My Ender 3 Journey 2.5 Years Later! Still Worth Getting?

when i pre-ordered my ender 3 in april of 2018 i was so excited to get my first creality printer at that point i'd already been 3d printing for a couple of years and the cr-10 had gained a ton of popularity up until that point i had a lot of friends that really liked their cr-10 machines and on multiple occasions i almost got one but i really didn't have a need for such a large form factor printer well then creality released their cr-10 mini which to me was way more attractive and way more something in the realm of what i would want and after talking to my buddy chuck over at filament friday i was nearly sold on picking one up but life got busy and i still decided to hold off when crowley announced their ender 3 which was essentially a smaller even smaller more budget-friendly version had a lot of the things that made the cr-10 machine so popular i was sold and instantly pre-ordered one at the time i ordered it i had no idea that it would blow up to the extent that it did and that it would actually change the way i looked at budget 3d printers forever a couple of months after i bought that machine i made a video calling it the best budget friendly or best beginner 3d printer of 2018 and with christmas being around the corner and it being two and a half years later i felt it was time to revisit that so today's video is going to be all about the ender 3 printer we're going to talk about my journey with it from when i pre-ordered it all the way up until now and we're going to see if i still feel the same way about it we're also going to go over the plethora of mods and upgrades i've done to it it's going to be quite a long video so without further ado let's get right into today's video [Music] up until the end of three most of the 3d printers that i've gotten were complete kits taking an entire day to assemble and a lot of them used acrylic frames which meant that they were much more difficult to keep calibrated for someone that wanted to get into 3d printing at that point you either had to fork out quite a bit more money to get something that was already put together and fully assembled or you had to put in the work and this was something that i think was a huge hurdle for a lot of people wanting to get into 3d printing because maybe the full kit was too intimidating or i had seen plenty of people that thought they would be able to get the kit and assemble it and just had nothing but problems and were never able to get a good print off of these full kit machines so when my ender 3 did finally show up i was so excited i cracked the printer open right away and within 30 or 40 minutes i had this printer fully assembled put together and ready to do some printing and after a first couple of prints off of the machine i was blown away by the surface quality that i was getting with like no tweaking whatsoever on this 200 printer at that time i was going to school as well as running a small print farm out of my room where i was selling parts that i made online and the ender 3 instantly was added to that print farm and began cranking out parts right away after just a couple of months of owning the ender 3 i decided that i wanted to upgrade just the bed on it to a flex plate system this is something that i had seen around a lot but i'd never experienced for myself and the main issue i was having was that some of the parts i was printing out were really flat and kind of big and so it was difficult for me to get the spatula underneath it sometimes and i got really tired of having to pry away at it so i went ahead and picked up a built tank flex plate system at the time they either didn't have the size for the ender 3 the 9.25 by 9.25 or they were just out of stock so i opted for a 9x10 which is what i've been using on this machine ever since then it's completely fine on the x-axis but on the y-axis it does stick out about an inch roughly but it's never caused any problems and it was a huge game changer for my overall experience and really spoiled me in now that i just love using flex plate systems and almost dread having to take the spatula to a printer so once i had installed the flex plate system i printed with the machine completely stock for another couple of months and then i decided that i wanted to add auto bed level into this printer the majority of the parts that i had printed fine when they were just kind of in the center of the bed but when i wanted to go bigger than like four to five inches i ran into some inconsistencies and was hoping that getting a bl touch to do a mesh bed leveling would fix that so i went through the process of flashing a boot loader printing out a mount for the bl touch mounting the bl touch wiring it in and configuring a stock marlin to work with this and by some miracle everything worked perfectly well which this was the first time i had done a bltouch install so there's always a chance things go wrong the first time but i was able to get it up and running and it made a huge difference in just me not having to worry about re-leveling the bed or checking on anything when i was running big prints and i ran it with the flex plate system and the bl touch very heavily printing out parts non-stop almost for the next four months then when november came around micro swiss had released their all metal drop and hot end for the ender 3. and the main reason why this was attractive to me was that i'd always wanted to experiment or do a bit of printing with nylon but i wasn't able to on really any of my machines because they were all ptfe lined so i went ahead and picked up the microsource hotend and installed it which was really easy to do and because i'd already flashed the bootloader over to my ender 3 and i had that custom marlin configuration all i had to do was change the max temp to the new max that it was able to hit and i was set and i was able to print now with nylon