Supersizing an Ender 3 V2: CR-10 Max for half the money

this cr-10 max is a beast with a hermera and large nozzle it's my go-to when i want to print large parts but in a hurry trouble is it costs around a thousand us dollars this ender 3v2 is going to be modified to a similar spec so let's see how much cheaper we can do it [Music] [Music] this cr-10 max really is a beast as you can see it's almost impossible to fit in shot when i reviewed it i did have some initial issues but after a little bit of fettling it's been quite reliable since the best addition i've done was adding a hammer with a volcano hot end and fat nozzle and that lets me print big objects with a 0.4 millimeter layer height and surprising quality at a thousand us dollars and then we add the cost of the hammer this is going to be out of the price range for many people so instead we're going to start with an end of 3v2 a much more realistic proposition and we're going to add parts to make it big make it direct drive we're basically going to match the specs of this printer and see how much cheaper we can do it now when i reviewed this one i had some issues with the bed moving because the springs were very soft i've since replaced those with solid spacers and at the same time i put on a bltouch and upgraded the firmware both of those are covered in an existing video i think this is a good platform to start with the cr-10 max is quite sophisticated it's got a nice color lcd the ender 3v2 has a similar type of interface so that tells me after we upgrade it we're going to have a reasonable amount of polish our first upgrade is something i've done on the video before for the original ender 3 and that is an ender extender kit so let's get started with that and the extender kits have been around for a while now and they come with everything you need to upsize your ender 3 or ender 5 to a much larger printer today we're going to be fitting the end extender 400 v2 this kit has been designed for the ender 3 version 2 and it's going to up the x and y from 220 to 400 millimeters you might remember that last time we fitted one of these kits i absolutely butchered cutting a piece of mirror so this time included is a piece of glass to sit neatly on top the kit arrives with new oversized extrusions machined and tapped ready to go there's also a new aluminium plate for the bed and here's the optional sheet of glass to go on top of that in addition to this we have a bag full of the various mounting hardware that we're going to require to install this instructions are available on their website and in this case we're following ender extender v2 after listing all of the parts that come with the upgrade the next page is all concerned disassembly which gives me a great chance for a montage [Music] the printer is now in pieces and i took care to keep fasteners with their matching parts this greatly reduces the chance of losing things later on assembly instructions are pretty comprehensive always refer to this document rather than what's in my video for the most up-to-date information the general premise is that we reassemble the machine except some of the new parts are going to be a lot bigger apart from that they are identical with all holes pre-drilled and tapped where necessary for the most part we also reuse the factory fasteners early on the lower frame goes together and gives us a good indication of the size of the final printer parts like the power supply will no longer reach the whole way across the printer but mounting is still possible thanks to some printed adapters included in the kit some of them look similar but at the start of the instructions are more details so you can select the correct one another thing that needs to be bigger is the wiring because in some places it will no longer reach therefore wiring extensions or replacements are included for the bed thermistor we have an extension cable it simply plugs in and for the high current heated bed wires we have this adapter where we lift up the levers insert the wires snap the levers back down we do this on a second side with the longer piece of wire this seemed to mean like it was really simple and really effective for other sections of the wiring complete replacement harnesses are provided for these we simply unplug remove the old wiring feed the new wiring in in its place and re-plug into the main board with our extended wiring installed we can now reattach the mainboard cover making sure to plug back in the cooling fan with everything back together it looks just like factory a significant step is installing the 4040 extrusion that the y-axis will roll on top of the long side hangs out the front and again we use the factory fasteners to put it in place after reattaching the factory lcd with the included longer ribbon cable the printer is taking shape new belts for x and y are included and the y-axis belt needs to be fed down the center of the y-axis extrusion once it's hanging out of both ends we can start to reassemble the y-axis stepper motor re-installing the factory injection molded pieces in exactly the same way but on our longer piece of extrusion the y carriage plate is asymmetrical and the skinnier piece goes to the back left of the printer we roll it into position reattach the belt and reassemble the factory tensioning system once again the longer ender extender extrusions have the threads already in place so progress is fast time to turn our attention to the x and z axes again we have a longer 2020 extrusion with all of the holes already in place we mount it to the left side only and slide the assembly down from above before introducing the right hand carriage and loosely putting