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!
Enclosure will protect printer from dust and it will also keep the ambient temperature more stable. Dont make it hermetic sealed, better add few holes on the front and few on the back for example. I have a low rpm fan with dust filter because I mostly print PLA and in long prints (12h+) temperature can go a bit too high if there is no airflow at all. Keep in mind that enclosure should be removed sometimes for mintainance, removable sides is what you should look for.
You can leave filament on the printer, but if you dont use it for a long time it could get wet and then you have to dry it. Keep the rest of the spools in plastic sealed box or bag and put some silica gel inside.
Full calibration should be done once, but fine tuning when you face some issues or when you change to different brand or filament type. It depends how well the printer is assembled and how experienced you are, it can take only 5 min every few months, but begginers can spend days sometimes.
Extra tips: clean your rails and wheels whenever you can (once a month at least) for dusty garage. Get a kitchen sponge, drill a hole in it and guide filament trough the hole to remove any dust before extruder.
Welcome to the most fun hoby and happy printing!
This guy’s giving out good advice.
Thanks for the great answer! The enclosure should have holes while printing, but is not necessary when it’s powered off, correct?
I’ll grab a kitchen sponge!
Correct and sounds like the best of both worlds
I’ll grab a kitchen sponge
You can just cut 30x30 mm peace and zip-tie it over filament 😉
- Keeping dust and debris out of it while not in use is a good idea. However, if you are printing in low temperature materials such as PLA, TPU, and probably also PETG you should not run your printer in an enclosed box. The heated bed plus the waste heat generated by the hot end, etc. in a sealed environment can eventually become enough to soften the filament while it’s still in the feed path, which will cause problems. Your PLA prints will also get saggy and noodly if the air temperature inside the box remains elevated above the material’s glass transition temperature for any significant length of time. (The peanut gallery can argue in the comments just how high the temperature needs to be, but it’s better to just not risk it.)
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.
- When not in use you should store your filament in an airtight box, by preference with some manner of desiccant in there with it. Silica gel is what most people use. The reason being, all polymers are hygroscopic – that is, they absorb moisture from the air – and moisture in your filament will alter its physical properties making it more brittle and less flexible. “Wet” PLA tends to snap without provocation… including in the middle of a print job. Also, moisture in your filament will be boiled off inside the printer’s hotend and essentially cause the extruded material to froth and foam which will produce lousy print quality or even outright print failures eventually.
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.
- Any time you change the nozzle, do anything that might alter the thickness of the build plate (adding kapton tape to it, for instance), change out the build plate for a different one, mess with your belt tension, undo any of the hardware that mounts the hot end/gantry or anything attached to it such as a z offset sensor (if you have one), crash your nozzle into the bed due to manual operation error or g-code fuckup, or if you notice any first layer adhesion problems or any other mystery print quality issues that don’t appear to have any other cause.
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.
(The peanut gallery can argue in the comments just how high the temperature needs to be, but it’s better to just not risk it.)
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
I store filament in a tight sealing, food grade, bucket with a rechargeable silica gel device, and a cheap hygrometer. The round spools fit well in the round bucket. The silica gel device can be plugged in for a few hours to dry the gel for reuse. Last time I checked the bucket was around 10% humidity in a house around 45%.
This is a good advice! What is the “safe” humidity level?
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
This is a normal thing to do, actually. most printers benefit greatly from being printed in an enclosure.
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?)
It depends on a lot of things. For PLA, I’ve found ziplocks + the moisture packs they come with to be sufficient protection. If you want a dedicated filament storage, a large rubermaid (or whatever) bin with loose silica gel is going to do just fine as well.
There are also plenty of STL versions for silica gel “containers” that fit in the hub of a spool.
For other filaments, it depends greatly on the type of plastic. PETG needs to be kept dry. You can dry any filament in a food dehydrator if it doesn’t get too hot. (PLA, don’t go above 55. 45 is better… and keep it slower. 45c it might take 4-6 hours.) PETG can be dried happily at 55c, in the same amount of time. Or, if you don’t mind playing the waiting game, you can stuff it in the bin with silica gel… and just let the gel do it’s thing. (the one linked above can be recharged in an oven or food dehydrator. I’d recomend getting something cheap explicitly for drying filament and recharging the gel at the same time. I use a presto food dehydrator… and I got some extra trays (which promptly removed the mesh from every-other tray, so I can stack multiple reels.) The presto goes down to 90F or 32C,
If I don’t move the printer, how often should I calibrate it?
Define “calibration”… eventually you’ll learn what needs to be checked and how often. Generally, i check belts and for anything obviously wrong every fresh session of printing. but I’m not going to be tweaking it everytime. it’s just a good habit to check your printer over every so often.
I use UBL and mesh bed leveling, and find I can go about 2 weeks of constant printing before I need to pull a new mesh. IIRC, the ender 3’s don’t come with a bed probe; so you’re going to be manually leveling your bed; which should happen every new session or so. You can reduce it some by getting silicone bed supports (instead of the springs.).
Things like esteps / mm, are only calibrated if I change something that would affect it (For example, a new extruder, or a change to the mechanical belts, or a new stepper driver/motor.) Or if I’m chasing something being waaayyyy off.
Thanks for the super exhaustive answer! The silica gel that comes packed with the filament isn’t enough to keep it dry?
It kind of depends on where you are. if you’re someplace dry, you may not even need that much.
for PLA, I’ve found a session in the dehydrator (and recharge the packs at the same time!) is enough to keep it just fine… in a gallon size ziplock. and many PLA brands don’t necessarily need to be dried (oh, you’ll get zitting, for sure. And it can be brittle from the steam getting forced out if it’s been open for a while.)
PETG and TPU need more, because they’ll soak up any moisture they can.
About #1, it’s also very likely that your enclosure will not contain the full movement of the printer or will get too hot for the electronics and the lubrication.
But as people said, if you manage to build a good temperature control, printing with an enclosure is much better.
I will not reiterate the great things others have said but I’ve used old windows to create an enclosure for my printer and it definitely helps with the prints. Also since you’re a new user and have an Ender 3, I would recommend you to take a look at thingiverse.com and printables.com - if not already done - for great tweaks to protect your printer but also to find great things to print.
For your printer, you may be interested in cable guides, filament guide, spool roller, fan duct, bed lock (they will keep your bed in place so you will not have to deal with bed tramming anymore before your bed leveling sessions)…
Finally, although a little bit off topic, if you get bored to walk to your printer to watch the prints and would like to add some level of safety in case anything goes wrong I would highly recommend considering octoprint.
Thanks for the answer! The first thing I printed is indeed a tool holder I downloaded from thingverse. I don’t understand very well the purpose of the bed lock: it basically avoid the “calibration screws” to accidentally “unscrew” while the printer is working?
Octoprint seems very very VERY interesting, but sadly in my garage there is no internet connection :(
I don’t understand very well the purpose of the bed lock: it basically avoid the “calibration screws” to accidentally “unscrew” while the printer is working?
You are correct. The screws will move a little bit when you print which will result in your bed being unleveled after few prints and you’ll have to recalibrate your printer. This hack will eliminate that so you will have to level your bed less frequently (because as others said, leveling your bed will be needed for other reasons).
I’m not OP but thank you, I will be saving this comment for future use!
Glad it can be useful.
