How to Upgrade Your Ender-3 3D Printer and Fix Safety Concerns

2022-05-14 20:29:38 By : Ms. Carry Chan

Your Ender-3 might be trying to... kill you? Find out how to make it safer and more reliable with these nifty upgrades.

The original Creality Ender-3 raised the bar for budget 3D printers despite being cheaper than just ten rolls of PLA filament. But corners were clearly cut to achieve this feat.

Whether you own the original Ender-3, the Ender-3 Pro, or the newer Ender-3 V2 model, these budget 3D printers are hobbled with compromises to design, engineering, and even something as basic as safety.

Read on to find out which critical upgrades you can make to stave off potential issues ranging from poor reliability and print quality to preventing house fires and dodging lethal nerve agents.

While you can start printing with the Ender-3 lineup right out of the box, doing so isn’t ideal given the health and safety risks associated with Creality’s aggressive cost-cutting measures. A device capable of melting plastic is a potential fire hazard. And that potential is even greater when it is made cheaply.

The Ender-3 controller board handles the delicate task of redirecting power from the 350-watt power supply unit (PSU) to power-hungry components such as the heated bed and nozzle through wires that hook into screw terminals on the mainboard.

Unlike solid copper wires found within the walls of our homes, 3D printer wiring consists of several tiny copper strands for flexibility. The risk of stray strands shorting out neighboring terminals makes it difficult to safely insert stranded wires into screw terminals.

Crimping wire ends with bootlace ferrules is the ideal way to get around this problem.

Creality instead tins the ends of these wires with solder. While that may sound like a cheap fix, solder tends to gradually deform under clamping pressure from the screw terminals. The wires subsequently become loose, which increases conductor resistance and eventually generates enough heat to ignite flammable materials in the vicinity.

Cutting off the tinned wire ends and crimping bootlace ferrules onto them is absolutely critical for long-term operational safety of your Ender-3:

The Ender-3 and Pro models are known to spontaneously combust on account of counterfeit XT60 connectors, which act as quick disconnects between the PSU and the heated bed. The fire hazard is attributed to poor electrical contact and questionable fire resistance of the plastic connector housing.

While genuine XT60 connectors are relatively inexpensive, but the replacement procedure still requires basic soldering skills.

Related: 3D Printing Mistakes You Should Avoid for Better Prints

A 3D printer lays down layers of plastic by pushing filament through a heated nozzle. Restricting heat only to the nozzle is difficult and some of it invariably migrates to the heatbreak, which is a metal tube carrying cold filament into the heated nozzle.

In fact, filament melting prematurely in the heatbreak is one the most common causes of clogs and jams.

All hot-end designs incorporate an actively cooled heatsink to mitigate this issue, but that alone isn’t enough to prevent filament jams.

Creality’s solution involves insulating the filament with a heat-resistant PTFE liner that passes through the heater block and butts right against the nozzle. Unfortunately, this also exposes the PTFE tubing to temperatures in excess of 500°F (required to print materials like ABS).

That’s a bad idea because PTFE off-gasses toxic chemicals lethal to pet birds at temperatures as low as 395°F. DuPont’s own studies reveal that the material releases toxic particulates harmful to humans at 464°F. Heat it further and you are exposed to low doses of chemical warfare agents, such as PFIB and WWII-era nerve gas phosgene.

This is all true for PTFE tubes that are manufactured to spec—cheaper PTFE tubes will readily degrade at even lower temperatures.

Expensive 3D printers get around this problem with “all-metal” hot-end assemblies that physically separate the PTFE tube from the heater block and nozzle.

Heat creep is further mitigated by making the heatbreak thinner, which reduces its thermal mass to arrest thermal conduction. This also calls for the use of expensive materials with low thermal conductivity, such as stainless steel and titanium.

You should ideally stick to printing PLA if you can’t afford the all-metal hot-end upgrade. However, you can still safely print PETG by replacing the cheap PTFE tubing with a Capricorn branded one.

This is a convenient drop-in replacement, complete with additives that prevent premature thermal deterioration. Capricorn PTFE tube also improves retraction quality thanks to tighter tolerances and reduced friction.

Related: How to 3D Print for First Timers and Beginners

Now that we are certain your Ender-3 won’t murder you while you sleep, let’s move onto upgrades improving print quality and overall reliability. Although the Ender-3 line-up’s design and engineering failures stem from Creality’s aggressive cost-cutting measures, most of these fixes are fortunately 3D printable or fairly cheap.

A large number of Ender-3 printers suffer from misaligned Z-axis stepper motor mounts. This leads to problems ranging from conspicuous Z-banding artifacts in 3D prints to catastrophic binding of the Z-axis stepper motor.

