The Creality Ender 3
Yesterday I received my Ender 3 kit in the mail. It came in quite a small box which is roughly the size of an old VCR box (if anyone is old enough to remember what they looked like) The base was assembled and it has an inbuilt motherboard which is screwed to the base. The rest was un-assembled and needed to be put together.
The instructions that it came with were very simple and it was a single page sheet that folds out to roughly A3 size. Even though the instructions were very basic it was quite a painless stress free task to assemble it and get it up and running.
I've built and rebuilt a few printers though but someone completely new to 3D printing could need to watch a few youtube vids to see how it all goes together. I did have a few minor issues that I had to fix that the instructions didn't cover so they could probably cause issues for someone new to the hobby so I I'll outline them here.
The bracket that the Z endstop is mounted to had a small tab that locates on top of the bottom rail of the printer, when this was in place my hotend wouldn't reach my bed so the printer couldn't print. That was an easy fix, I just lopped the tab off the side of the bracket with a wood chisel and then I could adjust the endstop to allow the hotend to reach the bed.
The Z stepper motor shaft was out of alignment from the Z nut which runs on the shaft the Z stepper drives, so I had to shim it to get it into perfect alignment. I used two pieces of cardboard about (0.4mm thick each 0.8mm total) and shimmed the Z stepper motor and then the z lead screw slipped easily into the coupling on the stepper motor when it was screwed into the Z nut.
And finally when I had it all assembled I noticed my gantry wasn't parallel with the base, so I had to disassemble the top and loosen the screws on the gantry brackets to align them better and tighten it all back up and re-fit it all. I did that twice and made sure it was as perfect as humanly possible.
I also had to play around with the eccentric nuts that are used to adjust the moving parts on the x axis and also on the base as they were adjusted slightly too tight for my liking from the factory. I hate the concept of those eccentric adjustment nuts but they are a fairly standard part used on modern printers, so that type of adjustment has to be done on all printers these days.
The end result
This is an amazing printer for this price ($256 AU) and I'd go so far to say that it is the best printer out of the three I own. So far everything I've printed has turned out perfect with PLA and I've just finished my first test print with PETG and it turned out great too.
Final ratings
Value for money *****
Ease of Assembly ****
Print quality *****
Delivery time *****
If you are considering buying a 3D printer and don't want to spend a fortune, this is the printer for you. How they can build something of this quality and ship it here and still make a profit is beyond me. This is a fantastic little printer.