I call it my little Lamborghini. In May 2021 I tested the Artillery Hornet, a bright yellow budget Bowden printer that looks like a piece of design on your desk and prints almost exactly like my Genius.
99% assembled
As usual with Artillery, the packaging is excellent. You can feel the quality just by picking up the box. The Hornet comes about 99% assembled: six screws, a couple of wires, bed levelling, and in 10 to 15 minutes you're printing.
Specs: a standard 220 × 220 × 250 mm volume, a filament runout sensor, no automatic levelling but easy manual levelling with either a four-corner or a nine-point assisted routine, and an SD card for G-code. The display is not as pretty as on the Genius and Sidewinder. It uses the classic knob interface, like the Ender 3 series, but it works fine. There are X and Y belt tensioners too. The yellow is a punch in the eye at first, then you start to see the style.
The Bowden cable question
Unlike the Genius and Sidewinder, the Hornet uses a Bowden extruder, with the PTFE tube and the electrical wires running inside one cable to the hotend. At first I loved the idea. Then some YouTubers pointed out that clearing a clog might mean unplugging the cable, and therefore the power. I talked to Artillery and here's what we figured out:
- The PTFE tube inside the cable doesn't reach the hotend: there's a second, short piece of PTFE inside the heatbreak.
- If a clog forms between the two tubes, undo the connector on the other side and cut the clogged filament away.
- If it isn't there, unload the filament. The clog is probably in the short PTFE piece.
- Remove the three screws holding the hotend to the carriage. With the cable still connected, you can work on the hotend and replace the short PTFE tube.
How it prints
A strange detail: the Z motor is mounted upside down, at the top. I thought it had been assembled wrong, then realised it's probably meant to avoid Z wobble. I printed a tall test, around 22 cm, almost the maximum, and saw no wobble at all.
Then the fun prints: a scaled-up MatterHackers filament astronaut (hollow, with 5% infill only in the shoes), a support-free Minion in AzureFilm Green Pearl, a lion in Red Pearl, a detailed succulent planter in vase mode, and my favourite, a fractal pyramid at 300% scale, also in vase mode, which took 24 hours. One of the most beautiful files I've found on Thingiverse. At around 60 mm/s it behaves very much like my Genius with standard settings.