Yep. I also like the 3D Printing Discord server, since many there have first hand experience with multiple printers. It’s of course also interesting to hear about the experience those who only own a single printer have had, but occasionally someone claims the printer they own is a great choice for beginners despite having spent hundreds, and countless hours, on fixes and upgrade to get it in a usable state :D
Most printer companies send out review units to a bunch of youtubers
Unfortunately this also means that it’s not easy to know which reviews you can trust. Even if some youtuber isn’t paid in cash for a positive review, it’s still in their interest to make the manufacturer happy so they keep getting free stuff in the future. Neither does it help that most reviews have affiliate links, so they have an additional financial incentive to convince you to buy the product.
MyTechFun also has a lot of material tests, and while perhaps not ideal from a usability standpoint he posts detailed Excel sheets with all the data.
Blog post with the same info, for people who don’t like watching videos.
I agree with half your statement :) There are other cheap brands that are just as bad as Creality, or possibly even worse.
From what I’ve heard Microcenter frequently has a deal for “new customers” where you can get an Ender 3 Pro for $99. Though it’s a pretty old printer by now, and while getting some mods would do a lot for it, I think I would rather get something like a Sovol SV06 unless $200 is a hard limit.
This is assuming you’re interested in an FDM printer, and might not apply as much if you’re shopping for resin printers.
I like this list of 3d printers, it is maintained by users of the 3D Printing discord server, who I know have first hand experience with multiple printers. Unfortunately it’s not been updated with the latest models, such as Sovol SV07 and Ender 3 v3 SE/KE.
There are sadly a lot of fake reviews and paid youtubers out there, so it’s difficult to do your own research when it comes to buying tech nowadays. I fell for this and ended up with an Ender 3 v2 which I wasn’t happy with before I had spent an additional €300 and many hours on modding it (though I didn’t go for the cheapest mods, it could’ve been improved for less). Don’t trust anyone who has a strong preference for a single brand. Most cheap Chinese brands have managed to design both a few good or at least decent printers, and several bad/flawed printers.
Creality is probably the most known brand when it comes to budget printers. They got a good reputation with the original Ender 3, but after establishing their position as market leaders they began using lower quality components, and appeared to have non-existing QC. IMO they also failed to keep up with the competition and ended up selling outdated and overpriced printers for several years, while paying youtubers for good reviews. Ender 3 S1 was a step in the right direction, though a bit expensive and still a gamble with QC. Ender 3 v3 looks quite promising and actually competitively priced, so hopefully they’ve got their shit together again but I think it’s too early to tell.
Do not buy from Amazon if you have other options. Their permissive returns policy can be a double edged sword in this case. 3d printers are high precision machines, and with companies competing to make them as cheap as possible there’s always a risk of a manufacturing/QC fault. It can be something really subtle, like holes drilled 1mm off or a bent aluminium extrusion, which is difficult to “debug” even for an experienced user but near impossible for a beginner. These faulty printers are often returned to Amazon where they are repackaged to look like new and sold to some other unsuspecting customer. This is less of an issue with new models, but it has happened that people have had to return multiple printers before getting a fully working unit when buying a model that has been on the market for longer.
When you get your 3d printer, find a comprehensive guide to calibrating it and go through every step. Don’t touch the build plate with your hands more than necessary, fingerprints ruin adhesion.
Any possibility that you’ve accidentally modified something in the automatically generated part of the config, so its failing to read the saved value? Perhaps you could attach your entire printer.cfg?
Or put the slab on top of foam rubber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y08v6PY_7ak
ASA seems like an easier-to-print alternative to ABS, afaik only downsides are higher cost and fewer colours to choose from. Supposedly possible to print ASA without enclosure.
Yea, definitely keep a fire extinguisher nearby if you decide to do this experiment :) But on the other hand, one should probably already have one of those close to any 3d printer.
One could try “printing” 1.3mm EL wire using a nozzle of similar diameter, low enough temperature to only melt its outer PVC layer, and thick layer height so that its core isn’t squished. And it would of course have to be vase mode… I’m not saying it would work, but it might be an interesting experiment.
Have you compiled your own firmware? It can be a little bit tricky figuring out what you need to change, but it’s definitely doable if you have a little bit of experience with computers.
Btw. I think Creality made 2 versions of Ender 5 with different Z leadscrews, so regardless of if you’re trying to use prebuilt firmware or compiling your own you might need to verify that the z-steps is set correctly for your hardware.
