Creality Ender 3
Pros
- Based of the Prusa i3 design
- Easily upgradable
- Decent build volume
- Extremely competitive price point
Areas for Improvement
- Printer must be assembled
- Manufacturer used some cheap components to keep cost down
- Quality control isn't as tight as desired
Rave Robot’s review of the Creality Ender 3 Printer. When buying an FDM printer you will find that there are a plethora of options on the market. Ever since Prusa debuted their i3 open sourced printer a large number of similar printers have come in the market. Of particular interest are some of the Chinese i3 clones such as the Anycubic Mega, the Monoprice Maker Select, and of course the Creality Ender 3. These are printers designed to be assembled, modified, and tinkered with. It is important when purchasing a budget printer such as the Ender 3 to consider that. If you want something assembled ready to go out of the box and without the need for tinkering it will come at a steep price increase.
Printer Specifications
Printer Size: 440mm (length) x 410mm (depth) x 465mm (height)
Build Volume: 220mm (length) x 220mm (depth) x 250mm (height)
Heated Build Plate: Yes
Printing Technology: Fused Deposition Modeling
Printing Material: 1.75mm diameter filament
Filament Path: Bowden Tube
Suggested Layer Height: 0.1 – 0.2mm
Out Of The Box Impression
The Ender 3 is a kit and when you open the box you will be quickly reminded of that. Pieces of metal extrusion, bags of screws, and various parts will greet you. The good news here is that everything is carefully labeled and the instructions are mostly illustrations.
The printer is not hard to put together, just go slow and make sure you know what you are doing for each step before you start screwing things together. There are a ton of videos on YouTube of assembly as well so watching someone else make their mistakes before you do is a smart decision.
The Ender 3 comes with a bunch of extra screws and some tools. These are nothing high quality but they will get you started and you can buy a better set later.
- Various Allen keys, wrenches, and screwdriver
- Two 0.4mm Nozzles
- A set of cutters, mine broke within a few months
- A Scraper
- A USB adapter and a micro SD card
- A few feet of PLA filament
- Pneumatic fittings for the bowden tube
Included tools minus the cutters which broke
The Ender 3 uses a bowden tube setup for the extruder as opposed to a direct drive. This reduces the weight on the X-axis gantry but does make printing flexibles more difficult. The Bowden tube continues into the hot end which prevents safely printing high temperature filaments such as nylon. PLA and PETG will be fine with the stock hot end.
Bed leveling test print. Without an automatic bed leveling sensor this is the best way to visualize it. This bed is too high in the front and too low in the back.
The Ender 3 is a budget printer and there are some places that this shows. Many people will tell you that the stock bed is often not fully flat, sometimes downright warped. There is no auto bed leveling built in to compensate for inconsistencies in the bed.
The stock build surface is nothing special though the pro model does have a magnetic bed. The main board for the printer is definitely budget. It is and 8 bit model with older stepper motor drivers which are fairly noisy.
The extruder is made of plastic and is prone to cracking. Creality is also using an old version of Marlin firmware on their printers which doesn’t have thermal runaway protection enabled. This may seem like a lot of downsides.
Remember the Ender 3 is cheap printer and the good news is that this printer is insanely easy to upgrade!
What Additional Supplies Should I Get For an Ender 3?
A printer nozzle cleaning kit is a must. This one has a variety of cleaning needles as well as some tweezers. The allen keys included with the printer are fine but you might find yourself wanting a magnetic set. A spray bottle, a microfiber cloth, and some IPA for cleaning your print surface.
You don’t want to have a long print fail because you forgot to clean your bed. Creality included a set of cutters but I found my pair were made of fairly soft metal and didn’t survive long. A higher quality pair may be in order.
What Upgrades Should I Purchase For an Ender 3?
Normally I would talk about print quality before I talk about upgrades but with this printer I think I’ll break with tradition. First let’s talk the print bed. The stock bed is not great and if yours is warped then this is something to look at.
There are two excellent options either a glass bed or a magnetic one. Glass is much smoother and if you are not planning on adding an automatic bed leveling sensor this a great choice. If you prefer the ease of print removal then a magnetic bed might be a better option for you.
I also replaced those large binder clips with swiss clips which aren’t in the way of the nozzle when it gets near the edge of the build plate.
A Titan extruder clone mounted to my Ender 3
When we look at the stock extruder there are a few issues with it.
First and most importantly, it is made of plastic and prone to breakage. Second, it isn’t great for flexible filaments as it has a very open filament path. By far the cheapest way to address the breakage issue is to buy a metal extruder of the same design.
If you want to go up a notch then you have the E3D titan and BondTech bmg extruders. These have a 3:1 gear ratio and really grip your filament. Of course you might balk at buying a part for your printer that is more than the printer itself.
There are knockoffs you can consider but keep in mind that their quality control may be lacking.
Capricorn tubing is blue and has very tight tolerances for the internal diameter. Supposedly it handles heat a little better but I wouldn’t rely on that with PTFE.