filaments then in december something kind of strange happened i did make a video about this back then but in december the bl touch seemed to stop working and it was working in the sense that the probe would deploy it would go around and do its leveling points but it didn't seem to actually take it didn't seem like it was actually saving to eprom or saving at all and what would happen is when i was printing on one side of the printer the nozzle would be way too close going into the bed on the other side it would be printing up in the air and it was a total pain i went ahead and tried just about everything from checking the wiring checking the firmware reflashing the firmware starting with clean firmware and i for the life of me could not figure it out and got crazy frustrated and at that point decided you know what the leveling on this isn't that difficult it's not that big of a bed and i had gotten much better at just leveling in general so i went ahead and actually removed the bl touch and went back to manual bed leveling so at this point the ender 3 was pretty much able to print with all of the filaments i'd thrown at it which i tried pla abs pet nylon as well as some tpus on tpus they were just tpus around 95 a short hardness and i didn't go any softer i tried ninjaflex which is 85a shore hardness and i just never had any luck with it either i ran into under extrusion inconsistent extrusion or just lots of jams and clogging and around that time somebody reached out to me that had created a pretty simple budget friendly direct drive setup for the ender 3 which basically just took a bracket that allowed you to move your stepper motor and your stock extruder on top of the hot end making it direct drive so i went ahead and installed that and with that installed i was able to print out with ninjaflex and honestly i was really happy the ender 3 was in a crazy good place and it could do just about everything that i wanted to so with my new direct drive installed i was really excited because now the nd3 could print with all those filaments i'd previously listed and even ninjaflex when i needed it and i did use ninjaflex quite a bit to print out some buttons i printed out a couple of gaskets i printed out some cases so it was really awesome being able to now print with this wide variety of materials and this was the longest period of time i went without touching the ender three i let it run with that configuration for 10 months then 10 months later micro swiss which is the same company that had made that hot end released their own dual gear direct drive setup for the creality ender 3 and most creative machines in general this thing was catered for these types of machines so that way the install process was as simple as it could be i actually did end up installing it and if you want to see how i did that i can place a link in the description down below but this thing was far superior to the direct drive i currently have been running which was just using all of the stock components micro swisses was machined out of aluminum it had a dual hardened steel geared extruder which meant that instead of just being gripped as the filament passes through it's normally just gripped on one side well with the dual gear it's gripped on both sides so it basically eliminates just about all filament slipping and because those gears are hardened steel you can now print with abrasive filaments so things that have carbon things that have glass things that have glow in the dark anything that's abrasive you can now print through this and so i definitely was excited and jumped on that right away and although again the budget-friendly version of the direct drive i'd been running had work up until that point and it had worked quite well this was just an all-around cleaner and better option that allowed you to do even more and really improved my print quality and the reliability of printing in most materials but definitely flexibles as well then just one month later big tree tech released a 32-bit drop-in replacement board for the creality under 3 which is awesome because most of the time when you install a replacement or aftermarket board in your 3d printer it requires you to print out a mount you have to change up all of your plugs like it's very very involved but with big tree techs it was the same form factor it took the same plugs i think it even had the firmware already pre-flashed if i remember correctly for the ender 3 so all you had to do was unplug everything put the new board in plug everything back in and you had a 32-bit board and you had a trinamic drivers so it was a much quieter machine which was a pretty awesome upgrade and along with that i also installed a big old touchscreen which didn't necessarily add all that many features granted there was some additional details i could now see and it made my experience a lot more fun and enjoyable interacting with the machine using a bright touch screen versus the kind of old older style rotary dial or that you know that the stock creator 3 comes with but at this point looking at the ender 3 it was nothing at all like it looked when i first got it you know two years prior at that point the only things that were still stock on the ender 3 was the power supply the aluminum extrusions the stepper motors and the heated bed everything else had pretty much been gutted and at this point i had printed with just about everything from pla all the way up to carbon fiber nylon so i had printed with a ton of filaments in i've put thousands of hours on my ender three i wish that it had a gauge i mean i swapped out the board and stuff like that so it would have been pretty tough unless i wrote down kind of what the amount of print time was on there but with the amount of parts i printed for when i was running it in a print farm to for personal things around the house to content for the channel it's had thousands of hours and this machine