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Episode: 2581
Title: HPR2581: My new 3D printer - impressions of the Creality Ender 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2581/hpr2581.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:02:57
---
This is HBR Episode 2581 entitled, My New 3D Printer, Impression of the Reality Ender 3.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and in about 21 minutes long, and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I bought a Reality Ender 3D printer in June 2018.
Here are my first impressions of it.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello everybody. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Dave Morris.
Now today I'm talking about a new 3D printer that I've got in the past week.
I've been thinking about getting a 3D printer for a year or two, probably longer than that.
When I first saw the rep rep and stuff like that at conferences, I wanted one.
But my plan was to get a Prusa i3 mark 3, which is the latest from Prusa.
You can buy it as a kit and it's cheaper that way, but it's still quite a lot of money.
And it's something around 700 pounds if you buy it like that.
And it's pretty hard to build because it really is everything as individual components,
which you then pretty much build yourself. I've not seen it so I don't know the details.
I wasn't really sure that there was a need for 3D printer in my life.
Though I have to say I was beginning to amass more and more reasons why I'd need one.
So this year I've been looking at the Chinese originated Creality CR10, which is quite nice.
And certainly got all of the 3D printer fans raving. It's about half the price of the Prusa.
And it's more or less fully assembled. Probably killed a bit to put together.
I've not actually seen this the details, but since it's quite a chunky thing,
you'd think it would be packed in a box in a more compacted way.
So I not decided on that one. And then in April, something I just spotted in May,
it was a new print from Creality called the Ender 3.
And it was a half the price of the CR10.
And actually cheaper than it's predecessor, the Ender 2, which is a very small one.
So that meant it was around about 200 pounds. So I thought it was worth taking the risk to get one,
to see if I could justify having a 3D printer. So I bought one early June.
From Amazon, I bought it from Amazon. You can get them from China,
whether they're a good bit cheaper, but having had all sorts of problems with customs in the UK,
things bought from overseas, I wanted to try and avoid it if I can.
So as I was, as I wrote this, I'm sort of, I've got some long notes here to talk about this subject.
And that was on the 10th of June. I was writing this. It's the 11th of the days I'm recording it.
But it's been, well, about a week since it was delivered.
I think it was last Monday, but I can't remember.
So all the stuff I'm saying is quite preliminary, because we haven't had it that long.
But I thought it might be an interesting thing to talk about.
So the Ender 3 is, which is strange now, I had no idea where that comes from,
but it's a fused deposition modeling printer. That's the sort that
extrudes hot filaments of plastic. And it's a Cartesian printer.
It's got XYZ axes that it moves about with. It's got a heated bed.
The bed is 220 by 220 millimeters, and it's got a headroom of 250 millimeters.
So that's the full volume if you multiply those together.
It's Chinese, as I've mentioned. This one arrives in a partially disassembled form.
It's not quite a kit, but it's in bits, which we'll look at in a minute.
Assembly isn't difficult, and takes maybe a couple of hours.
So just in brief, the printer is made from aluminium extrusions with, I think, laser cut metal fittings.
And the overall quality looks really good.
So the extrusions are a big chunky light, but chunky bits of metal.
And the other parts look really heavily heavy duty.
There are a few plastic parts, but unlike a lot of printers, there are no 3D printed parts in it.
They're all, like, injection molded and that type of thing.
The X and Y movements are controlled by stepper motors that drive tooth belts.
The Z-axis is controlled by a single threaded rod.
Some printers have two for this job, but the single one is in the end of three.
The moving parts are supported by what seem to be hard rubber wheels on bearings,
which ride on the flat parts of the frame.
So things need to be very well put together and rectangular, and that sort of thing
all the joints need to be good and solidly fixed and with good right angles for that to work well.
So I've got a bunch of pictures in the notes.
You can see from them some assembly info there and stuff, that there's a metal box containing
the main controller electronics, which is underneath the print bed.
And to the right of the unit, there's an LCD panel and a control knob
for driving the thing, controlling the thing.
The power supply is attached to the frame and it's behind the right most vertical extrusion.
So there's a spool holder on top of the frame, which keeps the whole layout of the thing compact.
I'm saying this because other modules, the CR10s,
got bits that you have to find homes for on the bench you're working on,
whereas this is all just one thing that you can just pick up.
And the filament feed, the extruder that drives the filament is a motor with a gear
and a pulley and it pinches the filament and pushes it along.
The filament goes through what I discovered is called a bowed and tube,
which is a heat resistant plastic tube and it moves to the heated bit, which I believe is called
the hot end. You see how I'm new to this stuff? So I'm telling you stuff I'm discovering.
So the printer will print from a micro SD card, which there's a slot at the front for that
on the control box and there's also a micro USB connection for PCO laptop.
So I've done some brief notes about assembly.
You get the stuff nicely packed in a box with foam and this sort of stuff and there's picture of that.