I would guess it ultimately depends on how much you’re interested in modding, fine-tuning settings and calibrating the printer to perfection. If you only want to load a model and hit “print” then I guess you wouldn’t notice much difference from just a mainboard swap. But since you’re about to install Klipper, you probably have some interest in spending time optimising your printer :)
I’ve upgraded a lot of things on my printer, but not got to the mainboard yet so it still has TMC2208 driver hardwired in stealthchop mode. I never got much out of pressure advance while the printer was still in bowden mode, even with a BMG extruder which is much stronger than the stock extruder… Can’t say if it would’ve turned out better with TMC2209 drivers, but after modding the printer to direct drive I have no issue with pressure advance. Now the main reason I want to upgrade mainboard some day is that I would like a 5:th driver so I can do proper dual Z.
And a general Klipper recommendation, in case this is the first time you try it out; Resonance compensation is like magic, and it works perfectly fine calibrating it manually (i.e. without buying an ADXL). After calibration, I could increase acceleration to 4000 without visible ringing. For reference the default acceleration for Ender-sized bed slingers is usually 500, which IIRC can be upped to about 700-900 before you start to get ringing… Not only does high acceleration make it print faster, but at least for me it had a bigger impact on corner quality than pressure advance ever had.
From what I can find on search engines, the Aquila probably has a 32 bit board, so from a “processing” perspective I think it would be equivalent to the E3 Turbo.
It seems a bit unclear what kind of stepper drivers the Aquila has, but some posts I found claim it has clone TMC2208. I believe the E3 Turbo has TMC2209 which should be more powerful, and supposedly is better for pressure advance. You can search for “tmc2208 vs tmc2209” if you want more opinions on if it’s worth upgrading just for that.
I also believe the E3 Turbo will give you UART access to the stepper drivers. IIRC this allows you to configure each stepper motor for either stealthchop (less noise) or spreadcycle (more power) mode, so you could for example set the extruder stepper to spreadcycle.
The E3 Turbo has 5 stepper drivers while the Voxelab board only has 4, right? If you upgrade/mod your printer to dual Z it’s nice to have each stepper on their own driver, or if you rebuild the printer to IDEX, but otherwise there’s not much use for it.
Right, I forgot that they make other extruders than the BMG :) Sounds like the motor gear is press fit mounted on the shaft, which is great (as long as you don’t need to remove the gear).
If you have the printer in parts, I suppose you could run some tests directly on the motor.
First of all, I would recommend resetting the eeprom to the firmware’s default settings by issuing the following commands:
M502 ; Reset to factory defaults
M500 ; Save firmware to EEPROM
Then, with the stepper motor not installed in the extruder, set esteps to 200 and instruct the printer to extrude 1 unit filament, to verify that the motor gear turns exactly 1 full turn in 1 second.
M83 ; Set E stepper to "relative" coordinates
M92 E200 ; Set E steps/unit to 200
G1 E1 F60 ; Extrude 1 unit, with a feed rate of 60 units per minute = 1 unit per second.
The reason I suggest setting e-steps to 200 for testing is because this stepper motor should require exactly 200 steps per revolution, according to this page. This should make the printer send 200 pulses to the stepper motor for each “unit” (very unlikely that your firmware is configured with something else than unit=millimeter) you tell it to extrude.
If that works as expected, you can try setting esteps to 400, which should result in the motor gear making 2 full turns per unit you tell it to extrude.
M83 ; Set E stepper to "relative" coordinates
M92 E400 ; Set E steps/unit to 400
G1 E1 F30 ; Extrude 1 unit, with a feed rate of 30 units per minute = 0.5 unit per second.
I’m lowering the feed rate to make the rotation speed the same, i.e. it should make 2 full turns in 2 seconds now.
If all of this is working, then it seems like your firmware/esteps behaves as expected, and you can set the correct e-steps for this extruder, which should be close to 415.
M502 ; Reset firmware to factory default again, to make sure you aren't accidentally saving something else.
M92 E415 ; Set E steps/unit to 415
M500 ; Save firmware
Also check your slicer start/end gcode so that it doesn’t contain any M50x commands that mess up the EEPROM.
If the extruder is still acting up, at least you know that the firmware is probably ok :)
Did you upgrade the extruder yourself btw? Did you adjust the stepper motor current to the correct value? Otherwise here’s a guide how to do that
It could be something completely different, but if you want to rule out a mechanical issue you could check these things:
What printer do you have? If you link a .gcode file where you set esteps in the start code, but it feels like nothing happen, we could check if there’s something weird going on. If your extruder has grub screws, have you verified that they’re tightened and aligned with the flat side of the shaft?
As others have said, it’s not a great extruder, but I’ve never heard of any “crushing” the filament. Perhaps you could post some photos of the filament and the extruder? Despite its flaws, it should still be usable (unless the plastic tension arm has started to break).
Never bought any, but I was looking at this type of automatic extinguisher: https://www.firerescue.eu/en/automatic/1027-viper-car-automatic-extinguishing-system.html