Square Singer

Ender 3 v3 SE.

That’s basically an Ender 3 with all important upgrades and tweaks from the factory.

This has received pretty good reviews in total.

I mostly use solid basic shapes (like e.g. a cylinder) which I modify using extrude or moving edges/vertices and then combine using the boolean modifier, which can do union, difference and intersection.

Sometimes you have to switch to carve in the modifier to get it to work correctly.

The important thing is to only work with watertight objects. So for your hollow cylinder example I’d do the following:

• Create a cylinder with the desired outer radius and height.
• Create a taller cylinder with the radius of hole.
• Move both onto the same location. The taller cylinder should stick out on bottom and top
• Select the outer cylinder -> modifiers -> add modifier boolean -> difference to inner cylinder
• Select the outer cylinder and export it with the option “Export only selection”

Use flame retardent foam, not just styrofoam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xZUr0BEfE

Nice! Yeah, pre-assembled extruders are sometimes assembled wrong. Had it before.

Just to check I understood you correctly:

You want to replace your extruder and you bought an extruder without stepper motor. Now the original stepper motor has a gear press-fitted onto the shaft instead of a flat side. Correct so far?

There are two things you can do:

• Flex/dremel the gear off and use the tool to cut a flat side into the stepper
• Buy a new extruder motor
• Send the new extruder back and get a good extruder including a new extruder motor

The first option is easy, but requires a tool.

The second option is also easy: You’ll just need to look for a Nema17 motor, that’s basically it. It should not be a pancake (=flat/small) one, because they are not powerful enough. Low stepping angle (0.9°) is advantageous but not required. You are going to have to tune the extruder steps per mm anyways, since it won’t be exactly like your old extruder, so it hardly matters whether the difference between old and new is small or large.

The third option will yield the best returns. These cheapo single-small-drive-gear extruders without gearing are just bad, especially if you add the loss of control you get if you run a bowden system.

If you can spare a little cash, get something like a TBG S or TBG Lite. They are both equivalent, just have slightly different mounting points.

Compared to the stock extruder, these are a massive improvement.

They use a tiny NEMA 14 motor, which weighs much less than a NEMA 17 that is used by the stock extruder. This does allow using it in Direct Drive configuration without adding a lot of weight to your print head.

To have the same (or actually more) power than the stock extruder, they use a ~11:1 gear reduction. They use dual gear drive, meaning that both gears that contact the filament also push it. And lastly, they use really large filament drive gears, which means that it’s got a much larger contact area on the filament.

With a TBG Lite I can extrude really soft, flexible TPU with about the same quality and speed that I was able to extrude PLA before. The amount of control is incredible.

And btw, when you swap equipment related to the extruder, you need to do an e-step tuning afterwards. Google what that is.

Yeah, ok, that looks pretty crushed.

Did you maybe “release” the extruder spring tension adjustment screw in the wrong direction? (Maybe screw that screw to the limit in the other direction and check if that removes the issue)

If that doesn’t sove the issue, there are only two possibilities:

• Your extruder is assembled wrong. Disassemble and reassemble it, following a decent video.
• Your spring is far, far too strong. This would be weird. That would mean they put the wrong spring into your printer.

I am guessing you are talking about PLA here?

First, I don’t think it’s the extruder crushing it, I think your filament is brittle.

Whenever you bend PLA (e.g. unroll it from the spool, or even worse, run it through the bowden tube, it develops microcracks.

In the space of a few days, these cracks make the filament super brittle.

Before loading the filament, take the loose end of the filament and bend it a bit. If it breaks like spaghetti, that part is brittle due to these cracks. Keep going until you reach a part that you can bend by almost 90° without it snapping. Break/cut it off at that point and load only the non-brittle part of the filament.

The correct answer for this is linear advance needs tuning. Google how to do that.

Other than that, getting a direct drive extruder like the TBG Lite will help a lot as well.

Yes. Get something like the TBG S or TBG Lite. These things are tiny, light, have a massive gear reduction (~1:11), which trades unnecessary speed (E is always running really slow even if you print really fast) for strength, and they have huge dual gears driving the filament. With that you can extrude TPU as if it was PLA.

If you can’t find a fitting mount, I made one for the TBG Lite. PM me with some address where I can send you an STL if you are interested.

Software compensation is good for stuff you really can’t fix.

But people use it to compensate stuff they totally could fix, e.g. a badly levelled bed. Almost as good as those guys who level the bed using a spirit level.

Just curious, did you try the isopropyl alcohol trick?

Yeah, a PEI plate is totally fine as well.

Better mechanics are never bad. But the points we where talking about weren’t that at all. We were talking about automatic alignment of multiple Z motors. That doesn’t apply to any stock Ender 3, because they all only have a single Z motor. No alignment needed, and actually no alignment possible.

