Creality Ender 3 Initial Setup and First Print

hi Ryan from 3d printing Canada on today's episode we'll be doing a first print and setup on the under three so welcome back now that we've assembled our under three here we're gonna go through a couple little steps for the initial setup first things first on our printer is out of the box if you notice the frame is wobbling around a little bit this one's not too bad then we'll want to adjust the frame sometimes from the factory these things are a little bit out of calibration so on the lower portion of the frames left and right we got two bolts right here if you find that the frame itself is wobbling around we can undo these bolts a little bit like so they're in there tight so you just want to be careful with it there we go we can undo those bolts there on either side and gently wiggle the frame back and forth until it's sitting nice and firm on the table and then we just tighten these back up again and snug them down nice and tight so they're not loose at all and repeat that step on both sides of the frame like so I'm loosening it here we're using our largest allen wrench that's included with the printer out of the box and wiggle it around just a little bit sits pretty well and then we'll just tighten it down again again you want to get them nice and tight you don't want to get too tight because these are tucked directly into the lumen extrusion itself so we don't want to strip out the extrusion and then if we're lucky and we rotate this back around as long as it's sitting on a nice flat surface we should have no wobble to the frame and that looks good okay so our next step here is in some cases we'll get a lot of wobble in our x-axis gantry right here so 10 this is typically because of the idlers themselves being a little bit loose on the printer now on the under three there's only one I'll er to adjust and it's on the opposite side of the two main wheels here and what we'll want to do here is if we can rotate this wheel by hand then it's too loose well one tighten this up a bit so using our provided wrench we'll just put that on to the Framus or on to the eccentric nut and just rotate that around a little bit as you can see I've just loosen it off quite a bit here see how much more Playaz now in the frame and just continue to rotate it around until all that slop slop is taken out of the frame and you can usually hit that sweet point right about there and that's not too bad right there you can see how much little movement in is it now so it's a lot more stable a lot more straight it should be relatively parallel to the bed as well so that should be a lot better so now that we've got most of our frame all squared up nice and true and parallel it's timely level our bed so first things first is we're gonna take a power cord and plug it into the printer you also want to grab either business card or a piece of paper now I've taken just a post-it note here and I fold it in half this will let us actually set the gap between the nozzle and the bed for the optimum print surface here so what we're going to do is we're just gonna flip the printer on and from the main menu itself we're just going to click the thumb wheel and go down to prepare and then we're gonna look for the menu item auto home and that's just going to home three access on the printer here and then we can begin leveling our bed now motors are enabled at this point so typically what I like what I like to do is actually just power off the printer so I've got all the accesses home but I can freely move around the accesses as I please so one thing to make sure before we continue is make sure that your bed surface is nice and clean there's no additional debris or previous prints on there or any sort of garbage that might affect the bed leveling so all we're going to do is take our piece of paper here I'm just going to move the extruder assembly to roughly the first corner somewhere in here and then I'm gonna take my piece of paper and try and slide it underneath the nozzle as you can see here I can't quite get it underneath so we can use the thumb wheels on the front here to adjust the bed up and down the one thing you want to try to avoid to do here is also pushing down on the bed wall we're leveling it because any kind of pressure down here will cause the bed to be a little bit lower than it needs to be so I'm just going to bear with me there we go there we go so now you can see I can get the paper underneath the nozzle relatively easily and it moves around pretty freely what I want to do is adjust this wheel till I get just enough tension that I feel a bit of a drag on the paper itself so I'll just rotate that back a bit and you can kind of hear it a little bit it's got a little bit of a slight drag that's not too bad we don't want it to be too hard but not too soft either so just adjust again and that's pretty good so what I'd like to do on this case then is go to the opposite diagonal corner so if we're doing the front left then we'll move to the right rear and we'll repeat the same step again so again trying not to apply pressure to the bed itself I'll just adjust these nozzles you see now I can get my paper underneath and I'll back the wheel back off again again we're looking for a little bit of drag but not not too much that it's scouring or ripping the paper that's not bad so with the opposite corner they are done I'll move to the front corner again and try and do the same thing okay we can get underneath it's a little tight we'll loosen it off that's not bad and then we'll move back to our final back corner and repeat the