Hello there! My friends gifted me an Ender 3 printer, and I achieved my first successful print today! I have a few (probably stupid) questions:
- I will store it in my garage, in a shelve among other things. It is quite dusty, so I’m thinking of building a plexiglass hermetic box to keep it while powered off. Would it be a problem to keep it closed also while printing? This would change the type of box I’ll build, because there is not much space and I’m trying to save the most of it
- How do I store the filament? I (currently) have only one filament (black PLA), so I see no need to remove it from the printer each time, but leaving it “connected” (I don’t know how to say it) will not allow me to store it in a different way the printer is stored. Do I need to store it in special ways or can I leave it connected? (And bonus question, what is the correct word to say it?)
- If I don’t move the printer, how often should I calibrate it?
Sorry if these are basic questions, I’m taking my first steps into this magic world… Thanks in advance!
1a. This is not applicable to high temperature materials such as ABS, polycarbonate, or nylon/PA. For these materials you will probably need to run the printer in an enclosure to maintain a stable air temperature, but you probably won’t be messing with these materials soon… or ever.
2a. It’s also a good idea to invest in a heated filament dryer, or jerry rig your own. This will allow you to drive moisture out of spools of filament that have absorbed moderate amounts of moisture to revive it, and is outright necessary for some super hygroscopic materials such as, again, nylon.
While we’re on the topic of newbie questions. I’ve been running my elegoo pro 3 off and on for a few months now. How will I know when to change out the nozzle? Meaning, are there symptoms of a bad nozzle I should look out for?
Yes. So, there are two general failure modes for nozzles which are either drastic and catastrophic or subtle and gradual.
You can have a sudden catastrophic nozzle issue most commonly by getting it clogged with something – dust, grit, metal debris, or any other material that won’t go molten at your printer’s extrusion temperature – usually settling on it from above. Printers with totally exposed filament paths like my old Qidi X-Plus are really bad for this, because crud can just fall right into the feed hole in the top of the hotend or even stick to the filament via static cling and get pulled right into the extruder along with the filament. If that happens you’ll notice sudden underextrusion.
Underextrusion is just not enough material leaving the nozzle. Or in extreme cases, none at all. It’s particularly noticeable on your first layer, where you can visibly see that the lines of material are not thick enough and eventually start to not touch each other anymore.
You can also roach your nozzle by crashing it into the build plate via manual control, getting your Z offset really wrong, sending mangled g-code to your printer, or as I once did by not realizing there was something stuck under the build plate causing it to sit higher and grinding the nozzle against it for an entire layer pass. Your nozzle is typically brass, and your build plate is typically steel… or glass… and in either case the build plate wins and the nozzle loses.
Over time you’ll eventually get burned molten plastic permanently baked into your nozzle and no amount of wiping, picking, or brushing will get it off. If this blocks the nozzle outlet it will cause problems. This happens over time, and the more dialed in your print settings are and the less stringing your printer produces the longer it’ll take to happen.
Gradual failure usually happens from just plain wearing the nozzle out. Having molten plastic forced through it will eventually erode the nozzle and slowly enlarge the hole in the end of it until it doesn’t produce the same extrusion width anymore. This will happen much faster if you use a soft nozzle (brass, copper) and abrasive filaments, which include not only composites with reinforcing stuff in them like chopped up glass fiber or carbon fiber, but also glow in the dark filaments (the glowy material is an abrasive powder), white filament (colored with titanium dioxide, which is an abrasive powder), glitter filaments (loaded with abrasive particles), wood effect filaments (filled with… you guessed it), or any other novelty material with some kind of particulate gumf in it.
Thank you for explaining it so thoroughly. I’ll keep a look out for changing extrusion levels because I use the white pla, it probably has titanium oxide in it. My printer came with quite a few extra nozzles, I’m just afraid of fucking up the printer when I change it the first time so I’m avoiding having to do it.
Even if you do wear out your nozzle slightly it probably still works perfectly fine if you change nozzle size/line width in the slicer. I printed a bunch of cf-asa on a brass nozzle since my hardened steel one hadn’t arrived yet. Started out as a .4 but became a .8 nozzle after about 500 grams of printing.
That’s good to know, I guess I have to start measuring the width now. I didn’t even think to get one of those measuring devices. Thanks.
Don’t need to measure, just increase the size by .1 when the extruded lines aren’t flattened out by the nozzle anymore. It’s not a foolproof strategy but might save you from wearing out multiple nozzles instead of 1
Thanks again, very helpful.
If you do get an enclosure printing abs will probably be just as easy as pla. People overstate the difficulties but it’s really not that difficult of a material to print as long as you can get 45°C+ air temps which is more than doable with even a cardboard box and the heat of the bed.
It might actually print nicer than pla on an ender since abs relies less on a good heatbreak and part cooling. Both of which are the stock Ender’s biggest weak point imo.
Uhm, you shouldn’t be printing with your bed above the glass transition temp anyhow. So, your enclosure shouldn’t be getting above that; there is heat coming off the hot end, but I’ve never seen it push the ambient temp in an otherwise-not-heated enclosure above the bed temp. unless you’re, like going hog-wild on insulation or something… leakage should be enough to keep it down.
Thanks for the great answer!!
I think the other user pretty much nailed it about the enclosure. Unless you are printing materials that require high heat it is not necessary.
Now if you are in a very dusty environment you might consider one just to avoid the hassle.
However you also may want to look online, there are some simple and fairly inexpensive pop up enclosures that work very well. I have been using one for a while now with mine and I print ABS pretty regularly. I just tore all the electronics out of my printer and printed a control box for it (external) to the outside of the enclosure.
It is a pretty dusty environment, and when it’s raining it may also get pretty high humidity, so I was thinking of a sealed enclosure to protect while it is not used, with a removable front side when it’s printing to avoid overheating the air inside