SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in Season 5, Episode 1 of “Star Trek: Discovery,” now streaming on Paramount+.

Guess I won’t be reading this until after I get a chance to watch the episode.

Hmm I know there used to be the issue with the aluminum beds being warped – mine is like that but was resolved with some layers of aluminum foil under the glass to flatten it out. And I do hear occasionally of someone getting a unit with an incorrectly cut rail length, but they’ve always just called Creality and gotten a replacement without any hassle. I haven’t heard of anyone having trouble with their customer service though, so I’m not sure what changed there, but that’s unfortunate that you had trouble with them.

I do agree about the hit-or-miss quality though. My own experience was the first glass bed I got from them was absolutely fantastic, nothing else beats the adhesion I had there. Then after a few years when the coating wore out I ordered a new one from them… and nothing will stick to that bed without using hairspray/glue/etc, so what’s the point? I finally settled on a slab of G10 with a PEI sticker which has worked well, but just the fact that the two glass beds which should have been identical says a lot about their quality control. I would say anyone getting an order from them should not expect a working machine right out of the box, however replacement parts have been easy to obtain for most people. And since you have to assemble these yourself, you definitely need to pay close attention to the online videos (I used the one from Tomb of 3D Horrors) to make sure everything is properly squared up, otherwise you’ll have nothing but trouble if you just slap them together.

Agreed that time is money, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time on mine. I think the worst time-sink was after converting to direct drive and basically having to start from scratch on all my slicer settings, and then working out cable management to reclaim my Z height. At one point I was playing with faster speeds (thus the dual-Z upgrade) but eventually I want to switch to a 0.2mm nozzle and try to dial in miniatures (HO scale trains). I would be better off switching to a resin printer for that but I don’t have an option for good ventilation so that’s not really a consideration right now.

I’ve always wondered where this comes from, the thought that a person would spend a huge amount to upgrade an Ender? I spent maybe $100 upgrading mine until I screwed up and fried my motherboard, but even adding the extra $60 for a decent upgrade I’ve still spent less than the original cost of the printer, and way WAY less than the cost of a Prusa. At this point the main upgrades include a direct drive and dual-Z to handle some NinjaFlex. I’ve always considered ABL a waste of money, and every other upgrade was just things I printed myself. You certainly can’t beat the reliability, I mean my printer has been sitting idle for nearly a year and I just fired it up a couple weeks ago to print some new items – no leveling or anything else, I just loaded up a spool of PLA and off it went. So what exactly are people spending these exorbitant amounts of money on for upgrades?

While I know I’m not to the point of investing in a full setup, I have started grinding down my waste so they don’t take up so much space. I currently have two paper shredders on hand, and one is functional. It will pull prints apart up to maybe 3/16" thick, but anything larger requires manually breaking down so it’s quite a tedious process. And even this setup is only enough to get the plastic broken down into ribbons, I’m nowhere near chopping into pellets yet. Based on an idea I’ve seen online, I would would to take the parts I have, and recombine them into something with heavier gearing to really tear into the larger pieces. If I could run everything through 2-3 times to cross-cut the resulting strips then maybe I can end up with fairly consistent sized pieces. It might even be worthwhile to build a second machine that runs much faster for the pieces after the first grinding, that might work better to chop up the smaller bits although there still wouldn’t be any control over the final pellet sizes.

Even with all the work I’ve put into this so far, I still don’t have enough waste of any one color to make even half a spool of filament. I figure I’ll just keep storing the grindings until I get enough on hand, then start looking into building an extruder/spooler. So far my only real cost in this was for the plastic tubs to store the waste materials in, so I’m not really out anything.

Nice! Have you thought about also adding a tray without a bottom, so you could stack them and allow young plants to grow a little taller before exposing them to the world?

My wife is also a big fan of the movies, and I had no idea these existed… Thanks! Will be ordering the set this weekend.

“Disorganized”

Considering it costs four times as much, it’s easy to see the sunk cost fallacy coming into play.

I mean yeah, they’re cheap, and there are definitely some production issues, but they’re pretty good about replacing bad parts in new machines. I think the biggest factor that got me off and running right away was following youtube videos to learn how to do the initial assembly including squaring up the frame, and videos on doing bed leveling correctly (if your spring aren’t almost completely closed then you’re going to have problems). Took me three hours to do the initial assembly but I’ve never had to do it again. I still stand by Creality because they helped me and countless others break in to 3D printing at home at a time when the next available model was around $500 (but that one was made by Creality too! 😀 ).

I did mods on mine simply because it’s so easy to add things to make it look better, or in some cases make it easier to work with. I think the only significant improvements for printing were adding an arm to change the angle of the filament entering the extruder, and a fang duct which helped a lot with bridging and stringing.

I didn’t really do anything major until I wanted to print with NinjaFlex TPU so I printed and assembled a direct drive head, compiled a new version of Marlin to move the motors the right way, and included some extra features that help print more consistent lines. Yeah that’s going to be way outside the comfort zone for most people, but my printer always worked reliably for the three years before this change (I got it at the end of January 2019). I’ve been working on other projects this year so it’s been awhile since I printed anything, but I know I could clean the dust off the bed, load up some filament, and kick out a print job. It just works.

Are you suggesting the Ender 3 is unreliable? That’s pretty funny.

