How to Upgrade the Creality Ender-3 | Essential Upgrades!

[Music] hey guys what's up today I'm gonna be upgrading my under 3 so I wanted to kind of take you guys through the actual little build process of what I'm gonna be doing the upgrades I got and just kind of explain like why I'm actually doing it so this is just a standard under 3 I haven't upgraded anything on it yet but this was never supposed to be my under 3 basically this was donated by a friend on Facebook for a program that I teach but since the virus and all that I haven't really been able to teach the class so instead of it just kind of sitting there collecting dust I decided bring it home little work for me a little bit but I don't want to give it back broken so to make it a little more reliable I finally decided to upgrade a few things to get it basically on par with my other printers and I'm gonna show you guys what those upgrades are and how I'm gonna make it just a little bit more reliable and these are really the only upgrades I would ever recommend on any of these printers all the other ones are just preference and personal choice I also got a couple little upgrades for my a net 8 build but nobody really gives a crap about that get a better angle so you guys can kind of see what I'm doing here so some of the upgrades I got was this really cool new magnetic flexible build plate it has really good adhesion and then you just pull it off like a big magnet and flex it and the prick pops off I also got my hands on a boding Capricorn tube and this is gonna replace this stock white Capricorn or Bowden tube I got an all-metal extruder some new leveling bed springs so first up I think we're gonna swap those bed springs so let's take off this so we're also gonna get rid of this finally and so let's go so a good way to get these screws out all you have to do is actually squeeze the bed down a little bit pinch it and then you can spin the knob for at all instead of having to sit there and unscrew by hand and obviously this is gonna throw my entire bed out of level and we're going to we're done but on a tender that is ridiculously easy we got our four adjustment knobs we're gonna lift this up we're gonna pull one two three over the factory Springs out and then this fourth one's kind of stuff in there and we'll pull him out so there are the four factory Springs then you can hold this up and we're gonna actually maneuver this first one in under here because that's where the little break for the heated bed is to help support the wires we actually put that one in first so before I put these in this is the difference in the springs right here it's easy this one's squishes and pops down this one's a lot tougher so what this is gonna help with is a leveling your bed it's gonna give you more spring tension these ones wear down over time and just they're really just not good look how much I could compress that I can look at that difference the other thing is when you start getting really big heavy prints that use a lot of filament this can actually get compressed down just from the weight of that print and it can get thrown off off whack this will stay in that level better and it's gonna put more tension on those Springs so if you're a head of one of these adjustment leveling knobs come loose while you're actually printing this will help fix that problem all right so now all four screws are back on with the new Springs so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually pinch this down a lot and then spin a knob up a good amount because we're gonna have to read level this bed and you don't want the nozzle colliding with it so we're gonna want to make the bed as low as possible and now since we have this all nice and ready to go we can actually put on our magnetic bed now people can debate all day what the bed best build surface is and what works and what doesn't I switch to magnetic flex beds because they made printing armor parts a lot easier I was using a lot of rafts and tree supports and it just made the print we're finished I pop off the plate get print off put it back on and I'd be printing again I hope would clean my magnetic beds on my create my CR tens maybe I don't know once a month if that and they would still print just fine so this comes in two parts it's gonna have the actual magnetic bed and then the build plate so we can move the build plate away and this gets actually permanently affixed to this now you can clean this down with alcohol that's total from my friends up to you I never did on my other one say they're still sticking just fine now if you're sitting here wondering what weight you're gonna put this on you're gonna cover up your screws there's no point to really ever take these out if you're ever gonna loosen this year that undo here and undo the adjustment knob and then you're gonna take that out so it doesn't matter if you lock these screws now now we're gonna want to get this nice and square obviously and I don't know if there's an overhang lip so let's take a look at that so we're gonna put this on and is this the actual exact same size with no overhang yes it is are so that means we can actually line up one of these corners perfectly and it'll let us line up the rest just right look at that perfect that's it okay now we can throw on our magnetic oh wow look at that look at that oh that's just that just grabs that it's so much stronger I feel like I could lift up half the printer with this thing that is so much stronger than my other magnetic beds I might have to go around and upgrade those soon so what you want to be careful of is now that you have this magnetic bed you want to be careful with the clearance on the side because you could always see what your other bed looked like but if the bed gets put on to the left or right what will happen is it'll collide with the rail right here and it can mess