Regarding the other points:

• Metal extruder is nice if you want to print hotter materials and it’s a bit less maintainance, but the trade-off is that it’s a fair bit worse for PLA, which incidentally is what most beginners print exclusively.
• The older stock hotends for Ender 3 wheren’t great. The new one isn’t exactly great either, but better. So not a bad thing.
• Better springs are better mechanics.
• ABL doesn’t do much at all if your hardware is set up correctly and is mostly used by beginners to mask a badly calibrated bed, which in turn creates non-dimensionally accurate prints.

But of course the recommendation would be for the newest version of Ender 3, because there’s no point in starting off with an outdated machine.

Again, the upgrades the other guy mentioned where not that.

Believe me, I know what it does. At this point I would respectfully point to the fact that I’ve been printing for 6 years, have been running self-compiled Marlin for over 5 of that and have been fixing up the printers of 6 people in my friend group.

If your printer runs Marlin, your printer contains code I wrote.

I’ve been doing this for more than a few weeeks.

Also, you misunderstood what that guy before meant. He wasn’t talking about simple Autobedleveling, but rather about auto-aligning multiple Z axies. See, if you have multiple powered Z-axies (e.g. if you have a bedslinger with two Z axies or a Cube-style printer that moves the bed along multiple Z axies), these Z-axies can become misaligned if one of them skips a step or you power the printer off and they become misaligned. There are multiple solutions for fixing this, and the guy before went for the nice but expensive route of controlling each Z axis with a separate stepper and homing each of them separately. That is what I said was a nice gadget, but not a must-have feature for a beginner.

Now regarding classic auto bedlevel: It’s meant to correct slight misleveling and bent beds. It does so by purpously warping the print to follow the misalignment of the bed. This means, you’ll end up with a print that is not straight. The reason why ABL exists is that 5 or 10 years ago, springs and beds were utter crap and thus people had to workaround in software.

In 2023, if your bed loses leveling all the time, you have the whole bed leveled too high so that the springs aren’t tensioned correctly. On my printer I have to re-level the bed maybe 2-3 times a year and that’s usually related to modifications like using a different nozzle.

Also, in 2023, if your bed is so bent that you’d need to use ABL to compensate, that’s a warranty case.

If you actually don’t RMA such a board but seriously try to compensate it’s failings with ABL, you can choose between a fast 9-point ABL, which does nothing, a 16-point ABL which doesn’t measure the center point, a 25-point ABL which does a bit more but takes forever or you go even higher and spend more time leveling than printing if you do small prints. Also, you need to re-level every time you print with a different bed temperature.

All in all: don’t compensate mechanical issues in software. Fix your mechanical issues.

I had a dual Z printer before (Tronxy X8), so I know the issue.

I already mentioned tying the motors together with belts.

But if you want to not do any modifications, you can also move the print head off the bed, disable software endstops and move the Z axis down until both motors start to skip. That sounds bad but doesn’t hurt the mechanics or engines at all, they are built with skips in mind.

That also aligns both Z axies.

For a 10 year old machine that makes sense. But honestly, get your self a buildtak clone surface and stick it onto your glass board.

You won’t be going back to the glass, I promise you.

Costs maybe €10, takes 2 minutes to install and you won’t ever have to mess with glue stick, hairspray or any other surface treatment.

My stock Ender 5 print plate is super flat and I don’t need any auto bed leveling.

The print plate of my Tronxy X8, which I had before, was also super flat.

With spring steel PC, I need no surface treatment before printing PLA, PETG or TPU. It sticks perfectly every time and it comes off easily after cooling down.

No glue strick, hairspray, tape or other stuff that belongs in the 2010s needed.

More systems means more that can go wrong and more difficult trouble shooting. No matter what printer you get, stuff needs to be tuned, stuff needs to be maintained and stuff breaks.

Getting the biggest best do-it-all device with all the bells and whistles (like a fully speced Voron) means not only that you spend a massive amount of money for a machine that does the same thing just a bit faster, but also that you have tons of things you need to watch out for.

Auto bedlevel, for example, is by far not a fire-and-forget solution.

Upgrades are also a thing. Once you get into printing and understand what it’s all about you will learn what you want and need. This allows you to upgrade the machine and make it better. Especially the Ender 3 series is built with upgradability in mind. They have a lot of drop-in upgrades that are as simple to integrate as the (very simple) initial setup of the machine was.

If you buy your first car you also don’t start out with an 800 PS super car or a semitrailer.

Have you tried wiping your old build plate (guessing it’s the standard ender one) with isopropyl alcohol? That’s a must before first use and every once in a while if the bed gets too greasy and dirty.

Why would you use a glass bed in 2023?