Revive Your 3D Printer With These Easy Tune-Up Tips!

hi this is IR Shapiro with make Tech I haven't made a video recently been concentrating on some other things that you'll learn about in the future but a unique opportunity came up to make a video when I'm done reviewing 3D printers I generally donate them to nonprofits to community organizations to local schools once in a while I provide them to friends of mine so I posted on a community group recently that I had some printers I wanted to donate give away somebody reached out to me their son was going to be in charge of a 3D printing group within a overnight camp and they had an Ender 3 at home that he had been practicing on and it stopped working they couldn't use it and so they wondered if I have a different printer he could practice on well I asked him what was wrong with their printer and I told him to bring it over because we probably could just fix it well it ends up there was a surprise that I missed for at least a couple hours but in the interim I completely tuned up their printer I adjusted everything on their printer and then I discovered the solution to their problem so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] so the printer we're going to look at today is a Sint smart Ender 3 Clone I think it's just an Ender 3 generic Ender 3 with the same smart label uh pasted on the front and it looks very much like any other pretty much first or second generation Ender 3 I have't opened it up to see exactly what the control board is inside but it's a very good printer to learn on because you have easy access to all the components that's one of the things I like the most about the first generation Ender 3 so we're going to go through this printer and do some tuneup and then we're going to solve the original problem the original problem is nothing would stick to the print surface so I assumed in the beginning it would just wasn't leveled properly they assured me they'd done it many many times I thought okay I'll try it myself and we'll see what happens when they brought it over there was filament that had broken off just inside the extruder area and so to get it out I needed to disconnect the coupler here that is used to hold the Bowden tube so I explained to them you just push in on the coupler and then you should be able to pull it out and you can see this one came out easily however with their original Bowden tool and coupler it was completely stuck so I unscrewed the coupler using just the wrench that creality or in this case Sint smart provides you with their printers it was still completely stuck so I said to me you know what I have a a piece of Capricorn tubing Capricorn Bowden tubing is a higher grade of tubing that means two things it means the internal diameter is more accurate and it's able to handle a bit higher temperatures so this blue tube here is Capricorn tubing how did I replace it well I just use this wrench to unscrew the couplers on both ends both at the hot end and the coupler on the extruder now there's a trick with Ender Style 3D printers there are two types of hot ends this is the overall hot end assembly one type is a hot and assembly where the Bowen tube actually goes all the way down to just above the nozzle so it goes all the way down inside if you do not push it firmly all the way down your printer is going to jam repeatedly so when you take off the B tube at the top here by disconnecting it here once you have that loose before you attempt to pull this out you have to heat up the hot end why you have filament going through this Bowen tube into the nozzle area and I'm going to go to control to temperature and I'm going to set the nozzle to about 220° C now depending on your filament you may printing at a lower temperature but I want to get it good and hot to make sure it doesn't stick at all this is up to temperature now so now I can take and pull this component out you'll see it was hot right now alternatively we could have just pulled out our filament first and that would have been fine now I'm going to turn this back off and you'll notice that this Bowden tube is coming down fairly far then I'm going to use a little trick I'm going to release the Couer coupler slide it up then I'm going to take the Bowen tube I'm going to push it into the hot end as hard as I can you need to make sure it goes all the way to the bottom then I'm going to slide the coupler down and I'm going to start tightening it if this does not tighten easily then you may have cross threaded it so make sure it's started nicely you should be able to even turn it the first couple turns with your fingers but then we're going to tighten it all the way down now you don't want to ever crank everything anything hard you want everything to be sort of fingertight that means as tight as you can get it pushing with one finger there we go now let me attach the other end that's going to slide back in here and this is less critical on this end make sure that's fingertight and we're good to go now you'll notice the Bowden tube is attached to the electronics cable with some wire ties and then you'll see this little thing on here you know what that is that's a badge holder you buy them in any stationary store um big box stationary store online it's just a great way to keep the cables out of the way while printing so I've just replaced the Bowden tube what's that going to do to my printer well if the tube is a more precise F size the retractions and extrusions of the filament will be more precise and the filament will flow better okay but that's not the reason my friend brought this over to me uh that was a side effect of trying to get this to work um and here by the way is their old Bowden tube and if you look at it it's very distorted on the ends so this might have been holding the filament a little too tight they said that prints weren't sticking so how do we address that well the next thing we're going to do is we're going to level the print bed and I'll show you on these early printers a sneaky way to do that so these are Post-it notes I'm going to take a Post-It note off I'm going to fold it so that the sticky side is stuck together and it's just the right thickness for leveling the printer so there are four knobs under your printer so when you make them