up your print so you always want to make sure you're doing this also don't move your printer like this like I'm doing it's actually kind of bad for it you want to unplug the stepper motors because if you actually put the screen right here you see a power on for a second it's back feeding electricity into the system so do as I say not as I do so again let's make sure the leveling Bedknobs are pretty tight and this is already looking beautiful and I just love how this looks now funny thing is there's no reason we can't go back and use this if we take off the magnetic bed and put this fiberglass bed back on and put the clips on all you're gonna have to do is read level it again because the thickness of this is very different than the thickness of the magnet so you could very easily swap back and forth once you do this upgrade if for some reason the magnetic bed you don't want to use it you can put glass on this as long as it gets warm you're good so we're gonna put the magnet back on okay yeah I love I just love how that goes on I still use these bed clips even though it's magnetic just for extra security because why not the last thing you want is your print getting knocked off and your bed peeling up so that's it beds upgraded springs are upgraded we can move on to the next parts which is our our extruder and our hot end sometimes down my first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna want to get this Bowden tube out of this nozzle so we're gonna just pull this clip off a little blue clip and just show you guys a little bit better on what this what we're actually doing here is these are the couplers for your Bowden tube the bigger one sits on your nozzle right here and the skinnier one usually sits back here on your extruder so if you've never taken these off if this came all built up there's a little lock in there so when you push this down it releases the lock of the tube sliding in there so if I push this through it goes through but it doesn't want to come back out however if I push this lock down see it comes out I can push it it slides out so that's all we're gonna do it might be really stuck in there I've had I've seen people to have this real issue pushing this down you know what why am I even doing this let's do it this the other way let's do this the smart way sometimes you just have one of those moments you're like why am I wasting my time we can just take this coupler out it's gonna spin around hot end or it's gonna spin around the tube so let's just take this out leave the tube in there we're not using either of these so if you're gonna replace your Bowden tube I would replace the coupler with the with the one that the votans who came with its new you know it's gonna work so see the couplers slid up and now we're just gonna pull this out so I'm a jerk and I never had this problem with my CR ten or any of the other printers all upgraded but it's bonum tubes really stuck in there so we're actually gonna go through we're gonna heat up the nozzle real quick just to release that well that's heating up we can go ahead and take off the extruder side and it comes off the exact same way you're gonna pull in a little blue clip out and then me being a dumb-dumb I'm just gonna again loosen this entire thing we're going to leave this off because we're gonna be swapping our extruder out anyway [Music] so you can either cut the zip ties or on this you can actually force these off so see that coupler came off that's fine and make sure you put you move around what a coupler that went to what and we're actually just gonna pull this tube out from the zip ties cuz I'm gonna feed the new boat into it through those zip ties so that's out oh there we go okay so that came right out and you can actually see right from the factory that this wasn't even cut level it's already kind of janky and messed up aside from when I did to it so this coupler we can pull right through now I would save all this this is still good in case you ever need an extra but we don't want that way to anymore [Music] all right so now [Music] what we can do right now is get our new coupler thread this in [Music] and since this is since the nozzles hot we're gonna actually go in and push our new boat into in as far as possible in case there's any filament kind of dunked up down there alright so that's warm we're gonna go through and tighten this on doesn't need to be incredibly tight because God forbid you have to take it off one day but tight enough all right so now we have our Capricorn too now this probably came with a lot of slack I've already kind of cut this in half to use it for another printer but what we what we're gonna want to do is size it up basically as long as it's about the same length as the wire you should be in good shape so this looks like it's gonna work just fine because you want it to be able to travel all the way left and right and then what you want to make sure is that this is cut as square and flush as possible so when it goes down into your hot end it makes a good seal there's a ton of videos on this I've been eyeballing it since I got the printer and you just want to make a nice square fluff you just want to make a nice square flush cut with a exacto knife or a razor so put it up against something I've honestly put it up against the rail before and just made a nice cut so we're gonna square this back up [Music] I'm pretty happy with that and then do two cuts do one on each side because whichever one is worse that one can go on your extruder because it's less important so it gives you two chances to do this without wasting too much material so that was a little crooked that one's perfect so this side is gonna be for my hot head so all we're gonna do is push it down in there and it's gonna go in there a good amount so let's see so it's gonna go in there for my for my finger down so if it