step and our back corner actually looks to be set pretty good and lastly if you really want you can put it back in the center of the bed here and make sure if this is relatively flat it should feel pretty good in the center and it does so at that point our bed seems to be pretty well leveled everything looks pretty good it feels pretty good we're about ready to begin our first print so we can flip the printer back on again and we'll go back into our prepare menu here and we will go under control oops sorry move accesses the menu item we're looking for and we will want to move this in one millimeter increments and we're going to go go down to the move Z access and we're just going to rotate the wheel up here all we want to do here is we won't bring the nozzle up off the bed high enough that we can load the film it and purge some filament through the hot end usually 30 to 40 mils good enough that we can get underneath here and purge out some material okay and we'll go back okay so go back to the prepare menu again and this time we will go down to we're using PLA in this case so we're gonna go down to our preheat PLA and this will begin to heat up both the heat bed itself and the nozzle so I'll take a little bit you might hear the power supply kicking in a little bit as well but usually within two or three minutes the hot end and bed will be up to temperature here and we can load our filament so now that we're ready to start our first print we have to load our material so we're going to take our PLA right here and carefully take it off the Roll and be careful not to let it unwind on itself we want to take our side cutters and snip a nice clean cut at a 45 degree angle a 45 degree angle will help keep provide a nice sharp edge that will lead well into the extruder here with the printer up to temperature we've got it set at 200 degrees right now I'm just going to depress the lever on the extruder and slot the filament into the filament hole here it'll move past both the extruder wheel and the idler bearing and into our PTFE tube here a quick note on the PTFE tube is sometimes these can pop out of their housings here you can just slide that back into the extruder and lock it in place so we'll continue to feed the filament into the extruder here and I'm just going to rotate this around a little bit for a better view so as we rotate or as we push it through we should start to see some of it extruding from the extruder and sure enough there we go now you can take your side cutters and just trim off the excess verify that our role is nice on the spool holder nothing's tangled across and that the filament path is nice and clear from there if we can begin our first print so we'll go into our control menu here and we will move down to the item print from sd and we're going to this case we're going to do a test model so in which case we will do the test dog the printer will heat up to its normal operating temperature and as you can see right here it will home the bed if there's any filament extruding from the nozzle we can just pick it off they'll home the Z and then hopefully begin our first printer and if all goes well with the bed leveling then we should see a nice first layer going down so I always like to watch my first layer as it goes down to see what kind of width I'm getting out of this and right now it looks a little bit high so in that case on the fly walks printing I can actually adjust the wheels a bit here so when we're looking for a first layer we don't want the first layer to be too thin you can see on the start of my print here that the outside perimeters were quite thin that's not going to adhere very well to the bed at all these subsequent layers are quite flat they're probably maybe a little bit too low but in this case that will help adhere the the print just a little bit better especially to this build tack surface which adheres great with a lower builder a lower first layer height so it looks like it's not too bad sort of keep an eye on I never like to walk away from a print on my first layer I always like to make sure that things are going down well that the perimeters look well and that is extruding properly 90% of your print failures begin on the first layer whether it be a bad first layer adhesion or under extrusion that's usually where your trouble begins you see on the screen the screen will begin to tell us our elapsed time the temperatures were running and when the print is actually finished in this case it's also reading off the positions of the x y&z axis as well so we can get in real time where the hot end and where the accesses are relative to the bed so all that's left to do at this point is wait for the print to finish and see how it comes out [Music] so we're about 45 minutes into our print here and from what we can see everything's looking really nice I really like everything the layers are all going them nice and smooth it looks like a point 1 millimeter layer height it's a good print adhesion seems good nothing's curling up off the bed and so far our prints going well so we'll let this print go for a while and we'll see how it comes out but so far everything's looking really nice if you've got any comments questions or anything else you'd like to see leave them in the comments below and thank you so much remember to like our videos subscribe to our Channel and click the notification bell in the top corner thank you [Music]

Channel: 3D Printing Canada

Views: 967,423

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Id: N9aWBjbj3Ag

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Thu May 24 2018