looser the bed moves up because there's a spring that expands when you make them tighter the bed moves down so we want it so that when you put this under the print head there's clear tension on the paper but it doesn't rip so how do we get the print head to the zero position well in these early Ender printers and on a lot of entry-level printers there's a little switch hear that and when the Gantry hits that switch it's in the zero position so if you have a single threaded printer not a dual threaded printer but a single threaded printer where there's one Z AIS single z-axis thread you can turn that by hand slowly not too fast until it just clicks the switch hear that okay now so I'm going to get put the print head over this corner right over where the screw is I'm going to put the paper underneath and go to the zero position and then try to move the paper I can't move the paper at all so that says this is too tight so I'm going to tighten the screw TIY righty Lefty Loosey so I'm going to turn it to the right until I can just move this paper okay now I'm going to raise this up I'm going to go to the next position same thing a little too tight good now I'm going to go to the next position that one was about right to start with and I'm going to go to this position that feels about right now I'm going to put it in the center okay now I'm going to tell you a secret when I first did this the corners were all fine but the center was a little too loose so what did I do I stuck a potit note under the print surface right in the center that's going to move the center up just a little bit it ends up that a lot of these early inexpensive Ender Style printers the center is not quite right so you can use a Post-It note to make that adjustment okay so now that this is adjusted I can go ahead ahead and try to print so what did I do next well I tried to print using the default Cur settings for pla nothing stuck I'm thinking you know I've done this before I'm pretty good at it so I took out a something called magu magu is a print bed adhesive that gives you a little bit more latitude about how perfectly your print bed is aligned I tried it again still nothing stuck I'm thinking what's going on here so the next thing I noticed was that a lot of things were loose on this printer the belts were loose the print module the print head system was loose there was a little bit of play so I decided I'm going to tighten everything up next okay so the belts on this printer are controlled by these two bolts right here you loosen them them up and then you can slide that out and tighten them down and you want to get that pretty much as tight as you can make it the belts on the bottom are controlled by these bolts down here same thing you really can't make them too tight on these printers so pull it out once again fingertight pull it out you don't want to be musling it now how do you stabilize this print head well under the print head I'm going to show you a picture is a special nut called an eccentric nut it's a nut where the hole is not in the very center it's off center so as you rotate it there's a round base on the back so as you rotate it it will move in or out very interesting design so that's how you adjust these wheels when you turn these Wheels by hand the print bed should move the print head should move even even if you're holding the print head you should not be able to turn these by hand with the print head not moving if you can this eccentric nut underneath is too loose so put the wrench that you got from creality or your print manufacturer on that eccentric nut so I have that on there now so I'm going to loosen this first just to show you and now you'll see yeah that loosens it now you'll see that I can turn these more without the print head moving so I need to tighten that up so I'm going to tighten it up and that'll make sure that this is not going to move up and down now you don't you want it once again fingertight if you make it too tight these wheels will wear down too quickly likewise there's eccentric nuts that control the wheels on the bottom under the print surface you also want to take and control those then I'm ready to try it again let me show you how I try it I turn on the printer I go to any website and find a print bed leveling print now before I do a test print obviously I have to put my filament back in so I'm going to mount the filament on here I'm going to cut it off on a nice sharp angle so I have a good point on there I'm going to load this filament into the extruder while pressing the two buttons together so that it just aligns with the Bowden tube and I'm going to press it in in until it comes to a stop now it will not extrude now why cuz the print head is cold so I'm going to go to the front of the printer I'm going to go to control let me turn this so I can see it temperature nozzle and I'm going to turn this up to 220 okay this is up to temperature now so I'm going to squeeze the spring on the back so that the path is nice and straight and I'm going to push on the filament and we should see it should extrude nicely out of the front there now I'm ready to do a test print so I'm going to go to print from TF card I'm going to select the print bed test now I'm going to start it Printing and we'll see if it sticks properly to the print surface and now it's printing what's called a purge line line that's a line just to make sure the filament's flowing and see I'm rubbing my finger on it it shouldn't rub off if with a light rub it comes right off it's not adhering properly now it's printing a skirt which is an area around my print and you can take and look at it as it prints and you can see here it's not sticking at all now I can take and unscrew each of these knobs a quarter turn that will move the print surface up a little tighter and we'll see if that helps so even while it's printing the initial skirt or even your print I'll get this other filament out of the way you can attempt to continue to fine-tune the printer so if I loosen these it's going to move the print bed up a little more we go even a little more and now we're seeing that it's a little better but it's still not working properly so my next thought was that the print temperature calibration was not working properly that means the