only goes in that much you know you're kind of caught on something so wiggle it around push it all the way down that's pretty much in there and lift that up and you're going to throw your clip back on us [Music] and that's in there cool so our tubes installed and we can feed it back through our zip ties or you can just clip them and add new zip ties dealer's choice I don't like wasting stuff so we're gonna feed this back [Applause] okay so that's good to go moves all the way so we're not going to screw the scene yet because now we're gonna mess with the extruder but since this is in tight we're actually gonna let this cool down now so let's swap out this extruder now with the wire out of the way okay let's unplug the plug this all right first thing we got to do is get this lever arm off and see if I get a better angle for you guys that's pretty good I think we can live with that so we can what we can do first is relieve this spring tension in here now you all you'll need mostly is what the kit came with and all the tools that provide it when you built your printer whenever braking torque on any of the screws on your printer use the flat side first and then spin it off with the round side it's a real good way to strip out a nut and then you're gonna be really mad at yourself alright cool so no so why upgrade your all-metal why upgrade to an all-metal extruder so unfortunately what happens over time is as there's spring tension pushing against this arm right here this is all plastic and it's gonna constantly have that pressure what happens sadly is this gets hot heats the plastic up it gets cold again this gets hot that stepper motor warms up he hot cold hot cold constant pressure it'll crack right here from that spring tension and one day you just won't have an extruder so I've had it happen on one of mine and I've just started upgrading them to begin with so I don't ever ever lose any extrusion so now this is a free arm again brake torque that we can take this top arm off a lot of these parts can be used back on the all-metal extruder so it's just good to save these in case you ever need to swap anything okay and then we're gonna take the rest of these screws off one of them is this size but when you take the last one off your extruder is gonna want to fall or your the stepper motor for your extruder is gonna want to fall down so just be careful you don't want it to damage anything when it falls oh that was disgustingly loose so if you've never seen your extruder motor off it's just a stepper motor with these two little set screws in there holding it on against itself and then it's bends so we can I don't want to mess up that's fine we'll put that there carefully then we take off our plastic extruder now this this is a nice upgrade this is actually the Cree allottee brand all model looks true yours might be red I got my other red ones off Amazon they do the same thing I think they were the same price really actually so this is I believe an aluminum one and this is just the you know plastic now this might be a good time to actually swap over this extruder here because you can already actually see that there's our groove getting worn into it so I'm actually gonna go ahead and swap this around we're gonna do is take your smallest allen key and not strip these screws out like I was just talking about and if you've ever taken this off or put or messed with this what you want to pay attention to is when you take this off there's actually a flat side to this stepper motor gear and you want one of those screws to be against that flat side you actually see it left a little bit of an indent if you don't put that there what will happen is you'll tighten it up and then this can still spin around so you're gonna want to lock it against that flat side now I can actually use the alignment where that hole was to kind of figure out and it'll want to kind of go back into that groove so it's actually sitting perfectly in there now and you might as well use that same indent that it left originally and this can be adjusted once it's back once it's back on the printer but that should be the right alignment anyway so now we got our nice new shiny extruder here on there too so let's pop this back up alright that'll go there this will sit here now let's look at our hardware and how this is going to go on so it's going to come with a couple different screws and the ones you want to pay attention to this is a little bit of a recess so you can see there's like an indent in there and this is gonna want this flat screw because this arm is gonna want to move over top of that and you don't want it to hit so that one's gonna go there and what we can do right away is actually use that first screw since we know exactly where it goes to hold up our extruder stepper so not too tight because I still need to move this around a little bit but that's in place and then the next ones are gonna be two normal-sized ones these are just you know normal allen keys and you can you can use some of the hardware that came off your other the plastic one that's fine but we got all this nice new fancy hardware might as well use it okay working at very odd angles for you guys alright so now we gotta put the arm on and if this came out that's fine just throw that back in there this is so when you tighten down the bolt it actually has a chance to spin around so if I put this in there and even if it's tight it's gonna actually spin around it alright and then what we can do is we can actually build this up before it goes on and I believe it's this small spur right here so you're going to put one small screw into the back of the arm oops don't drop that so screw that in a good amount because what this is gonna do this is gonna help align your spring like that and it's gonna give it something to actually push on so that one's on there and we can