{"id":239,"date":"2026-05-09T10:21:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T14:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/?p=239"},"modified":"2026-05-09T10:25:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T14:25:03","slug":"retiring-the-anet-a8-eight-years-one-close-call-and-a-printer-that-came-assembled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/2026\/05\/09\/retiring-the-anet-a8-eight-years-one-close-call-and-a-printer-that-came-assembled\/","title":{"rendered":"Retiring the Anet A8: Eight Years, One Close Call, and a Printer That Came Assembled"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought my Anet A8 in 2018. For those who don’t remember that era of budget 3D printing, the Anet A8 was a kit printer that shipped in a box of optimism and structural compromise. You assembled it yourself, leveled the bed by hand, and then spent the next several months modifying it to be the printer it should have been out of the box.<\/p>\n

I did all of it. External MOSFET for the heated bed, direct solder to the bed terminals because the stock connector had already started melting, inductive z-probe for auto leveling because manual tramming is a form of punishment I no longer accept. At some point I swapped the mainboard entirely for a RAMPS 1.4, which I documented here back in 2018, mostly because the original board decided one of its stepper drivers was optional.<\/p>\n

The printer worked. Mostly. It printed things I needed, tolerated abuse, and never actually caught fire. That last part is less of a design achievement and more of a statistical outcome. The Anet A8 had a well-documented reputation for burning down workshops, and the entire community treated a bed MOSFET as a mandatory safety mod rather than an optional upgrade. I added mine before anything bad happened. I got lucky. A lot of people did. Some didn’t.<\/p>\n

Anyway. It’s retired now. I replaced it with a Flashforge AD5X.<\/p>\n

\"Flashforge<\/figure>\n

What the AD5X Is<\/h2>\n

The AD5X is a CoreXY printer with a 220x220x220mm build volume, automatic bed leveling via pressure sensor, a flexible PEI steel sheet, and a top speed of 600mm\/s. It also does four-color printing through an onboard filament switching system called IFS. It came assembled. I did not have to crimp a single Dupont connector. This alone nearly brought me to tears.<\/p>\n

For comparison: the Anet A8 topped out somewhere around 50mm\/s before it started printing abstract art instead of the thing you asked for. The AD5X prints twelve times faster than that. A part that used to take three hours now takes less than thirty minutes. I have printed things this week that would have been overnight jobs on the A8.<\/p>\n

The Safety Situation<\/h2>\n

The AD5X has thermal runaway protection built in, a grounded power supply, and does not require community-sourced fire prevention mods to operate without incident. The heated bed wiring is not routed through a plastic connector that quietly melts over the course of six months. The nozzle is tool-free swap. Nothing about it requires soldering before first use.<\/p>\n

I want to be fair to the Anet A8 here. It never burned my house down. Eight years, one mainboard swap, a handful of firmware reflashes, and more bed leveling sessions than I care to count, and the house is still standing. That’s not nothing. It’s just also not a guarantee I’d want to keep relying on.<\/p>\n

The Leveling Thing<\/h2>\n

Automatic bed leveling on the AD5X works the way every printer should have worked for the last decade. Press a button, wait ninety seconds, print. The A8 with the inductive probe was better than pure manual tramming, but it still required babysitting. The AD5X does a full mesh compensation pass before every print and just handles it. I’ve done six prints since I unboxed it. I have not touched the bed once.<\/p>\n

Four Colors<\/h2>\n

I haven’t used this yet. I’m mentioning it because it exists and I paid for it. Ask me again in three months.<\/p>\n

Where Things Stand<\/h2>\n

The A8 is sitting in a corner of the shop. I haven’t decided what to do with it. It feels wrong to throw out something that technically still works and technically never killed anyone. I’ll probably strip it for parts eventually, or donate it to someone who enjoys spending weekends fixing printers instead of using them.<\/p>\n

The AD5X is sitting on the same bench, running, printing things in under an hour that used to be overnight jobs. It has not required a single modification, a single solder joint, or a single moment of wondering whether I should buy a fire extinguisher, (FYI, there is one there anyway).<\/p>\n

That’s the review. Eight years was a good run. I’m done being brave about bed connectors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eight years with the Anet A8, from MOSFET mods and melting connectors to retirement. A look at what it took to keep a notorious fire hazard running, and why the Flashforge AD5X is a better way to spend a weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3d-printer","tag-3d-printing"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thinkleet.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}