Are you looking for a low-cost 3d printer that can hold its own among the bigger boys the best 3d printer under $200 in 2018?
Well, yeah, you ain't getting none of that here.
This is a Maker's Muse review of the Creality Ender 3 warts and all. Let's get started.
How's it going guys, Angus here from Maker's Muse and this is the hype printer of
the moment: the Ender 3 from Creality and for good reason.
Creality are the creators of the legendary CR-10
And it's slightly smaller brother. The CR 10 mini was one of my picks for the budget makerspace project
The ender 3 is a little bit different though. So let's break it down
The machine has a print volume of 220 by 220 by 250
So don't let the lower price fool you this thing can print larger than most other i3s
and that includes the Prusa mark 3 it has a heated print bed Bowden extruder and the files are loaded via the
included micro SD card or you can tether it via the mini USB port
Quality printers usually come flat packed requiring some basic assembly, but the ender 3 comes in a lot more parts
So it's better classed as a kit, the hard parts are done for you
However, which is awesome leaving you to put together the main components and plug everything together
I did the whole thing on stream over at makers muse live and then I went in totally blind
It's probably the nicest kit I've ever assembled to be honest and well worth the price savings over a ready to run machine
Chinese manufacturers such as Creality have come a very long way in a short amount of time. You won't find a single
3d printed part in the kit with everything being sheet metal aluminium extrusions or injection molded plastic
really really nice and something some other manufacturers will start having to consider if they want to compete in this new era of
Hobby 3d printers the ender 3 has a heated aluminium bed with fake build tack from factory and sadly no
No Auto bed leveling. I would really like to see that
sort of thing becomes standard it just makes the machine so much easier to use and
Honestly, the slight price increase would be totally worth it to me
But instead we've got the bog standard four point spring-loaded bed with these comically oversized bed leveling adjustment wheels
They're great for fine adjustment
however, despite their huge size the rear ones are still quite difficult to access and I found you really have to loosen them if you
want the nozzle to be even close to reaching the bed quality was one of the first companies to really push for V rollers and
Appropriately matched V slot extrusion. So it's no surprise to see it here again on all axes
My machine was rolling tight from factory
However, if you find you need to adjust yours, it's easy to do with the included wrench on the eccentric nut
in fact
I'm not sure if mine might have been adjusted to be too tight because the rollers are already displaying some signs of excessive wear it
Is possible to stuff up V slot and get the angles slightly wrong?
So I'll be keeping a close eye on that to watch how it develops
Alrighty, then. Let's go on to the good stuff the print quality. Well, like I said, this review is warts-and-all and here's where it goes
Horribly wrong the first attempt at the test print on the SD card led to the Bowden tube popping free from the coupler
I pushed it back in place and it popped free again. Great
you see Bowden style extruders build up a lot of pressure in the PTFE tube and
If they're not up to the task of being held in place with the couplers
They just let go turns out this coupler was particularly rubbish and the PTFE tube supplied was quite slippery and soft
It just wasn't holding
luckily, I had another type of coupler on hand from another machine with really nice agressive metal teeth to grab onto the tube and it
Did a really good job at securing the PTFE so I can complete the test model on the included micro SD card
So while the test model printed fine, let's be honest
It's a very safe 3d print you'd be hard-pressed to stuff it up
My first prints were based off the CR 10 mini profile. I had in simplify 2d and well
The prints sucked they sucked hard
Mega stringing and
Insane under extrusion I catted this coast of design and I tried different speeds different multipliers different temperatures different
Slices you name it crap results every time in fact identical g-code provided varying extrusions
Depending on how fast I set the print speed on the printer
awesome
Look those the know will already have diagnosed this issue
But what if you're just a newcomer to 3d printing the Ender three is priced for that "my first 3d printer" market
Well it turns out I wasn't the only one experiencing this issue and Chuck Hellebuyck over on his channel produced a video
highlighting the exact cause and solution
It turns out the PTFE tube in the Ender three and other Creality machines
Butts up against the nozzle in the hot end and if it's not perfectly flush then molten plastic can pool in the gap
Ruining the already fairly average flow accuracy of the bowden tube design
You can push this down as hard as you like, which is what I was trying to do, but it gets worse over time
Why because the coupler on the extruder side wasn't holding properly either
It was slowly backing out causing the problem to recur
after a short period of printing the solution and something I would recommend to just
Avoid running into this problem altogether is to order two high quality
Couplers that replace the ones that this machine comes with when you order the machine and replace them from day one
During my test
I also replaced the stock PTFE tube with precision capricorn tubing, which is this blue stuff probably overkill
But this plus the new couplers have finally solved my issues
The print surface is also gone on my machine now as well as you'll notice what I found was that when homing the z-axis?