I would advocate Creality and tinkering for one very good reason… If you buy a fancy printer and it breaks, how will you know how to fix it?

At work we got a $2500 printer years ago. It has the sensors to self-adjust before every print, you pretty much don’t need to do anything except send your print jobs to it. Sounds great, right? Until it started failing… Around the same time things started to go wrong, I got my Ender 3 printer, and I spent a lot of time learning how to make adjustments, how to correct things in the slicer for better quality prints, and so on. Meanwhile the expensive printer at work sat idle for about 2 years because nobody knew anything about “fixing” it. I finally decided to take a crack at it and immediately recognized that even though this printer has auto bed leveling it was quite obvious the first layer was too close to the bed. Turns out the sensors had gotten dirty over time, I cleaned them and boom, we’re up and running again.

I have tinkered with my printer to the point of printing all kinds of custom parts for it including a direct-drive head. I can upgrade the firmware any time I want and set the defaults to match my custom hardware, but most importantly I know what everything does and can troubleshoot a variety of problems. Tinkering isn’t a bad thing, and you only have to get into it as far as you want to because the printer will work just fine out of the box if you take the time to set it up properly, but it does provide options if you want ‘better’.

Everyone works around their first mistakes until they feel comfortable enough with their printer that they can justify replacing the bed. You actually want to get in the habit of making prints outside the center of the bed anyway, if you always print in the same spot you’ll basically wear out the ‘adhesive’ properties of the bed until it starts requiring hairspray or glue sticks to make prints stick there.

The vibrating that you saw was probably the X or Y axis trying to move, but the head was locked in place by the hole it was now sitting it. As you’ve just witnessed, the stepper motors have quite a lot of power and will normally drag the head right through any obstruction (even if it’s your 27-hour print job that was nearly complete). This is why you see a lot of pictures with deep scratches in print beds.

Yeah once I figured out the characters it seemed pretty obvious it was geared towards a younger audience, but I still like the show. I think my interest is mainly in it being the grittier side of the Star Trek universe where not everything is all hunky-dory. DS9 certainly had that feel to it.

I didn’t even know about this show until news came down about it being cancelled… Figures. I started watching it and already like it more than Lower Decks. Really hoping they find a new home!

If it’s an 8-bit board then I’m assuming one of the original Ender 3 or Ender 3 Pro machines? Absolutely replace the plastic extruder head with a metal one, and while you’re there get some better quality bowden tubing and fittings (the original stuff had the wrong dimensions allowing too much slow which affected the prints).

You’re going to want to print something that adjusts the angle which the filament enters into the side of the extruder, there’s some easy things like an extension arm, but ideally you want to shoot for a wheel with a ball bearing to provide a smooth entry. The stock angle creates a lot of friction and will literally wear a slot even through a metal extruder. Keep an eye out for a different mount for your filament as well – if you have room you can print a roller that its off to the side, otherwise you can print a ball bearing roller that mounts to the stock arm. Again, this will greatly reduce the friction.

After you get these done you’ll want to look into a better fan shroud. SO MANY different versions of these, but if you plan to add an ABL later you will want one that is compatible with the model you’re interested in. I have never found a use for an ABL as a properly leveled bed can hold its settings for a year or more (especially if you upgrade to the stronger yellow springs), however a better fan duct is essential for cooling your parts as you print. The stock fan will get you a long way and there are many ducts that work with it. I had to start with smaller ducts and work my way up as my stock printer couldn’t actually make large prints successfully.

A final must-have is going to be selecting a better bed. There are a number of PEI surfaces mounted on spring-steel which works with most (but not all) types of filament. The gold standard is to print without doing something ugly like coating your bed in hairspray or glue sticks, you should be able to wipe the surface with some ISO alcohol and start a new print directly in the clean surface.

Now getting into ease-of-use… See those two belts that drive the X and Y movements? The stock tensions screws are horrible! Again, there are lots of printable options available with a large screw surface to easily adjust the belt tension, but you need to pay attention here because you need a different version for the Y axis depending on which model of printer you have. Print extra parts here, I end up replacing one of the screws about once a year. I just use plain PLA so it probably gets brittle over time. A properly tensioned belt can be strummed like a guitar string, you will hear a low tone. This prevents skipping during prints, and the printed tensioners let you fine-tune this. If you go too tight you’ll notice the stepper motors getting a lot hotter, but I found it impossible to get tight enough with the stock screws.

Another huge upgrade is to get a raspberry pi and load up OctoPrint on it. This allows you to send print jobs from multiple devices, OctoPrint will then take control of the whole job which frees up your computer for other tasks (and you won’t lose hours of printing if your computer crashes). You can make do with a Pi Zero, but it’s better to get yourself a Pi3 or Pi4 for this task.

And finally, the finishing touches… Take a look a cable chains. Yes, another thing you print yourself. Tidies up the loose cables hanging from the printer and makes the whole thing look a lot more professional.

I just LOVE this printer, so many upgrades you can print yourself, customizing it to your specific needs. Go crazy!

Oh god, “Once More With Feeling” was the first musical TV episode that stuck with me. So much passion in that episode and it brought to a head so many issues the characters had been dealing with up to that point. It still stands out as my favorite episode of the entire series.

Guess I’m going to have to rewatch this episode, I missed the bunny reference!

Every single time I see him show up! Dude looks way more like Carrey than he looks like Shatner.