Then and there's a little bit of PLA filament included. I don't know about 10 meters or something
and there's an assembly instructions that consists of a large sheet with color pictures on it
and a teeny amount of English, but it's a bit like an IKEA thing except that it's in color.
And so it's all about components being shown an arrow showing where they go and that type of thing.
And I certainly like those sort of things personally. I enjoy putting IKEA stuff together.
Not so keen about that stuff itself, but yeah, anyway, that's another issue.
So I unpacked the box. So I should say we unpack the box because I had my son helping.
I couldn't keep up my way. He's very keen on this with his girlfriend.
So the three of us were all working on this. So he unpacked the box and I've taken a couple of
photos to show all the different parts. You'll see that the parts are not very tiny. I mean the
the feed mechanism is one unit. So that's all assembled. The extrusion tubes that make the frame
are individually. They wrap together and they're they're just individual things that you
can have to just screw screw into other things. But you know, it was pretty easy because they're
nicely made. They're tapped beautifully. You get nice bolts and the bolts and the screws and
few t-nuts. Of course, this is extrusion with channels in it. So you put t-nuts in there.
They're all in individual plastic bags. So you know when you need a thing of certain size and
certain length, then you pick up the bag and read the label and that's it. Which to me is
absolutely brilliant. The number of things I had to assemble in the past where it is just a
sort of a collection of stuff in a in one big bag. I mean, think of IKEA stuff, for example.
It's that you really got to identify everything quite carefully. It's already been done here.
Included with the printer is an SD card which has got detailed assemblies, instructions,
and a test print and stuff of that sort. But we didn't use the assembly instructions while
we were building it. We used the colored pictures thing. So the building didn't take too long
actually with the three of us. I let the guys do a lot of it and act it as an executive role.
Three is that tone of life where I can do that. Not being embarrassed. I won't go into much
more detail. You can see the almost finished assembly in one of the pictures. There are loads of
assembly videos on YouTube and there's blogs as well and so it would be completely superfluous for
me to go into any more detail, I think, about this. Apart from a few issues and observations,
I'm going to come on to in a moment. One of the things that I'm not wild about as far as
the assembly is concerned is that there's a lot of wiring, ribbon cables and bunches of cables
that really need some careful management. We tied them together, they were cable ties with the kit,
but it would be nicer if we had things that kept them out the way of movements and that sort of
stuff. So that's something, you know, it's a 200 quid. What do you expect? It's not going to be that,
that wonderful. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good and it doesn't take a lot to make it better.
So the assembly issues and stuff. The X axis belt, that's this sort of forward and back on as you
look at the front of the printer, was already on. I was well-tensioned. It's got tensioning,
let's go at tensioning, a unit with a pulley on the end of it, which you can move back with.
It's already really quite tight. So that was fine, but the belt on the Y axis, you had to install
yourself and it had two anchors, anchor on each end, a metal clip on each end, and you had to
clop them into slots. Then you had to use a tensioner to get the tension. We didn't do that very
well to start with, and the slack belt was obvious in the first time we tried printing. So getting
that right, and it's not that easy. It could be better. I'll come on to this a bit more in a moment.
We found it was slightly difficult to feed the filament through the extruder. You have to squeeze
a spring, there's a lever, that does this, that clears the, separates the pinch rollers from one
another. But the end of the filament was snagging on stuff. Even though we cut it diagonally as we were
told, we disassembled that bit just so that we could see the filament coming out of the extruder
and could guide it into the tube, and then we were fine. Later on, maybe we hadn't set it up
probably the first time, but later on we didn't seem to have any problems with it. It's just a case
of knowing what's the right, the right way to do things and learning from your mistakes, I think.
We didn't have any problems in certainly microSD cards. Obviously these cards are really tiny,
but there are reports of it missing the slot. If you're not very accurate with the way that you
put it into the slot, the slot is on the edge of a card. I imagine I've not looked at it on the edge
of a PCB, and it's in a hole in the case, but there's gaps either above or below it, and you can,
if you're not paying attention to poke the SD card through there, we're looking at ways, it's not a
thing, I don't think we would do it, but if the phone goes just as you're doing it, maybe you might,
I don't know, but there are things you can do to make that better. So first thing, we tried first
print. There was a pre-sliced object on the SD card, that is an object in a format that the printer
could use, which is in a format called G-code. I think that's all it will do, but I don't know,
I'm still very green about how you, the ins and outs of these things. My son was, had prepared
a Fusion 360 object on a Windows machine that he has access to, I don't have one myself,
and he used the Ultimaker Cura slicer for that, and was experimenting with the parameters.
He produced something which was, which didn't infill very much, and wasn't very detailed,
the resolution wasn't very fine, and he printed that, and there's a picture of it,
it's just a sort of little token style. The thing looks to be like a gear wheel, but it was,
you know, it's a fun thing to do, it's quite nice to have generated a thing of your own and then
printed it. Then a few days later we got our first reel of PLA, polylactic acid, the plastic that
this printer is probably best at, we haven't tried other types of filament yet, but we will do.