actually go ahead and put this bearing on so this bearing is gonna sit right here it's gonna get a washer on top of it so build this build that and that's it no nope I grabbed the wrong one apologies this is what goes through there I knew that looked a little weird [Applause] so it's actually the the flat allen key one doesn't need as much Toretto's it was starting to come through the bottom and I wasn't sure why so you don't want this one incredibly tight because this bearing is still going to want to move around and if you tighten this too much [Applause] if you tighten this too much it's actually not gonna spin at all so right there that's pretty good and we tighten it a little bit more and I know that sounds weird but what you're doing is you're crushing the bearings in there so that's actually a little looser than I will right there cool so you can actually actually see that spinning around good let's put this little soffit thingy back in there great and then we need our long screw so now we're going to put that in there and actually attach the arm and this is going to be the last bolt that's holding our extruder up for stepper motor my bad okay so I just tighten that down a lot and it actually doesn't want to move too much so don't make this too tight you want this to be able to wiggle or move so right there I like that now we're going to put the screw into the back here so what you can do before you actually tighten that in all the way you can actually put this in the spring it's a little kind of guide gear and you're gonna push this in and there's a couple different like you know you could have done this in a different order that's fine but I'm gonna line that up then screw this in and this can pretty much go down almost all the way but let's see so right there okay that's it our streeter gear works it's contacting nicely and we can spin our stepper around a little so relieve tension spin our stepper and you're gonna kind of want to eyeball and look at it in this direction the channel on this silver bearing let me see if I can get the other one so you're gonna want to make sure that this extruder Deere is in line with the center of that bearing because if it's like this it's not going to be pushing filament you want to be in the middle as possible so it'll be something like that so as it's pushing and spinning it's actually pulling the filament through oh I didn't realize that it actually gave me just one and the smaller coupler that came with my boat into is actually too small so good thing we saved the larger coupler is now it's an upgraded size this is the size of the one that was on our plastic one and now it's asked it wants us to put on the bigger one fine by me probably tightening this way too much but it'll be alright so that's on and again the same way we're gonna push this all the way through and it's gonna go in a quarter to half of an inch and you'll feel it stop and then you now use your bigger clip to lock that side into all right that is very business they're got tools everywhere so usually you're boating Capricorn tube when you buy the kit it comes with enough to do like two printers you could probably do three and their threes with the kit I was able to do to create EC our tens with it so you'll always have extra the only difference now is there's no clip here to hook the wire up so you can get creative with how you want to attach this but all I'll do is I'll actually use this spring and I'll just throw zip tie underneath it grab the wire and then zip tie it to it and not tight at all because I don't want this to move around and get caught but the spring is only ever gonna move when you move it so that's enough to just hold it there and then the wires back in place cut off cutting zip ties is the best sound in the world so that's good that's ready to go we can load filament so everything is on our extruders on our Bowden tube is fed in we have our magnetic bed our new Springs are on so what I've done is I've gone and preheated everything because now we need to level our bed again make sure that your bed is bonded down as much as possible so again we moved our bed down all the way and now we want to make sure that this doesn't contact so when you go to auto home sorry camera died anyway so you go to auto home you just want to keep an eye as the nozzle comes down and doesn't contact the bed what you can do is maybe take something like a screwdriver and just have it really close to your Z stop and then if it's gonna hit the bed before it hits your Z stop trigger over here just press it and it'll think it's at home so let's go although home all right to move up Z close to my wall they're active it bad so our gantries all the way down we're at on auto home zero we're heated up and we're ready to go so I'm gonna show you guys just how I level the bed real quick and but the whole time you're gonna want to make sure that as you're moving this nozzle around that it's not gonna collide with your bed now some printers have a cool little level corners feature and I think if I was to flash the firmware on this under I couldn't get that feature but unfortunately I don't have it so we're an auto home make sure it's in the corner and now we're gonna manually move the access over each of the bed leveling screws almost four corners but not all the way in the corner so we don't want to hit these binder clips so let's move in I think it's about thirty or forty so we'll do forty and then we're gonna start moving over remove the X thirty or forty over so we're floating just above that spring we're gonna take a piece of paper or sticky note and we're gonna slide it under here and we're gonna start moving this around as we raise the bed up now always test it while you're not touching it because you pushing on this leveling spring is gonna actually mess up the reading that you're getting kind