Any most have upgrades for a mostly stock Ender 3 running on a 8-bit board with an original bed? Changed out bed springs and tube already.
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I’ve upgraded my Pro with a CR-Touch, WinnSinn metal dual gear extruder, BTT SKR mini E3 32 bit board, BTT TFT35 touch screen, Dual Z, Metal magnetic flex plate, Silicone Bed Stiffeners, and E3D hardened steel nozzles I also have a filament runout sensor to add
Octoprint if you can get an Rpi Stock is improving and it’s a great addon It’s also nice to be able to send prints right from the slicer
The best upgrade I made. No more moving SD cards back and forth. Adding a camera and octo everywhere takes it to another level too. I also bought a little USB light from ikea and plugged it into the raspberry pi, very useful when printing in a dark room.
I started down that path and now about the only thing left that’s original is the frame.
For me the biggest thing was moving the power supply under the back of the printer and putting 90 degree die cast braces to support the tower. The tower is the critical point of rigidity in this kind of design, and the stock ender 3 oscillates like a tuning fork. Especially if you leave the roll of filament on the top and the power supply attached to the upright.
Do you have a link to the die cast braces?
Honestly, ( and I say this as the owner of 2 ender 3’s). Just upgrade the control board and the extruder, and maybe print out some stuff to make it look nice. You’ll spend more money upgrading it than it will cost to just buy a sovol 6 or 7 which is a much better machine with all the stuff you would end up adding to the ender anyways.
Between my two Enders, upgrading to direct drives with decent extruders, double z axis screws etc. I could have just bought a nicer machine. I also have an Ideaformer print mill and a bambu p1s and it’s well worth the money to jump to a better machine when you can
This is where I’m at. I’m very new to 3dprinting and I’ve really been happy with my ender3. I’ve been putting money aside and had plans for upgrading parts, but when I look at better machines, the price point is pretty close to the ender3 with upgrades.
And there’s nothing wrong with ender 3’s , besides creality’s quality control in the last few years. They are a good machine to start on. They print well once they are dialed in and force you to tweak and upgrade them, so you are kinda pulled into learning how things work.
It’s harder to justify them when you can get a decent prusa clone on AliExpress for 250-300 bucks though
First change. Install Klipper and run it of a Raspberry Pi.
Edit: make sure the wires in the screw terminals on the pcb don’t have solder on the ends. Clip it and strip it to bare wire or put crimped ferrules on the ends. You can get arcing and fire from the solder softening and the wire slipping out.
All metal or bi metal heat break, or just replace the whole hotend with one of those ceramic heater ones.
Printed locking notched bed level wheels. I used one that had a number of teeth to match the rotation suggestions from the klipper screw adjust macro that uses abl to measure how much to turn each one.
Magnet bed plates. I have smooth matte pei, textured pei, gloss peo, unknown generic textured black stuff, and something else I can’t remember. Different filaments work better or worse on different bed materials and get great results without derpy hax like glue stick. I generally do abs on matte and everything else on tex or super smooth.
Printed abl. I use klackender. It calls for jap omron mouse click switch but I used kailh gm8 as a drop in replacement and it works great.
After trying pretty much every z mod I went with belted z from same website/discord/git as klackender. Single and dual drive dual rod and pom nut etc all skipped every now and then but now any print problems are from other causes. It’s a bit involved but effort and cost to returns is better ratio compared to the switchwire conversion…
Klipper. You can use basically any computer. I have one on a rpi zero 2 and one with a Dell computer that came with windows but is worse than a bad Chromebook. Both use dietpi as the os and kiauh to set up klipper and mainsail.