The Bowden tube itself isn’t anything fancy, buying length of genuine capricorn tubing is a cheap upgrade. The inner diameter is better defined than the stock tube and will help with preventing flexible filaments from kinking. Cutting it flush is very important, use a razor or a tube cutter, not scissors or clippers.
People claim it can handle higher temperatures but remember it is still PTFE, high temperature will let off toxic gas.
Raspberry Pi enclosure mounted under the heated bed for my Octoprint install.
Octoprint is a great way to control your printer remotely, it is community driven and I am absolutely in love with it. A raspberry pi micro computer is great to run it connected through USB. You can hook up some led lights and a camera as well and watch your prints from the comfort of your living room!
Seriously if you don’t know what Octoprint is, you don’t know what you are missing. If there is one upgrade off this list you do, it should be to set this up.
LED light bar mounted to the top of my Ender 3
If the noise of the stepper motors bothers you then you can consider buying either the Creality 1.1.5 silent board or the Bigtreetech SKR Mini E3 V1.2 board. Both of these have a bootloader installed to make updating the firmware easy and silent stepper drivers. The Bigtreetech board is a 32 bit board as opposed to Creality’s 8 bit board so it is probably the better value.
If you don’t want to replace the main board (which is understandable) you should still consider getting an arduino uno and some jumper wires and flashing a bootloader to the stock board so you can upgrade the firmware and enable thermal runaway protection. It is not as scary as it sounds and you’ll need updated firmware to use one of the 3:1 gear ratio extruders or a bed leveling probe.
BL Touch mounted to my hot end assembly.
Automatic bed leveling is a great way to compensate for a skewed or warped bed. The printer uses the probe to measure the height of the bed and build a mesh of the topography. When printing the Z-axis can then compensate for the slight height differences.
The BL touch is a very popular probe and the one I selected for my printer. If you are still using the stock mainboard that came with the printer you also need a pin27 board to do this upgrade. The pin27 board hijacks the cable that goes to the buzzer so that will be disabled.
Trading an annoying buzzer for autobed leveling is an easy choice.
Speaking of bed leveling, a set of stiffer springs for under the bed will definitely help keep the bed from shifting as you scrape and pull prints off it. It’s a cheap upgrade that really makes a difference regardless of the method of leveling you go for. If you are swapping to automatic bed leveling then you could also replace the springs with solid bed mounts which won’t drift at all but can’t be adjusted.
Bed level visualizer plugin in Octoprtint, slight dip in the middle but nice even layers with the mesh being used to adjust Z-height
If you want an all metal hotend to print high temperature filaments you have two good options. Micro Swiss makes a drop in replacement for the stock creality one. E3D makes the tried and true v6 hotend which is also a great option. The v6 will require some printed parts, so keep that in mind before you tear the printer apart.
Swapping to an all metal hotend may also make getting your PLA settings dialed in more difficult. If you print primarily in PLA this might be one to skip for now.
The connectors both at the extruder and the hot end which hold the bowden tube in place can be pretty loose. Buying some higher quality ones should save you from the bowden tube popping out mid print and causing a failure.
A nice selection of nozzles
Creality includes two 0.4mm brass nozzles with the printer and they work great but like all brass nozzles over time they will wear out. You’ll want to pick up some replacements and while doing so maybe a sampler pack with some different size nozzles would be in order. Start with the ones Creality includes but once you are comfortable with your print quality it is something worth looking into.
What Upgrades Should I Print For an Ender 3?
Once you have your printer going, something that isn’t hard to do even without buying any upgrades, there are some printed upgrades you should prioritize. The back of the LCD panel doesn’t have a cover, this is easily remedied.
The cable management, especially for the heated bed, left a lot to be desired. These printable cable chains will hold your cables without snagging and help alleviate the stress on them. The mainboard fan is also open and can collect bits of filament, a fan guard will save you a failure.
Back cover for the LCD board. Drag chain to hold the bed cables and prevent snags
The angle for the filament path from the spool is fairly extreme and skirts very close to the Z-axis gear. There are various filaments guides that help solves these problems.
You can also print a different mount for the spool holder or mount to move it down from the top. This spool holder is also very nice, it requires bearings to install.
A new spool holder moved to the left of the printer.
The Ender 3 community has created a large number of other upgrades you can print. Cable clips, bed handles, camera mounts, octoprint pi mounts, improved cooling fan shrouds, the list goes on.
What Slicer and Settings Should I Use For an Ender 3?
If you read my Anycubic Photon review you’ll remember I dedicated a decent amount of text to talking about slicing. None of that will apply to an FDM printer so if you are familiar with resin and not filament you’ll have some new things to learn.
A 3D Benchy sliced in Cura
The most common slicers for most hobbyist would be Cura or Prusa Slicer. Both have their idiosyncracies and you’ll probably prefer whichever one you learn first, for me that’s Cura.
In your slicer you will made a variety of tabs and menus to choose from. These settings are broken down into 3 categories. Machine settings, material settings, and print settings.