I found the tiny low cost limit switch to be less than accurate enough
And for one print it went just a bit too close and the first layer welded to the fake buildtak
This was after spending a very long time to get it perfect for previous prints mind you it just wasn't repeatable
So I give you fair warning removing. This stock print surface is
incredibly painful for me the plastic sheet lifted free and
delaminated from the adhesive backing leaving me with a job of peeling and dissolving the adhesive away from the metal plate that
Isopropyl alcohol I then got this clean and replaced it with this magnetic print surface called the easy peel Z
Which I reviewed here
it's great because if a surface becomes eventually
damaged you can just put another top sheet on there magnetically attached and you don't have to bother replacing the adhesive backed
magnetic sheet that the top surface attaches to. I really like that.
The leveling springs are also more than long enough to account for this increased thickness. So it's an upgrade that I would personally recommend
However with printing issues finally resolved. I settled on a simplified 3d profile based off Frank's Cura settings. Thanks, man
And yeah prints went from this to this
This deathclaw head at 0.15 is perhaps still a little bit fuzzy, but the stringing nightmare is over
Similarly an overhang test. I was able to reduce it down to just fine wisps
The gay Anderson cat is one of my favorite test prints to analyze print quality and similarly
It came out quite nice at point two millimeter layer heights in a generic gray PLA
there is some evidence of layer inaccuracies and
artifacts running up the surface which alerted me to a
Spot on the rollers for why that doesn't run super smooth
You can feel it kind of bumping or catching at a certain point as it moves back and forth
So I highly recommend checking your rollers for damage and making sure the V slot is
Perfectly clean to ensure you don't encounter artifacts like this. The seams on this model are pretty ugly, too
I mean, I probably could fine tune and tweak the slicer settings just a little bit better in terms of retraction
but this is the kind of thing you'll fight with a Bowden style extruder and
It's just something I'll probably have to live with I also did a PETG version in this awesome neon green and honestly
I think I might prefer it over the PLA print again
It's a little bit wispy and stringy
But it looks really nice and I might actually start printing more in PETG in the future if this is the sort of results
I can expect
Wanting to throw something with dimensional accuracy at the Machine. I printed this puzzle cube, and although it's pretty tight, It does work.
This is with the 0.3 millimeter clearance. So keep that in mind if you're trying to print parts that assemble together
So overall it's a rough print, but I would give it a pass
Finally a stress test was required
So enter the easter-egg torture test
Print quality is definitely average on this one with a bit of ghosting
And again those nasty retraction sites, but in all fairness the parts do turn which is difficult to reproduce on an FTM 3d printer
Although it definitely would have fused at the original scale
This is 200% and I had printed the puzzle cubes on zero infill and didn't update them for this model
So the stuff up at the bottom with the infill there
That's that's completely my bad. But the rest is a reflection on sort of print quality. I'm getting off my Ender three
Alrighty, then. Let's conclude this saga. Do I recommend the Ender Three from Creality?
Well, the price point is super difficult to beat regularly being on sale for below $200 u.s
It's pretty crazy for the print volume offered as well as having a heated bed
it's also got power out recovery too, which is important to a lot of people, but honestly,
I dislike the extruder design news. I just feel that there's too many unknowns that can affect print quality and make fine-tuning
really difficult. There's not much reason for this design to use a bowden -
There's room for a direct extruder director and extruder and something where the PTFE goes right down into the nozzle
Like the extruder is on the wen-hao(?) I3 for example would definitely be my preference.
I also don't like micro SD cards and 3d printers either they're fiddly and annoying and I did find the one provided wouldn't always play
nice with my adapters, but a simple micro SD to full size SD adapter fixes that issue
It's a really small thing to complain about
I know I honestly think that quality control is mostly to blame for my initial experiences at the Ender three
And they led me down a wild goose chase
I'm not gonna lie when it came to trying to troubleshoot what was going on?
When it was something as simple as just changing the couplers from the beginning
So I would love to seek Creality just do a bit better in the Quality Control Department and use high quality
couplers and probably PTFE to avoid this simple issue that would have been quite a significant barrier
For a newcomer to 3d printing on an overall quite good machine
Especially for the price point because that's what I'm all about
I want people to have positive experiences with 3d printing and this machine is as I said one of the best kits I've ever
assembled and I do mean that even though mains wiring is pre wired and safely hidden, which is a big thumbs-up to me. So just
fix those issues, please! With all that in mind
you can find a link below to pick one up using our affiliate code with gearbest or choose not to
That's totally cool. For me, I'll probably be swapping this extruder and hotend out for something else
so keep an eye out for a video on that in future and be sure to subscribe
So you don't miss it as always on makers muse this review has been my opinion and no money has changed hands
In fact, I told gearbest I wasn't actually planning to do a review. I was just gonna use it in projects
But here we are anyway
I felt was important to give you my experiences in the sea of other Ender three reviews. It is my aim to empower your creativity
through technology, and I do look forward to seeing you again very shortly here on makers muse. Catch you later guys. Bye