Ender 3 3D printer experiences?

[Allan Bennett]

I'm intrigued by the idea of 3D printing, but am not willing to spend a lot of money until I have had hands-on experience.  I see the Ender 3 3D printer advertised for what seems to me to be a reasonalbe price of £139 delivered.

 

Is this a reasonalbe starting point?  Is it's quality as good as the larger (more expensive) Ender models, or will it be a waste of money, requiring lots more money and fettling to get reasonable prints from it?

[Mark Turner 12]

I’ve got an ender 3 and I think mine came with an upgraded glass build plate, spend some time squaring it and levelling the bed and it works fine for me, I use pla+ filament that I got off Amazon, can’t complain and that’s a good price.

 

Mark

[Allan Bennett]

Thanks Mark.  That brings up another question:  I don't have a space where I can set it up and leave it, so is the process of squaring and levelling a long one that would need to be repeated every time I put the machine on my work bench to do a print?

[Mark Turner 12]

I tend to leave mine on top of a tall drawer unit so never move it but if you lift it by the base no need to do any more setup I’d expect.  As you just need to put a micro std card in to print could you not just leave it where it’s stored and print there, maybe on a shelf?

 

Edited November 20, 2022 by Mark Turner 12

[Simon Chaddock]

Allen

I would agree with Mark T.

These hobby printers are built down to a price so are best left in situ. Remember the printer head has to be able to travel all over the bed keeping the tip of the nozzle ideally to within 0.05 mm (2 thou in old money). The slideways are that good but it does not take much distortion of the frame to upset the first layer as it is laid down. You can find just a change in the ambient temperature can alter the bed adjustment.

There are dozens of things that can effect the quality of the  print, bed adjustment is just one of them.

Of course spend a bit and you can have 'self levelling' where a hall sensor is used to scan the bed before each print so the printer knows how to alter the nozzle height head as it prints so it stays a constant distance above the bed.

I know every time I physically lift my printer the bed adjustment has to be checked.

 

Incidentally my Anet A8 printer kit was the cheapest way to get printing a few years back but it is still going after well over a thousand printing hours. 😉   

[EvilC57]

I have an Ender 3 V2 which I bought back earlier this year. I found this video, which was very helpful in setting it up - far better than trying to follow the instructions.

 

Having spent some time aligning it I've found it excellect, and have only ever had one failed print, when the object being printed came unstuck from the bed.

 

As others have said, bed levelling is the most important thing, and it's important that the heated nozzle in the print head just clears the heated bed when at its lowest point (as determined by a limit switch). I have a bed levelling g-code file, which moves the print head to each corner in turn, and allows you to set the bed height by sliding a piece of paper between the nozzle and the bed like a feeler guage. Unfortunately at the moment, I can't rememeber where I downloaded it from, but I use it to check the bed levelling before every print. You can pay extra and get the auto bed levelling upgrade, but I didn't bother.

 

Given that the tolerances are so fine, it's best not to move the machine if you don't have to. In fact I've found from experience that when performing the levelling routine I've described above, it's best to do it with the nozzle and heated bed up to temperature, as even their expansion at different temperatures makes a difference to the nozzle to bed clearance.

 

Like you I was intruigued for a while, but baulked at the cost of the Prusa machines that one or two of our club members have, so when I found the Ender at only a couple of hundred pounds I thought I'd give it a try - and I haven't been disappointed. Indeed, I've learned enough this year to risk taking on a Planeprint Jetwing, which is a fairly major project for both me and the machine. Planeprint supply a number of recommended setup profiles for Cura slicer, which (after some test prints and tweeking) gave excellent results for the different print parameters required to print various parts of the Jetwing.

 

 

 

[EvilC57]

Further to my last; just thinking about it, the Ender 3 as it comes out of the box does have a couple of shortcomings:

 

The extruder feeder is not a great design, so I used this upgrade kit from Amazon.

 

And due to the design of the extruder feeder, the filament pulls from the reel at a rather awkward angle, so I one of the first things I made was this filament roller guide from Thingyverse.com

[Flying Squirrel]

The Ender 3 V2 is a fantastic entry machine, it does have some flaws but nothing major. One of the big upsides is that as it is so popular there is so much information out there to help you get the best of of it, there's also a significant number of upgrades so as you need more out of it you can simply upgrade. My latest and greatest upgrade was an ED3 direct drive hot end.

 

As others have said, try and leave it in situ, re levelling the bed every time will soon become a chore and put you off using it.