Machine settings are specific to your model of printer. Bed dimensions, g-code flavor, pre and post g-code scripts (required for something like automatic bed leveling), and the number of your extruders. You really don’t change these settings unless you upgrade your machine or there is something very wrong with the defaults.
Machine settings for my Ender 3, see the auto bed leveling commands for my BL Touch in the Start G-Code?
Material settings are specific to the filament you intend to print with. Settings such as filament diameter, default extruder and build plate temperatures, retraction speed and distance, and default fan speed. These settings will be specific to the brand and type of material you are using.
If you stick to just one brand of PLA and don’t mess with anything else then you won’t change this much once you dial it in. If you like to switch between PLA, PETG, and TPU as well as buying whatever brand is currently on sale then you’ll have a lot to do in here.
Filament settings for Hatchbox PLA, it is linked to Hatchbox woodfill PLA as they are similar but different.
Print settings are specific to the current run you are planning. The majority of changes to your profiles will be made in here and you will likely have multiple profiles for different occasions. Layer height, infill settings, print speeds, supports, and build plate adhesion are just a small number of the settings available to you.
Cura in particular will hide a lot of these settings so you’ll need to hit the 3 bar next to search and choose the level of detail you want to see. Personally I’d rather see all the settings then have the software hide some from me because it assumes I can’t handle it.
Some of my print settings for a 0.4mm nozzle at 0.2mm layer height.
What Is the Print Quality From an Ender 3?
So this is probably what you really want to know about. How well does this bargain printer print? Out of the box the printer is great, I ran through my tiny sample spool with no issues. Had I written my review right then it would have been perfect. After a few weeks as the printer settled in I noticed I needed to dial in my slicer settings a bit more.
Beautiful first layer on this light switch guard
Once I got a decent profile established my prints were great but I needed to learn how to level my printer better and the slightly skewed bed I had made using the full build plate difficult. During this time I also used an arduino to flash the most recent version of marlin and made sure thermal run away was on. I set up octoprint and got some LEDs and a camera set up.
For every new filament type and brand you will also need to check your slicer settings. Temperature towers, retraction tests, and calibration cubes are great ways to dial in your profile.
Temperature towers and a calibration cube in Hatchbox PLA
I was quite happy with my printer for the next few months until I developed a clog in one of my nozzles and started noticing underextrusion. An investigation showed that my extruder had cracked so I replaced it with a Titan and after dialing that in things are back to great. I also swapped to capricorn tubing as I plan to print some flexible TPU soon.
With my glass bed the prints on it adhere nicely with no need of hairspray or glue but I don’t like leveling it when I change nozzle sizes. I played with the manual mesh leveling option in marlin and while it worked decently I decided to add a BL touch. It was a very easy upgrade and now my first layers are perfect every time.
Music tiles I made for music education Fully functional light switch guard, no more guests turning off my boiler. Stormlight wall hanger printed in Hatchbox woodfill and stained, it is designed to hold a shard.
Compared to my Photon the quality of my Ender 3 prints look pretty poor but really they are pretty standard for filament printers. When you compare that the Photon prints with an X/Y resolution of 0.05mm and a 0.02-0.05mm layer height while the Ender 3 is printing with a line width of 0.48mm and a layer height of 0.1-0.2mm the differences are massive. The primary reason I bought my Ender 3 was to print larger items that would not be cost effective to make on the Photon or downright impossible.
Printing 1/4 of the shield with a 0.8mm nozzle Captain America shield assembled All finished
You may remember my article on the 12” Captain America shield I made with my Ender 3 using a 0.8mm nozzle and 0.4mm layer height. I’ve also made a Stormlight Archive wall decoration out of woodfill PLA and some ergonomic grips for my Nintendo Switch. One place the the Ender 3 shines is making a lot of parts all at once, I’ve made some game tokens for my child’s daycare, a light switch lock for my boiler, as well as a lot of parts and upgrades for the printer itself.
What Maintenance Does an Ender 3 Require?
After 6 months with this printer I have performed a number of upgrades on it. Routine maintenance is pretty simple though. Leveling and cleaning the build plate every few prints is a must. Grease the Z-axis threaded rod if it is sticking or once every few months. Finally check X and Y belt tension if you start seeing any layer shifting.
If you are seeing print issues such as under extrusion then you would also need to check the hotend for a partial blockage and check the tension on your extruder. If you haven’t had any leaks in the hot end or serious clogs there shouldn’t be much cleaning or maintenance there other than replacing the nozzle when it gets old.
Summary
Tinkering with the Ender 3 to get my prints where I wanted them was expected and I don’t consider it a negative. The upgrades I’ve done were also expected, and not an issue consider the price point of the Ender 3. It has been about 6 months and I’m feeling like I now understand this printer and it’s idiosyncrasies.
If you are not willing to spend some time tinkering or upgrading, the Ender 3 probably isn’t for you. I would then suggest you consider a pre-built Prusa i3 or an Ultimaker. If you are like me and are willing to put in a bit of time to dial things in and want a great bargain, then this is a great printer and one it is hard to beat for the price.