We've got some PETG on order. Anyway, we got the filament and we started printing items,
so I've included a picture of one of the first things that got printed. I want to reorganize my
Raspberry Pi's, and I have access to an abort some, some din rail. I've put a link to the, not
so much to the, what din rail is, I suppose I could do that, but where I got this particular thing
from, it came off thingyverse, but basically the rail is a thing that you would put in the back of
a cabinet of electrical equipment in a building, in a basement or whatever, and it's got a,
from a side view, a C-like section to it. So there's a lip at the top, you can hook things on
and a lip below that you can lock things into, and you can screw this into the wall or whatever.
I want to make some racks for my pies and so forth. So I printed this particular one, and like I
said, I've given a reference to where I got it from, it's not mine. And it printed really well.
It got high resolution treatment, and it looks pretty good actually, it looks pretty good.
I've got a bit of din rail here and I've connected it to it. It needs another part and needs a little
lock, locking a bit that fits into a slot at the bottom, that locks it onto the rail, but it's
absolutely brilliant, I think. So nearly finished and I want to mention some of the usage issues and
stuff and the observations we made in our first few days of using this printer. You have to level
the bed. The bed has to be parallel to the Y axis, otherwise the deposition of the plastic could
be anywhere, could be in just being squirted out in the air or whatever. There are four leveling
knobs under the corners of the bed. You have to lower the hot end to a corner of the bed,
make sure there's enough space under it to insert a sheet of paper and adjust the bed
appropriately until it's consistent, consistent with, you can slide a piece of paper in
without too much resistance. And then you have to do that on each of the four corners.
And you can control the position of the nozzle that's doing this by using the control panel,
move it in the X and Y directions. I saw a few days after, did this first time, I saw a review,
the printer on YouTube, where the reviewer ran a procedure that automatically positions the
nozzle at each of the four corners, precisely over the screw points where you were just the bed.
You can't look in for attention, it's strange how she always does this one.
I thought, oh, I wasn't paying enough attention. I wasn't sure if this was a firmware feature
or what it was. But looking a bit further, I found that there's G code available on Thingiverse,
which does this. So basically, it just lets you, it moves to the first position and then stops,
and you have to press the button on the control panel to move on. So at each point, you can adjust
the position. And we've been using that, and boy does that help. It's really good. It would be
nice it was in the firmware, but it's working pretty well. We're very happy with that. I've
put a link to it in case anybody is interested in this printer and would find that beneficial.
The other thing was adhesion to the print bed. When we printed with the supplied filament,
it stuck to the bed really, really hard. It's very hard to get off. When we got the new filament,
we kept finding things to touching. It looked for advice and tried glue stick, but that was a
mixed blessing because glue sticks don't go on very smoothly, et cetera, et cetera. We,
we're working on optimizing this. You shouldn't even need anything to make PLA stick, apparently.
Since we've got the better method of leveling the bed, things seem to be going much better.
The third one is just a warning, not one I've directly experienced, but in some cases,
this printer is being delivered with the bed being warped, and you need to be careful of this.
Mine doesn't seem to be warped at all. Not in a visible way. I've not done a minute examination
of it, but it doesn't seem to be an issue. But many people are adding a glass top to the bed,
and others are using adhesive surfaces that you can get. So, we're looking at that, but we
might be okay with what we have, I'm not sure. So, in conclusion then, this is a great printer.
There are upgrades for it. There's things like belt tensioner for the CR-10 that somebody
has invented and created. They're almost compatible with the end of three, but not quite. There's
an attachment for the hot end, which lets the fan direct air more directly onto the nozzle.
There's also alternative firmware for this device, which you can flash onto the controller,
and there's tons more other things, things like manate cable management. There's a cover for the
fan on the controller box, so things can't easily drop into it, which they could in the standard
model. And there's loads of things, and I've given a link to the Thingiverse page where all
of these things are collected together. So, there's many things you can do to enhance it,
even to beautify it with different coloured bits of use. I don't be doing that, but it's wonderful.
As I say, I'm very new to this, and I'm amazed how much there is that you can do to take the
basic machine and enhance it. I know there are many other 3D printer users on HPR who we can
do with more stuff, I wish we'd heard more about people 3D printer experiences, but they're
probably already switched off my ramblings about this new cheap printer. But if you haven't yet
gone to it, then this seems to me to be a damn good way to get into 3D printing. So,
I wanted to look at issues with it, but there's tons of information about it, and lots and lots
and lots of help. So, I think, speaking for the three of us who've been doing things with it,
it's a wonderful printer for a beginner in the world of 3D printing. So, hope that you find
that useful, and that's it. Bye-bye.
You've been listening to Hecopublic Radio at HecopublicRadio.org. We are a community podcast
network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows,
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