has been a beast i do often get comments from people saying well if you've got to do all these mods and things like that why not just get a better printer why not get a machine that already has most of these things and kind of my answer to that is is twofold well the first is you don't have to do all of these mods you don't really have to do any of these mods if you told me that hey i just want a really low cost machine that can print nice pla parts well the ender 3 does that it does that really well and mine did that for many many months before i upgraded anything when it came to the hot end or the extruder if you enclose it it can do abs parts pretty damn well stock as well and i even ran quite a few ptg prints on it before i decided to upgrade the hot end so you don't have to do all these upgrades they're purely optional and you can do you know one of them two of them all of them or none of them depending on what it is that your goals are for your 3d printing and for this machine me for example i mean my channel is it was based off of modding when it first started out i mean the channel's name modbot stems from when this channel first started i was taking video game consoles and i was hacking them up both on the hardware and the software side to make them better to make them more mined to customize them and to add additional features it didn't already have and i really enjoy that so for me being able to take something and use it as is or add my own little tweaks to it as i go or maybe you know swap this or upgrade that i really enjoy that i understand that that's not for everybody and you know again if you've got the bigger budget there's nothing wrong with going with the more expensive machine but for someone that just wants to get started and just wants to learn the technology the stock the stockheader 3 is more than capable and anybody that's been printing for an extended period of time like i'm coming up on like six and a half years of 3d printing and they go back to what they started with you'll know that the ender 3 is substantially better than any of the 3d printers that we were printing with back then and it is really a great option and the people that get to start off with an nd3 versus like an ana a8 or the stuff even prior to that are really lucky what i love about the ender 3 is that at its price point so many more people are able to justify the purchase of a 3d printer if you're not in an industry that requires you to use a 3d printer seeing the industrial 3d printers are just not attainable for so many people but at a price tag of around 200 a lot more people can justify a hobby 3d printer and that's awesome is it the best printer out there absolutely not does it have the most features of any printer out there no way but it is a fantastic starting point for you to get your bearings dip your feet into the technology and like i mentioned and like i showed in this video if you do want to grow with the machine it's certainly able to evolve with you as you begin or as you grow yourself on your journey and the combination of the one that's being i would say that i'd have to see statistics but i would say this is probably the most popular machine out there at all there's probably the most units of it in existence right now and meaning there's a ton of people that can help you if you run into issues there's so many like if you want to fix something or upgrade something or do a mod to your printer look on youtube look in forums you can find 10 10 different tutorials on the same exact thing so if you need to do something the content's out there and that is so valuable when starting off and you're a little bit foreign to this technology or to this space i still strongly believe that two and a half years later the ender 3 is a fantastic budget option for someone looking to get into 3d printing i have seen a ton of people get this machine as their first machine and get very successful with this machine and again either evolve with the machine and do some upgrades as your needs might change or at that point you're ready to get a different machine potentially but i think it is a fantastic starting point and this has been my journey with it the last two and a half years and this is still the same machine that i pre-ordered i've kept it all this time as i've done all these upgrades to it so let me know in the comments down below if we've got any other android 3 owners in the chat or in the in the video i'm sure there's lots of us out there or if you're somebody that's maybe looking to pick up an nd3 for yourself for christmas or just in general i will place links in the description to all the videos i've made on the different upgrades i'll try to place links to all of the various upgrades i've done as well if you want to check them out or order some of these mods for yourself but yeah if you've got any questions at all please let me know i'm always happy to answer them and i hope you guys enjoyed this video as always you guys rock don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos i make a video every single saturday and this this year has been insane the channel has grown so much and it's all thanks to you guys you guys absolutely rock if you do want to support the channel furthermore i'll place links down below in the description huge thank you to my current patreon supporters you guys are absolutely amazing and you guys allow me to do what i love and spend more time doing it which is making content for you guys on that note this has been diana from modbot and i will see you in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 96,597

Keywords: ender 3, ender 3 review, ender 3 2020, ender 3 review 2020, best 3d printer 2020, best budget 3d printer 2020, best Creality printer, Creality Ender 3, beginner 3d printer, desktop 3d printer, ender mods, ender 3 upgrades

Id: wLLfCoDjMyE

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020