in the bolts around this time in the instructions there's a detailed procedure for making sure the frame is square if i showed you this you might fall asleep but obviously it's a good idea to follow these steps to minimize the risk of print quality problems later on the kit comes with a longer piece of ptfe tube so we need to remove the old one and replace it with the new this is actually a crucial step so take your time and follow the instructions all that leaves us with is the reassembly of odds and ends around the printer such as the z-axis end stop the little tool tray which again uses a small printed adapter and we also have new parts like this y-axis support now in this build i've elected to retain the standard 24 volt heated bed and i've also decided to stick with solidly mounting the bed rather than using springs and leveling knobs the factory strain relief bracket is meant to be retained but i found it didn't quite sit right so i cut a split into it which means the wires now sit on the other side with a cable tie holding the whole thing together when reintroducing this to the printer it's pretty hard not to drop all of the washers but i got there in the end this surface came with a sheet of glass there were no instructions so i assumed i was meant to put it on top of the alloy plate with the large sheet of glass then sitting on top of it and retained by binder clips in the four corners the final step for me was the filament spool holder which completed my physical installation obviously in your slicer you're going to want to update the x and y with the bigger dimensions and you're going to want to do the same in configuration.h of our marlin firmware after flashing the update the lcd still read the old size so just ignore this but i knew that it worked because pre-flashing the firmware the bltouch was still probing the smaller area and after the firmware update the probing grid was correctly spaced around the printer just in case it helps i've uploaded a branch of marlin for the ender 3v2 with the bl touch enabled and the new sizes for the ender extender kit to my github so there it is the ender extender kit fitted and it's quite a thing and yes it doesn't fit in frame either now it's not quite as big as the cr-10 max it's missing 50 millimeters on x and y and at the moment the way i've configured it is for the standard 250 millimeters on the z-axis at the moment with those extension wiring looms if we move the hot end as far away from the electronics as possible we can see that everything just reaches but if we were to fit the xl version which adds a lot more length to the z-axis then we would definitely need to rewire some things and then that will become a little bit more difficult i've decided to keep this one at only 250 millimeters because it's being donated to a high school and they might not have room to fit it if i make it any taller so let's answer some common questions that come up firstly how long does it take to fit this well i started it on a friday afternoon and i finished it after the weekend so i think if you were experienced and you were trying to move quickly you could probably get it done in a day for most people it would be a comfortable weekend job how difficult was it well the instructions are pretty good i would suggest that if you can build a 3d printed kit then you're able to do this as well so far by my calculations we're coming in at 505 us dollars that's for the end of 3v2 the bl touch and this ender extender kit that means we've got a large printer like the cr-10 max for approximately half the price but i want to replicate the direct drive extruder like the mirror i put on my cr-10 max and to do that we're going to add another two mods firstly the 1.3 latest version of the modular direct drive kit from printermods.com and secondly an easy-our scooter from cme cnc i think i've purchased about eight of these now and i put them on all types of printers i just find them a little bit easier to use than the standard ender 3 extruder especially when loading filament let's get these two fitted and finally we'll do some test prints since the last time i covered this mod version 1.3 has been released and the main changes are additional mounting holes to support hardware like the chimera this direct drive mod supports a wide range of hardware both extruders as well as hot ends and there's a nice table on the store page that goes through the capabilities as well as the weight of these combinations the printer mods.com parts are beautifully made as always they're machined from alloy and anodized in black also included is an extension loom for the extruder mounting hardware and injection molded parts to help the install and to maintain wiring there's a printed set of instructions also available on the printermods.com website as well as files that you need to download and print before starting this conversion there are two pieces for the ender 3v2 and my main criticism is they're hard to print without using a lot of support material i manually place my support in simplify 3d and then printed out the parts ready to go like with the ender extender we start with some disassembly removing the shroud the hot end and then the v-roller wheels which are instantly transferred onto the new mdd plate however only loose for now we need to remove the two cooling fans from inside the ender 3v2 shroud and then reinsert them into our new printed shroud securing them with screws in the same way the part cooling fan slots in as a sub assembly taking care not to crush the wires using a plastic spacer we reattach the hot end to the new mdd plate longer m3 hardware is provided for this purpose