[EvilC57]

20 minutes ago, Flying Squirrel said:

The Ender 3 V2 is a fantastic entry machine, it does have some flaws but nothing major. One of the big upsides is that as it is so popular there is so much information out there to help you get the best of of it, there's also a significant number of upgrades so as you need more out of it you can simply upgrade. My latest and greatest upgrade was an ED3 direct drive hot end.

 

As others have said, try and leave it in situ, re levelling the bed every time will soon become a chore and put you off using it.

I can't say that bed levelling using the paper 'feeler gauge' method is a chore particularly. I accept it as something worth doing, which takes just a minute or two before I start a new print. It was when I got a bit lazy about not doing it, that the print became prematurely unstuck from the build plate.

 

The levelling code & routine I use is here. You don't have to wait for the whole program to run, and can cancel it once you're happy with the bed levelling.

[Allan Bennett]

Thanks guys, I've learned a lot from these replies.  It seems like an important thing will be to find or make a space where the printer could be permanently located, rather than taking it out of storage every time I want to use it.  It's good to hear that upgrades are easy and not too expensive, especially if you can print them yourself.

[Zflyer]

I have creality ender with self levelling. It gets moved from storage to study when required.  I have had no real problem with it and would recommend.

[Allan Bennett]

12 minutes ago, Zflyer said:

I have creality ender with self levelling. It gets moved from storage to study when required.  I have had no real problem with it and would recommend.

 

But that's presumably not the entry-level model 3?  I see now that there are about eight versions of the model 3, so does that mean that a base model can be easily upgraded to one of the higher-spec ones?

[EvilC57]

16 minutes ago, Allan Bennett said:

 

But that's presumably not the entry-level model 3?  I see now that there are about eight versions of the model 3, so does that mean that a base model can be easily upgraded to one of the higher-spec ones?

The basic Ender 3 V2 doesn't have self-levelling, however for just over £40 you can buy the CR Touch kit, which consists of a touch probe and associated extra wiring, which attaches to the side of the print head, and with the aid of software supplied on an SD card adds self-levelling.

[Allan Bennett]

Thank you everyone.  A couple of extra quid off the Ender 3 for 'Black Friday', so my wife is getting me one for Christmas.

 

No doubt I'll be back in this forum shortly while I try to figure out how to use it!

[Allan Bennett]

With a few days' experience using my Ender 3, with quite a bit of success, I've now got a couple of questions about bed levelling:-

 

1.  Why on earth do they have 4 levelling screws?  As any surveyor will know, 3 screws are optimum for quick and easy levelling; two at the front for left/right tilt, then one at the back for back/forth levelling.  (Rant -- no need to answer!)

 

2.  I agree that manual levelling is not too much of a chore, but I've looked at the video of the CR Touch kit.  I understand that it checks the bed level at several points, but what does it do then?  Does it store the 'errors' in memory and then use them to adjust the feeder height as it moves around, or does it just tell you which corners need adjustment?

[Keith Billinge]

The Ender 3 V2 is a good starting point in the wonderful world of 3D printing. Cheap and cheerful it's a good place to start learning. Due to the miriad Youtube and other social media help that's available to help you climb the learning curve. I have one and it prints very well for a budget model and there are so many upgrades available if you want to take it further.
I bought mine and eventually went for the BLTouch to keep the levelling beast at bay.

 

[EvilC57]

9 hours ago, Keith Billinge said:

The Ender 3 V2 is a good starting point in the wonderful world of 3D printing. Cheap and cheerful it's a good place to start learning. Due to the miriad Youtube and other social media help that's available to help you climb the learning curve. I have one and it prints very well for a budget model and there are so many upgrades available if you want to take it further.
I bought mine and eventually went for the BLTouch to keep the levelling beast at bay.

 

I’ll second that. After a lot of research I went for the E3 V2 at only around £200 because I didn’t want to commit to the £800+ of something like a Prusa i3. It may not have the bells & whistles, or be as fast as some, but the print quality is excellent, and it seems durable.

 

Indeed, I’ve recently finished printing a complete Planeprint Jetwing EDF model on it, using a mixture of light weight (Colorfabb) PLA, PLA+ and TPU, not had a single nozzle blockage or any other problem, and the quality of the prints has been excellent throughout.

[FlyinFlynn]

12 hours ago, Allan Bennett said:

Does it store the 'errors' in memory and then use them to adjust the feeder height as it moves around, or does it just tell you which corners need adjustment?