thermister the thermostat that in essence the thermometer that's measuring the temperature wasn't calibrated properly and the way you calibrate that is by doing what's called a PID calibration let me show you quickly how to do that so I'm I'm going to take my cable I'm going to open up my Chromebook and this could also be a laptop I'm going to plug it into the USB a connector and plug it into the printer then I'm going to go to a website called 3dy Printing hyen tools. make.com and I'm going to show you this on the screen now the feature we want to use on this site is called terminal so I'm going to click on Terminal and I'm going to click connect and if I have the cable connected properly when I click connect it should say USB serial now if you're on a Windows machine it'll say like Comm 3 um on a Mac it does say USB so it'll depend on your device so we need to connect to the USV device and you'll see a display down at the bottom the what's happening is those are display messages coming from the control board on this computer so as an example I can typee in I'm going to click on uppercase commands and reverse log just to make it easier there many printers you have to send the commands in uppercase this will make it automatic I'm going to type in m115 return and what this just showed me was the version of the firmware on this computer and what the basic settings are set to Now to turn on pit calibration if we look down here we'll see that to calibrate our hot end we type in m303 e0 and then a temperature so I'm going to type right up here m303 e0 s for the temperature let's calibrate it for 220° hit a return and you'll see here it says autotune started now what is it's going to do is it's going to tell the temper the printer to go to a specific temperature then it's going to measure the temperature it actually gets to and it's going to keep doing that over and over using a sophisticated algorithm in order to determine how accurate the measurement and heating system is and then it's going to give me a series of numbers to enter back into the printer so that it's properly calibrated so let's let this finish now while I was waiting I just noticed that I had a Post-It note right here on the side of this printer that said m301 the 301 command is the way you put the numbers back in to set them and p i and d as in PID those are the numbers we're going to set we'll see here it says autotune finished and what the values are that we should put into our configuration file so I'm going to take and enter some values here M31 then p 3.39 i 2.52 d 91.4 it said okay now I can do an M500 and that will save it in this printer if I don't to the M500 when I turn the printer off it's going to go back to the other values so this should be calibrated properly so I went ahead and I made another test print still didn't stick I then put on some magig go magig go is a bed adhesive that makes things stick better still didn't stick I'm thinking I've done this literally hundreds of times so then I'm looking at the filament my friend brought over it's from Eon it's one of the new pla pluses and I see here on the front it says temperatures 205 to 225 typical pla is 180 to 220 or lower so that's probably why it wasn't sticking so I went and I resliced at first layer 230 print bed 6 5 future layers print bet 60 and then at 210 and let's see what happens so we're going to go ahead and start the test print okay it's setting the home position now it's printing a purge line The Purge line is sticking very nicely won't this be interesting maybe I didn't need to do all this work it was good to learn anyways it was good to do but maybe it was just temperature and now it's printing the skirt that's going to print around my print and it's sticking better but it's not perfect so I'm going to raise the print bed a little bit more by going about a quarter turn on each of these and let's see if it's sticking better oh much better now actually going to go a little bit more and that's one of the nicest things about these Ender three printers is with these big dials here you can adjust it as it's printing and now it's actually sticking quite well if I rub my finger over it it looks like it's right the bead looks relatively round I want to flatten it out just a little bit so I can go a little bit further up and remember tidy righty Lefty Loosey and so if I tighten it it pulls the bed down if I go to the right if I go to the left it moves the bed up and now it's sticking perfectly but once again it's still a little bit round you want the bead to be a flattened bead you don't want to see it breaking up like it's having trouble printing it sort of like drawing of chalk on a sidewalk you don't want it to have that look but you also don't want it to be a completely round bead you want it to be a flat bead and this looks like we're in good shape now so it's wonderful that I did all of these adjustments i t tightened the belt I adjusted the temperature with the pit adjustment I adjusted the wheels with the eccentric screws I changed the Bowden tube to a higher quality Bowden tube you'll notice I have this little thing here that's just a very simple thing that's a badge holder I use it to keep the cable out of the way they sell for I don't know 10 bucks on Amazon and now we can see that this print is printing very nicely including in the center cuz I put a Post-It note under the center so folks sometimes it's the simplest thing check the temperature of your filament but today we learned how to maintain and support an ender3 style 3D printer thanks for watching please subscribe to the channel recommend it to your friends share this video have a great day and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 6,609

Keywords: 3d modeling, 3d printer, 3d printing, 3d printing videos, 3d printing videos youtube, additive manufacturing, additive manufacturing 3d printing, anatomy of a 3d printer, cool 3d printing videos, how to 3d print, how to 3d print anything, what is 3d printing, what is 3d printing technology, what is 3d printing video, creality ender 3, bowden tube coupler, bowden tube ender 3, bowden tube removal, bowden tube stuck, bowden tube upgrade ender 3, bowden tube upgrade, Ender

Id: eUt1459WTJI

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024