The solution is fairly simple and involves 3D printing an appropriate adjustable stepper motor mount for your version of Ender-3. The adjustable kind are especially handy to work around existing frame misalignment issues.

The PTFE tube not only carries the filament into the heated nozzle, but it also ensures that it doesn’t melt prematurely on its way there. That makes these couplings important, because they firmly hold the PTFE tube in place and prevent it from being pushed out during retraction moves.

The stock Ender-3 couplings aren’t very good at this and tend to lose their grip over time, which leads to the PTFE tube being pushed out of the hot-end. The filament melts before it reaches the nozzle in the absence of heat-resistant PTFE liner—and that’s how you get nasty clogs and jams.

A good quality PTFE coupling costs only a few dollars, but it saves time, effort, and money associated with filament jamming.

A 3D printer needs two primary components: a heated nozzle to melt the filament, and an extruder to precisely move molten filament out of (and sometimes back into) the nozzle. The stock extruder assembly moves the filament by pinching it between a bearing and straight-cut pinion gear.

The latter unfortunately crushes the filament, with the damage being exacerbated by frequent retractions. Worse yet, this extruder design fails to provide enough extrusion grip since only the pinion gear can actively push the filament. The ensuing extruder slippage results in poor print quality.

A dual drive geared extruder is a relatively inexpensive solution employing a pair of meshing gears to push filament from both sides. These pinion gears aren’t straight-cut like their stock counterparts, but are instead hobbed to firmly grip the filament without crushing it.

Hobbing is a machining process that cuts teeth into gears at a unique semi-circular profile, which conforms to the filament's natural cylindrical shape. This ensures precise filament extrusion that delivers consistent and accurate 3D prints.

Tramming (or leveling) the build surface is absolutely critical to the success of your 3D prints. This is a labor-intensive process that can be easily undone by hammering away at 3D prints stubbornly stuck to the build plate.

There are two primary ways of tackling this problem. The first one involves upgrading the stock bed springs with stiffer aftermarket ones that preserve alignment better through the aforementioned abuse.

The more expensive solution involves upgrading the stock build surface to a flexible magnetic one. The finished 3D print stuck onto the removable spring steel sheet can then be conveniently separated from the magnetic sheet glued onto the bed.

Detaching prints is a simple matter of bending the flexible plate, which can then be slapped right back onto the bed without affecting alignment.

The Ender-3’s nozzle moves along the Z-axis thanks to an 8mm leadscrew precisely controlling the up and down motion of the X-gantry that houses the nozzle. The leadscrew is powered by the Z-axis stepper motor, with a rigid shaft coupling mechanically connecting the two.

The rigid nature of the coupling quickly becomes a liability even with the slightest misalignment.

It's pretty much impossible to find a perfectly straight leadscrew devoid of wobble—a problem that's further exacerbated by imprecise Z-axis stepper motor mount. This misalignment manifests in the form of Z-banding artefacts plaguing virtually every Ender-3 out in the wild.

Spider shaft couplings serve as an elegant solution to this problem.

Unlike their rigid counterparts, spider couplings are composed of three parts: an upper half and a lower half of the hub, sandwiching the spider in the middle. The latter is manufactured from a semi-flexible elastomer designed to absorb minor leadscrew wobble and prevent slight misalignments from affecting print quality.

However, the biggest benefit of a spider coupling is its propensity to decouple the leadscrew from the stepper motor in the event of the nozzle crashes. Such mishaps aren’t uncommon, and spider couplings act as a failsafe protecting the nozzle, bed, and other hot-end components from damage.

These couplings can be snapped right back without any loss of functionality following mishaps.

All these upgrades should fix major safety, quality, and reliability issues affecting the Ender-3 lineup. Avoid applying more than one upgrade at a time, or troubleshooting will be a nightmare when things go wrong.

We have deliberately left out expensive and complicated modifications such as the BLTouch automatic bed levelling system and dual Z-axis upgrade. Resorting to these quick-fixes at the outset is detrimental to acquiring the essential skill of manually dialing in your printer.

You can even replace the stock controller board with feature-rich aftermarket upgrades as you delve further down the 3D printing rabbit hole. However, it is quite easy to spend more on upgrades than what you paid for the printer itself. At that point—like this ancient thought experiment postulates—is that even an Ender-3 anymore?

Nachiket has covered diverse technology beats ranging from video games and PC hardware to smartphones and DIY over a career spanning 15 years. Some say that his DIY articles serve as an excuse to pass off his 3D printer, custom keyboard, and RC addiction as “business expenses” to the wife.

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