It stores the 'heightmap' data and applies that to Z height positioning across the printing line dynamically. The 'heightmap' data can be configured to be cleared after a G28 homing command or not (so you can either do a levelling once and print using it until you do another levelling, or do a fresh levelling before every print.)

[Allan Bennett]

Thanks FF, that's what I was hoping for.  I've had no problems with my Ender 3 so far but I'm finding that, even though the machine isn't moved between prints, if I don't re-level the bed before each one I have problems with the first layer.  I'll go with the routine in EvilC57's earlier link for the moment, but the CR Touch is very tempting . . . 

[Flying Squirrel]

Allan, I had a similar thing with my Ender 3 and it turned out to be a faulty Z limit switch (base of the left hand upright) it wasn't actioning at exactly the same point so may be worth keeping an eye on. At least it's a cheap fix.

 

Unless you're a bit heavy handed removing prints it should need doing every time. 

[EvilC57]

35 minutes ago, Flying Squirrel said:

Allan, I had a similar thing with my Ender 3 and it turned out to be a faulty Z limit switch (base of the left hand upright) it wasn't actioning at exactly the same point so may be worth keeping an eye on. At least it's a cheap fix.

 

Unless you're a bit heavy handed removing prints it should need doing every time. 

It’s interesting you should say that. I run the paper levelling routine* just before every print, and I’ve started finding just recently that the bed level, as demonstrated by the ease with which the paper slides between the nozzle and glass has changed. Cancelling and restarting the routine (without adjusting the bed) sees it work OK. And on the occasions when the clearance has been wrong (too big), I’ve noticed no audible ‘click’ from the Z limit switch, so maybe I too have an intermittent switch.

I find that for most prints it’s best to unclip and remove the glass with the newly printed object on it, I then kneel down on the floor and chisel/prize it off with the ‘wallpaper’ scraper that was supplied with the Ender 3. With large objects (particularly those printed with PLA) I find that the forces required to remove them from the glass are quite large sometimes; and I’ve learned the hard way if you don’t remove the glass, that small prints can sometimes ping off down the back of the cabinet on which the printer sits, never to be seen again!
 

*Paper levelling g code

Edited January 3, 2023 by EvilC57

[Zflyer]

I find acetone with a piece of kitchen towel cleans the glass bed well, this helps with removal, or just wait till its cooled.

[EvilC57]

I clean the bed with IPA between every print. But I find that PLA sticks well to the (I believe) carborundum coated glass, whether hot or cold. Fortunately, I found while printing the Jetwing that LW-PLA separated from the glass quite easily, with some encouragement from the scraper. And TPU peels off easily too.

[Flying Squirrel]

23 hours ago, EvilC57 said:

It’s interesting you should say that. I run the paper levelling routine* just before every print, and I’ve started finding just recently that the bed level, as demonstrated by the ease with which the paper slides between the nozzle and glass has changed. Cancelling and restarting the routine (without adjusting the bed) sees it work OK. And on the occasions when the clearance has been wrong (too big), I’ve noticed no audible ‘click’ from the Z limit switch, so maybe I too have an intermittent switch.

I find that for most prints it’s best to unclip and remove the glass with the newly printed object on it, I then kneel down on the floor and chisel/prize it off with the ‘wallpaper’ scraper that was supplied with the Ender 3. With large objects (particularly those printed with PLA) I find that the forces required to remove them from the glass are quite large sometimes; and I’ve learned the hard way if you don’t remove the glass, that small prints can sometimes ping off down the back of the cabinet on which the printer sits, never to be seen again!
 

*Paper levelling g code

I certainly sounds like the £6 for 3 genuine Creality switches would be money well spent, worth a try at least. For me it ended hours and hours of frustration.

 

Your comments did make me laugh, pretty sure if NASA based a new launch system based on our print removal experience man would be on Mars within minutes.

 

A quick squirt of IPA from a spritzer type bottle at the base of your print can help....sometimes.

[Keith Billinge]

I have found one of the best sources of info on the ENDER 3 V2 is the BV3D channel on Youtube, He's great!

Also I have signed up to the Ender 3 V2 group on Facebook.

 

Both of these places seem to help with the printer.

Since owning mine, I have fitted some quieter fans, a Capricorn Bowden tube, new Jyers firmware, BLTouch, Silicone bed spring replacements, and I've printed a few accesories like taller feet, a filament guide and a thingy to hold the tools.

 

I use almost exclusively Sunlu PLA and find it's a cheap but reliable filament.

 

KB