On our way back from Perth, Chris asked me about 3D printers. I haven’t kept up on the 3D printer market, but he said he wanted to try and make some historical Cornish fishing vessels for his railway modelling. My existing 3D printer is a clone of the Makerbot 2 that I bought in 2013 or something and its print quality is pretty rough in comparison to today’s printers. When we got back to Albany I hit up the internet to get some ideas. I was looking for a decent, modern printer that seemed to be well recommended and settled on the Creality Ender 3 V3 SE.
I showed the printer to Chris and he said to go ahead and order it. I ordered it directly from the Creality web site for $260. That seemed to be a pretty good price given that in my reading I found one Australian site asking in excess of $800 for the same printer. Once I placed the order it was time to wait, because I suspected, owing to the free freight, that it might be coming directly from China.
It took a fortnight, maybe less, but then the courier arrived with a big box. I spend one morning getting it assembled and tightened up. It seems a great improvement over the old printer, even though my old one is in a solid metal box.
We decided that the best place for the printer would be in my office next to the old one. I finished setting it up and powered it on. The UI and self leveling has definitely come a long way in 12 years.
That’s where I left it for a bit. I sat down with the software and got pretty lost in the weeds with all the settings so shut it down to come back later. The next day (?) I decided I needed to try it out, whether I knew the best settings or not. I figured it might be useful to get a baseline for the printer so I downloaded the boat benchy, sliced it and copied it to the SD card.
I was pretty impressed.
I have never been able to print with my old printer without lots of support and a raft. The new printer printed the benchy straight onto the bed and the print quality was quite pleasing. I noticed a fair bit of stringing, which I removed after the print was complete with my hot air gun. I’ll need to try a temperature tower, which is what all the cool kids use to find the best temperature to minimise stringing. And then? Chris needs to find some pictures of the old boats he wants so that I can have a go at modelling them.
Except, and I don’t know whether this the plan all along, but this morning as I was getting the fruit salad ready for lunch, Chris told me to consider the printer a Christmas gift, since he doesn’t see himself likely to make much use of it. That was completely unexpected and very generous of him, so thanks Chris. I’m going to have to dedicate some time getting to know the printer and the software and come up with some useful projects.