31 days ago I knew next to nothing about 3D printing. Everything I knew I learned from the Vice documentary about 3D printing firearms which made the technology look cool but the people involved unbearable. But then I was given a voucher for a Creality Ender 3 Pro that brought the cost down to $99, a price that seemed too good to pass up. Extensive Research (asking my boss if it was a good deal) confirmed my suspicion so I picked one up. Over the next few post I’ll be documenting my experiences diving into this hobby and also providing a small review of the Creality Ender 3 Pro…and perhaps a few other items of interest.
I made these.The benchy on the far left is actually 25% copper.The green drawer i broke, the black drawer is a misprint. So is
the transparent pi 4 case.
Let start with describing the Ender 3 Pro. It’s part of the Ender line, Creality’s entry level offering of printers. It features:
- 220x220x250 printing Area
- Heated printing bed
- Magnetic printing surface
- Bowden tube Extruder
- Metal hotend capable of 180mm/sec
- LCD sceen (non touch)
- Rev 4.2.2 32 bit system board.
Basically it has everything you’ll need to begin printing PLA (polylactic acid), the most common printing material, accurately and in a reasonable amount of time. Just as important as what it comes with is the fact that everything has an easy upgrade option and there are tons of options to choose from because Ender series is basically the Honda Civic of 3D printers.
If you don’t know what any of those parts are or how they work don’t worry you’ll have a chance to get intimately familiar with them when during the assembly process. You’ll have to otherwise good luck putting the thing together. If you’ve spent some time in the FOSS/FLOSS community you know there are basically two types of open source. There’s the comes with documentation kind, and then there’s the comes with a “good luck” kind. Creality is edging towards the latter.
This is all the documentation they provide you with.
I recommend that you watch some youtube build videos to verify you have everything setup to the correct specifications. There are some minor tweaks that may be necessary that the instructions do not account for and you might not otherwise consider but will make a difference in your ability to print. I’m somewhat disappointed that Creality is putting this much responsibility on the user. Their target market with this product is the new user you would think they would at least provide a brief walkthrough of what you’ve purchased. It’s hard to pin this on Creality as a company though because this seems to be the “culture”.
A planter that my Ficus is now loving.
Now the next step in the assembly process is the most important part of printing on FDM printers and it is of course not so much as mentioned in the instructions. Once you have everything assembled before you can actually print you need to tram the bed and configure your offsets. I’ll explain…
Lets take a moment to understand the basics of a 3D printer. They operate on 3 axis, x, y and z. The print nozzle moves on the x and z axis while the bed moves along the y. The nozzle calculates its position by knowing the bid dimensions and from always starting from home which is 0,0,0. For any number of reason that coordinate can be incorrect. The Z height will always be incorrect because the bed does not come attached and calibrated. You may also choose to use a different printing surface which can vary in thickness. So it’s the users job to calculate the difference between the programmed and actual coordinates. These are called offsets.
What should the z height be, and how do you calibrate it? Well the nozzle should be a millimeter off of the bed..about the thickness of a sheet of paper.. Infact, thats how you calibrate it. You slide a piece of paper between the nozzle and the bed, at all corners of the bed, and feel for resistance. I was not expecting this level of manual configuration, but so it goes. Aside from being monotonous and annoying there are several issues with this process. Most notably its not uncommon for Creality to send you a warped bed. So you might calibrate all 4 corners perfectly but have a bow in the middle which is going ruin your first layer print and its all downhill from there. This is probably where you’re going make your first upgrades. I can’t say whether or not I have this issue because I upgraded my printing surface and added autoleveling almost immediately (more on that later).
Creality does not teach you any of this. You’re going to have to get that information from websites or youtube.
Here’s where you may experience a bit more frustration. Like I mentioned earlier, its all open source. Even at the firmware level. The most popular and standard firmware out there, Marlin is community driven and any firmware that comes with any printer you get is most likely going to be a fork of Marlin. So that means two things - its always in flux, and theres many different versions out in the wild. So as you read through or watch tutorials you might have some difficulty navigating around because menu’s, navigation steps, and options have changed. Some menu items might be totally gone or called something else. Almost all the top videos for configuring Ender 3’s will have you looking for menu items that no longer exist so get a broad understanding of the process as you watch.
Personally I didn’t know what to expect in terms of initial setup. I did expect a bit more information than what was provided but it wasn’t a difficult process. Plus Creality provides all the tools necessary to complete the build. All in all it took me less than 2 hours from opening the box to beginning my first print.
And a note on first prints. Yours are probably going to go one of two ways. A stringy mess of nothing, or a paper thin barely there sheet of nothing. It means your z height is off either too high or too low. You’re either printing into thin air or clogging the nozzle and printing nothing, so pay close attention to the bed tramming process.
In the next dispatch I’ll talk about upgrades and some more Creality specific frustrations
EDIT 08/20/23:
It’s not going to take another posts for me to sum up my thoughts on the Ender 3 Pro. So let me catch you up on how things have gone. I fully upgraded the Pro and I even bought a V2 and in the end I ended up giving the V2 to a friend and the Pro just sits around as a secondary printer. My standard printer is now an Anycubic Kobra which has none of the issues found in the Creality line. The Ender is just entirely too unpredictable and inconsistent and the issues that atleast I ran into were rarely my fault. You’ll see this echoed online if you’re dealing with honest people, Creality just has terrible quality control and you’re rolling the dice with every single purchase you make from them.
If you’re new to 3D printing I wouldnt recommend anything from Creality. When you first jump into this hobby the primary thing you want to do is print right? Not spend days troubleshooting between successful prints. If actually printing is your goal stay away from Enders.