How Easy is 3D Printing ACTUALLY? (Ender 3 S1 Review)

[Music] you know when you discover a new hobby and you think damn that's cool like i want to do that but in reality you know that you don't actually care enough to put in the work to learn that skill well 3d printing was one of those things for me okay sure maybe 3d printing isn't really that cool but the idea of being able to create random objects at a thin air seemed awesome it was mostly that actually learning how to 3d model them and learning how to tune and adjust your printer to get the best results which seemed like a huge investment of time something that i already wish i had more of but you know how it is a few weeks later a deep dark youtube rabbit hole at 2 am and a sudden surge of motivation ended up with me convincing myself that a 3d printer is exactly what my life was missing and that's how i ended up with this the creality ender 3 v2 now it probably seems like i'm building up towards telling you that this was a stupid purchase and a big mistake but honestly i have no regrets the printer was amazing and i had no idea how easy it actually is to get into this even though i had no experience setting it up was so simple and although 3d modeling is something that would take some time to learn i learned that huge libraries of designs already exist that you can just download and print for free i downloaded things like this cool stationery cup this bag clip a memory card organizer this phone holder this fidget toy remember those tv commercials that were like you wouldn't steal a car pirating movies is no different well if i could download and print an entire car 100 i would be printing cars for everyone but yeah i didn't even really have to change any settings or anything and right away i felt like it did an amazing job again i'm just a beginner and i'm sure that it's possible to get even better prints than this but for not having to do much the printer completely exceeded my expectations well actually sometimes there was one big problem so the main reason i got the printer was because i wanted to print 3d parts for my drones fpv drones often use 3d printed camera mounts arm protectors antenna holders and a variety of other stuff the problem was that everything i had made until that point was made of pla which is this hard rigid plastic but what i really needed were parts made of tpu which is a malleable plastic and when i got some tpu to test it out this happened okay actually that's not true at all after adjusting the settings a little bit it didn't do a horrible job but the prints definitely weren't as clean as when i was using the hard plastic i would always get some sort of imperfections and sometimes they would randomly decide to completely fail on me as well after speaking to a few people that know more about 3d printing than i do i learned that to get the best results what i should do is modify a few parts of my printer and that was that i put that on the back burner along with the countless other things that i hoped to get to one day but then a few months later i heard that a new version of this printer was coming out one that was just as easy to set up and use as the one i had but already equipped with the add-ons i needed to print with a wider range of plastics as well as some other features to make it even better so being the lazy person that i am i reached out to reality asking if they would send me one and they agreed so here we are the ender 3 s1 would this be the perfect 3d printer for casual hobbyists like me that mostly wants a hands-off experience that's what i tried to find out okay so the setup was actually even easier than the ender 3v2 with the s1 a majority of the printer came pre-assembled in the box so there were less steps that you have to do yourself the instructions that came with it were relatively clear but i did find that following along with a youtube video made it a lot more straightforward i'd say that if i wasn't filming it probably wouldn't have taken more than 15 minutes to get the whole thing set up once it was all set up the next step was to level the bed to do this all i had to do was power on the printer and select the auto leveling function this was another thing that had to be done manually on the ender 3v2 and is something a lot of beginners struggle with so the auto leveling is a huge plus after that though the one thing i did have to adjust manually was the nozzle's distance from the print bed and that is done by adjusting the setting called z offset now to properly adjust the nozzle distance on my previous printer pretty much every youtube video i watched said that to get the best results you want the nozzle to be the distance of one piece of paper away from the print bed now every time i did that i ended up getting amazing results however i tried this tip on the ender 3s1 and i'm not sure why but the same tip does not seem to apply after the paper trick apparently it was still too close causing the filament to adhere rather strongly and leaving a permanent mark and now everybody knows that i was trying to print free bitcoins anyways i ended up lifting the nozzle a little bit more than i normally would and i found that that worked a lot better all right now let's look at some of the features that make this printer unique starting with the biggest upgrade the sprite direct dual gear extruder which is this contraption here based on what i can see with my very amateur perspective instead of the motor that is used to control the flow of the plastic filament being placed back here and then pushing the filament through this tube and into the extruder on the s1 all of that is built into this one extruder head this makes it easier to load and remove filament gives the filament a shorter distance to travel faster retraction speeds and for me the most important part is that this is what makes the printer better at working with softer plastics i honestly don't know why that is but apparently this is where the magic happens the ender 3 s1 also has cr touch automatic bed leveling which i showed you earlier it has dual z-axis motors and screws for more vertical precision when printing and it has this removable magnetic sheet which seems to have better adhesion than the glass bed on the other printer it makes it easier to remove your prints since you can bend it at the top here there's also a filament run out sensor that will stop your print if you run out of plastic and should also allow you to continue the print once you add more the lcd screen is almost identical on both printers but i do like that the s1 comes with a full sized sd card slot instead of microsd now to print an item it's also surprisingly easy let me show you the first step is to find an item that you want to print a popular website for this is thingiverse.com i found this gopro mount for my drone which seems like something i could use so i downloaded that step 2 is downloading a piece of software called a slicer now what a slicer does is it takes your 3d model and converts it into instructions that your printer can understand one thing that i didn't realize is that in 3d printing most of the adjustments that you make to your print are made in your slicer not on the actual printer itself now creality the company that makes the ender 3 printers has their own slicer that you can download however i chose to use cura which is another popular option when you open the program you pretty much just have to select the printer you have which material you will be printing with and you can choose a preset or change some settings if you want then you just click slice and you can save it directly to an sd card then you put that sd card in the printer and the printer will do the rest of the work for you now for my first attempt i tried printing the exact same object with the exact same settings that i tried on my ender 3 v2 this may or may not be very clear on camera but the new print clearly has fewer imperfections than the previous one i decided that next i should test it on a bigger item that might actually be useful to me which was when i downloaded the gopro mount now on my first attempt i noticed that it was printing the mount but with a lot of stringing and imperfections so i stopped the printing halfway and tried to make some adjustments i tried again and the result was similar but i would say a little bit better then after another half hour of watching a few more videos and applying a few more tips on literally my third attempt i was able to get a result that i was happy with straight off the printer it looked like this with some minor imperfections and some wispy stringing on the inside but after taking a minute to remove it all it looked like this honestly not including the time that it took the printer to do its job i would say that i spent maybe an hour total fine tuning the settings all right so is this printer everything that i hoped for well i learned that although 3d printing technology has become very accessible it's not a completely hands-off experience it will require you to watch a few tutorials at the start to understand the basics but that being said although it would take some time to master the learning curve really isn't that high to get started funny enough after trying this i actually feel kind of motivated to learn some 3d modeling so that might be something i try soon as for the two printers the one that you decide to get will probably depend on your budget the ender 3 v2 is currently 262 dollars while the s1 is 429 almost 170 difference now i would guess that with a bit more experience you could probably get great tpu prints on both printers but the s1 definitely makes it easier for you especially if you're a noob like me anyways hope you guys enjoyed this video and i'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Matt Pochwat

Views: 201,790

Keywords: 3d printing, creality ender 3 s1, ender 3 s1 review, ender 3 s1, best 3d printer 2022, 3d printing for beginners

Id: bU0L0aBNgjw

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022