We started selling Creality CR-10S printers to provide an affordable large format printer to our hobbyist customers. We found early on that they had quality control problems and this required us to start inspecting every printer from the ground up before releasing the printers to our customers. We spend between 2 and 4 hours per printer to make sure everything is in working order. On the last batch of printers we noticed that most of those printers were having temperature fluctuations and we delayed releasing them while we worked on finding out what the issue was. Thanks to our inspection and testing checklist none of the affected printers ever made it into our customers hands. While we were searching for the problem and the fix Tim Hoogland beat us to it and found the problem and came up with a fix. You can read about it HERE
The problem looks to be two fold. Creality has always used the wrong capacitor for the LM2596 chip and it was ok to run it that way even though it is not ideal as long as the chips were authentic they seemed to work even with the flawed design. This means sometime towards the end of 2017 Creality started using LM2596 clones that couldn't perform well enough with the wrong capacitor and it brought it to everyone's attention. So the fix could be to replace the LM2596 chip and have the board work but technically under a scope the power would be less than ideal. Or the proper fix would be to replace the capacitor with the proper ratings for the LM2596 chip.
So what did Printedsolid.com do?
We have replaced all of the capacitors with the proper ratings on our current batch of printers and then performed all of our inspections and test on the printers. We also inspected the power output of the LM2596 chips and they are all putting out clean power.
Will Printed Solid offer a repair service?
Only for customers who bought a CR-10S from us. While we would have caught this in our initial inspections if the problem develops down the road and you bought it from us then send us an email at info@printedsolid.com and then you can mail us the board and we will replace the capacitor for you and mail the board back.
What if you bought your printer from somewhere else and need the repair?
We will not be offering a repair service for non Printed Solid customers. Since Tim Hoogland discovered the issue we believe that it is only fair to recommend him for the repair. th3dstudio.com