This means that the Any i3m has arrived in the modern age.

Currently, the Any runs smoothly at 150 mm/s and an acceleration of 6,000 mm/s². The printout still looks completely normal. This is a really great result and once again proves the rock-solid quality of Anycubic 3D printers.