r/ender3

Hello Reddit, I have a mystery to solve that's been stumping my knowledgeable 3D Printing buddy and smart-people discords alike! For you see, I got a Ender 3 V1 from a friend of a friend who told me it wouldn't extrude anymore and he "didn't feel like" fixing it. Well, I opened that baby up and it turned out the spring had wiggled out of place and tada! It extrudes now! The problem is...boy, is it not extruding right.

I have been troubleshooting everything under the sun for the past two weeks with the help of my 3D printing buddy and a discord filled with nerds. It prints like this no matter the nozzle temperature, fan speed, or print speed. Everything looks fine in the slicer program I'm using. This is with PLA that's dry. I'm at my wits end and am this close to selling it for parts and just saving up for 3D printer that actually works.

I will say this printer has some creative repairs done by the previous owner when it comes to soldering the thermistor*,* and it seems to be missing a few screws. So it's not exactly in the best condition anyway.

Does anyone here know how to solve this mystery? Am I an idiot that's missed something obvious? Did the previous owner mess it up beyond saving?

Hi! I bought an ender 3 v2 second hand and it came with this mod. But I want to print it again since it looks weird and broken (you can see how the glued it). I event thins the right fan is facing to a wall and its not doing anything.

I want it to look nice. Do you know where to find this model or maybe a better one? I don't want to expend too much on new fans either so if anyone know how to improve this, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

I think it's still partly an ender 3 somewhere in here.

There's no end of posts here and elsewhere of someone shorting some wires on their Ender and killing things. Blowing a replaceable fuse is no big deal. Blowing a SMD fuse is a PITA and blowing a MCU sucks the big one.

I run a few external devices off my internal printer PSU and this is something I've been slack on but now that I've had a go as part of the rebuild it's proven quite simple to actually implement.

Mini blade fuses of appropriate size. Probably every auto shop in the world for higher amp ones, I went through E14 for lower rated ones - remember we're working at 24v so 1A is 24 watts! https://au.element14.com/littelfuse/0297002-wxnv/fuse-blade-2a-32v-fast-acting/dp/1677622

In what I am sure is total coincidence, the fuses have terminals 0.8mm thick and 2.7mm wide which just happens to be about the same size as smaller quick disconnect/faston fittings. I found mine in brass at a local electronics store labelled as "phone type crimp lugs".

https://au.element14.com/te-connectivity/150346-2/female-disconnect-2-8mm-24-20awg/dp/3133922

Add in a little clear heatshrink (clear = we can see if anything is going wrong underneath) and we now have peripheral power cables with safety current limitations. The package is fairly small so you can jam them in under the panels for internal PTO's too.

My needle nose pliers aren't small enough

How tight should the extruder spring that clamps the filament be? I’ve had under extrusion problems on my last print and I tried checking if the plastic arm was cracked but it seems fine, also wondering if I should upgrade to the fully metal one and if it is worth it.

The last layers of the print were fine because I was manually helping the filament push into the hot end from the other side of the Bowden tube. Also could it be the friction from the filament spool grinding on the spool holder?

Y Axis on my Ender 3 Pro is making a grinding noise whenever it moves, and won't move after it moves about 10mm. Help would be much appreciated lol

EDIT: SOLVED I did a thorough cleaning of the printer and found a little glob of probably scrap filament wedged under the belt. How it got there? Who knows, but it doesn't grind anymore So lesson of the day - Regular machine cleaning does some wonders i guess

Lots of free space for the air to flow now.

Time to get the old warhorse back in the saddle and ripping again. Going Kalico this time around because Klipper is just too straightforward and easy now.

Putting my $$$ where my mouth is too - bought one of the TZ-E3 v3.0 with unicorn styles nozzles to test against my venerable TZ-E3 v1.0 which had a press fitting fail after ~1200 hours of hot & fast printing.