This article covers my initial experiences and review of the Creality Ender 6 and the Ender 3 pro 3D printers. I’ve been messing with these printers for a few weeks now and have been completely enamored by them. The ability to whip out functional prototypes and usable products in a few hours is something I dreamed of as a kid. I work on a lot of different kinds of projects from electronics to automotive…sometimes certain pieces are straight-up unobtainable or unreasonably priced. I have a tendency to pick up on things fairly quickly so I decided to jump into 3D printing.
Heads up: This article is broken up into a couple chunks; The first and smaller section belonging to the Ender 6 since mine was fairly bang on right out of the box. The second covering the Ender 3.
The Ender 6:
When I decided to take the plunge and pick a 3D printer for myself, I was most interested in something I wouldn’t have to highly modify. I wanted to be able to print the materials that I have interest in. I knew that ABS and Carbon Fiber filament were in my game plan. Through a little bit of research I settled on the Creality Ender 6 and headed to my local MicroCenter. I happily scuttled home and got to the general assembly.
I was beyond excited. The main assembly was complete aside from installing the Plexi. I just had to get a picture during assembly because I normally forget about taking pictures when I work on things.
After I finished assembly I started off by printing one of the included g-code files on the SD card.. the lucky cat! I was unfamiliar with what I should expect from a newer modern 3D printer, I was pleasantly surprised by what came out. It did have imperfections, but nothing that I couldn’t get rid of with some 600 to 1000 grit sand paper. I was pleased. Not much later I realized the stringing could be eliminated with retraction and temp settings. This was definitely cool to begin with.
I started off by printing the most standard thing you should to help figure out what the status of your printer is: Benchy.
Obviously I had some stringing issues but overall it came out dimensionally great.
After playing around with retraction settings, movement speeds and temperatures I was printing fairly accurately with this printer in no time. It became fairly obvious to me after a couple weeks and more than one 20-hour print that I was going to need another printer. I couldn’t justify the price for another Ender 6 at this point. Which brought me to the Ender 3 Pro.
Ender 3 Pro:
The Ender 3 from Creality is an open source printer with a large user base and tons of community support. A little bit of Googling will get you pretty far with support from these machines. Luckily I had obtained a coupon which allowed me to take one home for $106 after tax.
I was skeptical of a machine in this price bracket; my suspicion not unfounded. I did work for an electronics manufacturer at one point. The typical practice was to reduce cost over time and also attempt to reduce cost for special contracts. My typical contribution was to consult on cooling issues for cheaper components. Anyway, I digress.
After roughly 3 and 1/2 hours of assembly I was ready to fire it up. I didn’t take a picture of it, but the Ender 3 Pro refused to do an auto home function. With little bit of investigation I found the factory harness was wired incorrectly with the extruder being wired to the x-axis and vice versa. Unfortunately I did not get a picture of this so you’re just going to have to take my word for it. It fired right up after. Within a week the potentiometer dial seized up completely. I brought it back for an exchange since I figured I had a lemon unit.
The initial print quality was decent and totally acceptable for 100+tax. It still needed some tuning and adjustment but I couldn’t complain for the price bracket. Not near as good as the Ender 6, but It was totally workable. It didn’t take long until I started looking into mods to improve print quality.
I’ll work on tinkering with the E3 to improve performance and quality. I picked up a second one to keep as a stock-ish comparison during my modification process. Eventually both will share the mods that are worthwhile. Which brings me to:
Ender 3 modifications – (This will be a link later, stay tuned!)
Thanks for reading! -Toby