3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
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Sure thing, chief. You were there when I bought the 1st one, there when I returned it for another one, and then held my hand through the tough times with the 2nd one. I salute you.
That was MY experience. You, as a 3d printer repair shop owner, had / have a different one. When a shop takes one back for a blatant defective part, do they send it to you? When that non-glass filled, poorly casted brass geared extruder breaks and it's an easy-enough $15ish dollar swap, does it cone to you? Or do the majority of people just try it and it works long enough for them to think, "well maybe if I just throw a little more time and money into it, it'll be good enough"? I. Me. The guy who's responding. Had multiple bad experiences with Creality printers. I'm done with them. My Bambu has been great since I've bought it, no maintenance aside from cleaning the carbon rods and the stray strands that make their way under the build plate. I repeatedly said, that was MY experience. I won't recommend them to anyone until I see major changes in their hardware. Feel free to disagree, but you're trying to argue with me regarding what I dealt with for far too long before I bought a printer that... wait for it... just works.
Yes - we constantly bought "defective" ones off of Ebay through an Amazon merchant program. They'd have shattered glass beds, or a missing idler arm, but I'd say 49/50 times, they were just misassembled. We'd purchase them for $40/ea, spend 5 minutes on them, and sell them for $150 properly assembled. Many of those people are still printing on the same Ender today, because a properly built old Ender 3 is a workhorse. You can't rely on people with no electromechanical knowledge to put together a literal manufacturing robot.
Yes. I have people drop their machines off and pay me the repair fee for a fan swap. For the silliest small things, constantly. Not only that, but this particular issue with Ender 3's was almost invisible, as the problem area existed under the arm idler, and if you didn't know what you were looking for, you wouldn't catch it. All you'd know is that you were having problems "leveling the bed" (as my customers always claimed) or "couldn't get it calibrated".
They literally have and I've been telling you that this whole time... The Ender 3 v3 comes with dual belt-sync'd Z, sprite extruder, dual auto leveling probes, proper linear rails on the bed, USB support, on custom extrusions. And I come to you with the experience of thousands of other Creality purchasers.
You're literally, purposely not listening here. You're comparing a machine that came out nearly 8 years ago to a modern one, and refusing to compare the modern one, with ANOTHER modern one. You simply cannot compare the vanilla Ender 3 - a GENERATIONS old machine, with a machine designed and sold within the past year. The Ender 3 v3 SE can be had for around $180-200 on Amazon. And it solved all the issues you're complaining about. But here you are, FESTERING on like a cancerous boil because you can't be bothered to listen to what a professional is telling you.
THIS is what I'm talking about. YOU are Creality's problem here. An inexperienced, uneducated user, who purchased what was at the time an enthusiasts machine, crashing out hard, and then bitching for all of eternity even after the machines have been fixed. Creality isn't bad any longer. They did exactly what you said they needed to do for you to stop giving them shit, but here you are giving them shit.
OF COURSE a 8 year old machine is shit compared to a 1 year old one. That's why I literally said not to get an older generation Ender. Your "experience" (and by that I mean lack-thereof) echos all the other new to the hobby people that walk in my store. You landed in the same shit they did. Literally a textbook case of you not knowing what was going on. And Creality will be bashed by you forever, because you - like everyone else - seemingly can't be arsed to learn, and instead blame it on whatever you're doing at the time.
This is getting ridiculous. While I only have an associates degree in CAD and machine design, I'm pretty sure I can pick out when a piece of 4040 extrusion is BENT, and i own and know how to use engineering squares. It wasn't an assembly mistake on my part. Since you buy them literally all the time on Ebay, someone must've snatched mine up before you could, since this NEVER happens. By your own admission, that extruder, from my generation, was junk. Yes it was only a $15 fix, and really, if you're going to get into this hobby you should be able to swap this part out, but the point stands-
First machine I bought was an OOB failure. When I brought it back to the store they opened the box and confirmed this with me. They did not need a finely honed straightedge to confirm it, the top gantry extrusion was bent.
Round two, the machine did okay, aside from the bed seemingly "losing" it's trimming. I purchased the "yellow springs" and installed them. This, at the time, seemed to resolve the issue. Until it didnt. At that point, I purchased and installed Creality's own ABL, I believe it was the CR touch, but you'll surely correct me if I'm wrong, after looking into several reviews/yt videos and multiple installation guides (somewhere during this time the extruder went, and yes, this was an easy fix with the red aluminum one). This is when I learned that the glass PEI bed that came with my machine was no longer flat. Fair enough, I figured this was a consumable part and bought another one. This did solve the problem again... until it didn't. This one had warped as well, as confirmed with a good, flat straightedge (an 18" Starrett 385, to be exact). It wasn't from improperly tensioned belts. Rather than attack someone personally over their experience, you scream Creality's praises on the internet and seem to insist that my experiences could not have happened. Sure, I bet you and your team are able to resurrect broken down machines, and that is fantastic. It keeps junk from filling up landfills and may even be able to get someone into the hobby at a lower price point. I commend you on this, honestly. However, after dumping time and money into the second machine Iexperienced from them, I decided it was no longer worth the effort. Mind you, these things all happened in about 8-9 months. I got some pretty good prints from it, but I also got a lot of failures, and when those kept piling up I cut my losses. As I've repeatedly stated, this was MY experience. Yours has clearly been different. I'm fully aware that scores of people likely fuck up these machines by putting them together incorrectly- I assure you this was not the case on mine.