I have an Ender 3 S1 that I use every couple of months at this point because it’s just such a pain to use. I have to adjust the bed tramming and z offset and run auto bed leveling for every single print and often times that’s still not good enough.
It will often take 30+ minutes just to get the first layer going down successfully.
Is this a me problem or did I lose the creality lottery?
OH!! Are you leveling with the bed and nozzle pre-heated? This is absolutely essential and so many guides don’t list this as a crucial step. There’s a shit ton of thermal expansion going on and you want to calibrate the space for the same conditions you’re going to be printing in.
You’re thinking of calibrating the Z-offset. A heated nozzle would have no impact on auto bed leveling.
Also, you don’t calibrate the Z-offset with a heated nozzle. Thermal expansion is the reason you use a piece of paper in between the nozzle and bed.
I have the bed and nozzle when calibrating z offset and bed tramming and auto bed leveling.
What’s the correct way for each of those?
When you’re calibrating z-offset you’re noting the difference between the probe and the nozzle.
So for that you want the nozzle heated but not the bed. Not that it hurts to have the bed heated. It’s just not needed.
Because the way you get the z offset is to find the point where probe triggers… and then find where the nozzle touches that same point.
For bed tramming you’ll want the bed heated. Although unless it’s badly warped you can get by without it and ABL should account for that anyway. What you want here is for the nozzle to be the same distance from the bed when it moves over it.
Here’s a series of comments I made for someone who was fighting issues that you might find helpful. They’re running Klipper but the mechanical adjustment and concepts should be the same.
https://lemmy.world/comment/7904011
Feel free to ask if you have any questions. I suspect you’re dealing with mostly mechanical variations which is common enough without dealing with the QA lottery you get with some printers like the ender 3
This is unfortunately the risk of the cheaper machines. Some people claim they have no issues, but you see many posts like this one that have constant problems or have spent a bunch of money to upgrade their machines to the point where they print consistently.
The cruel reality is that the cheaper machines are better for enthusiasts that have more knowledge and are ok with the printer being their hobby rather than printing, but they tend to be bought by people just coming into the hobby because they don’t want to invest in a reliable printer until they know whether they like it (or simply can’t afford it).
I did the exact same thing when I bought my first printer. I had already had experience with reliable printers and am very mechanically minded, so I thought I was ok to buy one that I knew I would have to tinker with. Eventually I came to the realization that to get it to the point where it would be workable the time and money would just about buy me a Prusa instead.
I probably count as that type of person you describe. I found a model on Lemmy that I really wanted to make and ended up buying an Ender 3 v2 cheap with a coupon at Micro Center. Has it totally been trouble-free? No. But I got it for a hundred bucks, plus a few addons (auto-level, flexible magnetic bed). I’d have to pay significantly more for a nicer one, when this is just an experimental hobby. I don’t care if I have to fiddle around a little more to get my occasional print going. In a way fine-tuning is part of the problem solving and tinkering I’m really looking for. I don’t care if the quality is less than what another printer can do. I don’t need a Cadillac when a Geo gets me to the grocery store just fine.
Oh, and most of my issues were caused by shitty filament. Once I went from some weird stuff on Amazon to the Inland I’ve had better success with, things went way better. I’m surprised that’s not mentioned more actually.
I had an ender 3 as well. Every time I used it I had to calibrate and level it, and watch the the print for the first few layers to make sure it was going to work. I’d estimate it had failed prints around 50% of the time. Eventually it died and I got a anycubic kobra printer. It is so much better it’s unbelievable. I leveled it once when I first assembled it. Since then I haven’t calibrated it or leveled the bed once. I’ve done over 100 prints on it with a 0% failure rate. It is truly a printer where I can tell it to print something and come back 10 hours later and have a perfect print.
You might have lost the lottery. I’ve printed 5 spools of parts with my work’s Ender 3 Pro without having to adjust the bed level after I first set it, and that doesn’t even have auto leveling.
Make sure your bed is clean, and make sure your gantry and frame is square when you assembled it. It might also be your type of filament or Z offset
Ender 3 pro owner here. I definitely need to level more than this person, but not even every print. I’ll go months printing nothing and when I fire it up, I get excellent adhesion right off the bat, no issues. Also never touched the z-offset, only fix it with manual leveling (no auto leveler)
Maybe check for loose screws, that’s one of the most common issues. And your Slicer settings, maybe it isn’t saving or restoring the Bed Levelling data.