of through the feel so we're gonna start moving up there we go so I'm gonna raise the bed up until it just starts to scrape between the nozzle and the paper so right about there okay and now we're gonna move the X all the way to the other side and I keep the paper underneath it the whole time while moving it to make sure I don't start rubbing and grabbing on the on the bed so again do the same thing or it starts to loosen the knob move this up now remember we're going to go back over to the other side eventually because if we're moving the left and the right side it can tilt and twist and we don't want that to happen so that's good alright now we're gonna move the y-axis that way and we're gonna check that back corner right up there ooh see right there it actually got tight by itself so I'm gonna stop and lower the bed a little bit okay straight out there okay and well I'm gonna go around and do real quick is I'm gonna do all four corners again just to make sure [Music] right about there and I'm gonna make sure the paper kind of just barely scrapes and grabs and I can feel it touching just a little bit that's perfect that means our beds not really warped or messed up so we're gonna Auto home this again and we're gonna actually pump out our first print on this new system real fast so I just have a little bit of extra white PLA I just want to check my first couple lines and I have a bench e print already loaded in here all right I pushed my filament through manually I'm getting some drip out the bottom let's send a print [Music] I'm going to want to watch this first layer real closely [Music] so that prime line came out perfect wow that is some next-level adhesion right there I can't even get that off [Music] there we go Wow [Music] so right now it's writing the letters from the bench II and if you really pay attention to exactly how the filaments going down does it look like it's being dragged and kind of placed on it or is it being switched down so actually now that it's writing it in the middle I'm actually starting to think I have to braise the bed up just a little but I'm gonna wait for it to get done with this whole first layer first [Music] I'm also paying attention to the bearing and the little guide channel over here to make sure this is spinning that it's actually pulling filament through because we don't want it to be under extruding at all and this is some really really crappy white PLA and it's still sticking pretty nicely so we can actually tell that we're on the second layer by looking at our z axis over here because we're using a point two millimeter layer height in the settings and now we're at point four so we've gone up that little bit so once it's done with this second layer I'm gonna stop the print to see how everything looks and now it moved up to point six so now we're on our third layer so I'm gonna go ahead and stop this and then after we stop the print we're gonna want to disable our steppers so I can move everything so I just pulled this out really quick and really hot and this is a good way to check to see if your Bowden tubes all the way down I don't have any weird shape here it's nice and straight the whole way and then it goes into the nozzle and that's it this is what I just pulled out if there was like a weird gap here or almost I think there was it was a piece cut out or taken out that's going to tell if you have some type of clock in your nozzle or i'ma break in your boat into so now we can pop this off and then it just flexes right off and then you can grab it that's it I had actually left the middle of the D on the bed peel this off ready to go again so that does it for this little upgrade video I just wanted to show you guys how I was upgrading the ender I would personally I do all three of these upgrades on all of my printers if they don't come stock with them an all-metal extruder is just great to have they even make an upgraded all-metal extruder that has even better gears on it but they're all metal one works just fine the boding Capricorn tube is just invaluable and it'll save you a lot of headache and nozzle blowouts and any drips or leakage the bed is more of a preference and I get that you can use whatever bed service you like I really just love these magnetic beds they've just served me well I have no adhesion problems ever as long as your bed is nice and leveled you're gonna get nice sticky prints if you're using PLA or PLA plus if you move into a BS and pet G and stuff like that it's a little bit of a different story but I'm only using PLA and PLA plus right now so this stuff is great and the bed springs that's kind of dealer's choice but ever since I've installed them on all my printers I don't have any issues with lovely and what it took us a couple minutes to level there and now we're good to go I could run a bed level test that does each corner but I'm pretty confident in my skills where I think this will this will suffice it was actually writing pretty good with that point two millimeter layer height and that a point for stop nozzle I hope this helped you guys kind of understand the Ender a little bit better and if you guys are any questions like always you know drop a comment message me an Instagram I'll do what I can if you have more questions about the Ender I'm gonna be doing more videos like this on how I'm doing my upgrades and maintaining my printers if you guys haven't already if you could subscribe that'd be absolutely great I really appreciate it because I want to keep showing you guys these types of videos and teaching you and you know sharing everything I've learned with you so I hope you got something from this video and have a good day [Music]

Channel: Frankly Built

Views: 67,153

Keywords: 3dprint, ender3, creality, ender 3, upgrade, 3dprinting

Id: g9tisw3x7Yo

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020