I'm going to try and give the Tevo Tarantula Prusa i3 Printer a bit of a review. I was kind of looking at getting a 3D printer, but the price of them seemed out of reach. Knowing nothing about 3D printers I would read some posts around the Internet, but nothing serious. I follow a blog at https://tech.scargill.net/. Mr. Scargill started a review on the printer in December of 2017, but had fallen ill and hasn't completed it. It is from his post that I decided to take the plunge and get one of these Tarantulas. I order it just be for Christmas and it arrived the first week of January. It was order from Banggood for $252.00 CAD at the time. I see it is a bit cheaper at the time of this writing.
The printer came well boxed with the inner printer box secured in an outer box. Well taped and marked for shipping. The inside box was also well secured for shipping.
When you go into a store and make a purchase and on the side of the box you see "some assembly required", this is not your Tevo Tarantula. It should say on the box, "assembly required"! This printer is literally in a million pieces. But for the DIY individual this is a piece of cake. There are M3, M4 and M5 screws, "T" nuts, lock nuts and just some of the hardware. Fortunately, Tevo had a plan. There are 3 layers in the boxes. Each layer is very well packed and labelled.
Layer "A"
The top layer in the box is know a Layer "A" as all of the bags and components are marked with an "A".
All of the cables, filament and the heat-bed (Tevo logo on it). The colour of the filament is just whatever they ship. There is no choice in it, you just have to take what you get. As you can see, it appears the top filament my have more than one colour in it.
Layer ”B”
As you can see in the picture, the bags in this layer start with the letter "B". The power supply, 4-stepper motors, Titan Extruder (extra to the regular extruder)
Layer "C"
Frame work and the acrylic pieces to assist in the assembly. The LCD screen and its acrylic framing noted in the bottom right corner. Each of the parts bags contain numerous screw, nuts, washers or wheels depending on the bag number and where you are in the instructions. (the "A" bags don't belong on this layer) Each part of the instructions tend to follow these letterings, right? But not so fast.
The instruction manual was opened and the instructions are not exactly numbered. The building of dream piece of equipment was about to commence and they were going well until about page 4. Then YouTube became my best friend as I wondered my way through the instruction book. Google "Tevo A-7" and there it is, several YouTube videos on how to install the parts that relate to the bag A-7. This was because back on page 4 the image and the instructions made absolutely no sense at all.
The "Y" axis is built and attached to the belt and motor. I did have the motor on the wrong in this picture and had to swap it to the other end, but this type of mistake happened more than once with the build of the printer. Hence the build took the better part of 4 days.
The plastic "L" bracket in the left image broke due to trying to move the x/z axis on the frame, but was replaced with the metal "L" brackets in the right image.
The build seemed to progress quite well throughout the reset of the build. Each of the instructions/bag numbers was also watched with the YouTube video which opened up a much better understanding on exactly how to build it properly. Watching the video saved me sometime in the end. I would highly recommend watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0F4T4aBN8c&t=3929s prior to and while building your Tevo Tarantula. This video does a few things in different order and makes the build make much more sense.
Once the printer itself was built, there was the wiring to be done. In Part 2, I'll go thru the wiring to the main circuit board from the various components on the printer.
Top Comments