at this time i took the chance to heat up the hot end remove the factory nozzle and install a 0.6 millimeter one the silicon sock just clears the v-roller nut and by trimming the tip it just clears the different nozzle as well the two sub-assemblies now come together and a couple of m3 bolts are used to hold them in place we can install everything back on the printer doing up the v-rollers and tensioning the lower one to make sure there's no wobble in the way it rolls on the carriage my bl touch then went onto the left hand mount and i removed the tube fitting from the top of the hot end ready to accept the ezr using a printed adapter and a short length of ptfe tube the ezr slides into place and is secured using two m3 bolts these prevent movement and maintain a tight seal on the tube inside the hot end it was at this point that i finally disassembled the factory extruder liberating the extruder stepper motor and installing the hop gear from the ezr the extruder stepper now slides into place and is secured by four m3 screws that come with the ezr kit finally we press on the manual extrusion dial for these two mods no firmware changes are required but we need to change the retraction in our slicer with 1.2 millimeters distance with 30 millimeters per second speed recommended as a starting point i also upped the size of my nozzle to match what was on the printer some of the hot end wiring back to the main board was now too short so i took the chance to lengthen it this allowed me to secure the loom where the extruder stepper used to be and that gave me plenty of cable slack to the full extent of the printer's movement after some final calibration i was off and printing now before i started printing i did a little bit more calibration i calculated the e-steps correctly and i also pid auto-tune the hot end but most importantly the bed and i have links in the description to help you with both of those after that i did some first layer tests and set up my z offset and i'm pleased to report the bl touch is working really well so what to print that was big well i know the internet is a little bit obsessed with cats so i printed one too big to fit on the standard ender 3v2 and with less polygons than on cats you're used to seeing in real life the second thing i printed was this it's from fab365 they're the ones that make those awesome 4d folding robots this one folds in the same way and i think we should fold it right now it prints with moving parts so we're just going to do a little bit of movement to free those up and with a little bit of pressure where we can get those to come loose now for the rest we just fold [Music] well it's mostly together and i guess the lesson is not everything scales up well because this is originally designed to be half the size it does however still function in terms of the mechanism inside and i think that's really cool if you haven't tried one of these fab 365 objects i recommend heading over to their website and purchasing one at the start of this video the premise was to recreate the cr-10 max but on a much tighter budget so let's revisit that if we add the price of hamira to the cr-10 max that puts us at 1120 us dollars if we add the equivalent modular direct drive kit and the ezr struder that puts us up to 578 which again is approximately half now when it comes to a direct drive conversion there are advantages and disadvantages so that comes down to personal taste people worry about the added weight to the x-axis but with a big heavy bed like this i think that's pretty insignificant price-wise we're on track but how about performance in many ways this is definitely as good as the cr10 max but there's a few drawbacks and you can fix those if you're willing to spend more money firstly i'm using the original small heated bed underneath it does take longer to heat up the big piece of glass but my prints did stick right on the edges self-releasing from the glass after it had cooled down as an option you could spend an extra 90 to get a mains powered heat bed when you order from ender extender secondly this printer despite its added girth is still only using a lead screw on one side rather than two like on the cr-10 max again we can spend an additional sixty dollars to upgrade that adding a second stepper to get both sides even finally i expect some people might criticize this build because we've more than doubled the price of the original printer but i just don't buy that some people buy their printers leave them stock and use them as a tool other people buy them as a project because they enjoy tinkering and i really don't see a problem with either of those approaches another important thing is that although this cost more than 500 dollars when it was done we didn't need to spend that all at once i think it makes a lot of sense to get a cheaper 3d printer treat it like a blank canvas and upgrade it as your interests and funds allow that's it for me but i'd love to know your thoughts on this type of build please let me know down below in the comments thank you so much for watching and until next time happy huge 3d printing g'day it's michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 233,897

Rating: 4.9549565 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, creality, ender 3, ender 3 v2, cr-10 max, cr10 max, budget, cheap, ender extender, super size, guide, tutorial, unboxing, installation, firmware, Marlin, assembly, disassembly, ezr, ezr struder, direct drive, printermods.com, mdd v1.3, seemecnc, fitment, comparison, print quality, glass, bltouch, 32 bit, mainboard, wiring, calibration

Id: z1jd1u6ePNA

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020