Question for 3D printing Maslovians

I just picked this up for a good price? Anybody use or know this unit? Any words of wisdom? Thanks!

#### SainSmart x Creality3D Ender-3 3D Printer

It does a decent job out of the box if the power supply doesn’t shoot sparks the first time you turn it on. I helped a friend build one. It was a fireworks show in the living room. Luckily one of our group members had a spare power supply with him. $50 later it fired up and ran well. We replaced it with a high end Meanwell power supply. The owner has been able to produce prints without much trouble.

I hope this helps

Thank you

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Face shield, check. Fire extinguisher, check. Very helpful. Thank you.

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I have the bigger cr-10 version and it works fine. I mostly make practical stuff with mine that doesn’t need a smooth surface finish, Brackets, adapterse, clamps, etc., so I changed the 0.4mm nozzle to a 0.8mm nozzle which prints about 4x faster.

Really depends on what you want to print. I find 3d printing annoyingly slow and inefficient. 90% of the time I figure a cheaper way to make it out of metal or wood. Or do a combination where I stick a big aluminum tube i the middle to make object stronger and also print faster. I’m not into printing plastic toys and widgets off thingverse either.

Like you I am not interested in printing toys and widgets. I am interested in making functional items with precision that I would rather dessign on the computer than fiddle with in the shop forever. I want to use the printer to make things like fixtures, brackets etc. while I work on larger pieces to use them on. The dust collector for the meticulous z-axis is one of those things. If I am going to spend $50 to have it printed I might as well buy a printer and have the utility for other things as well. I think I can make some nice knife scabbards, fishing tools, molds for fishing lures and on and on. I often need wierd shaped pieces for clamping wood when building recurve bows too.

I also want to keep up with technology. This is the direction technology is going and it keeps getting less expensive and things I learn will be applicable down the road.

I appreciate your comments.

This is just a general Bowden tube-style 3d printer bit of advice, Take care to store your filament properly, PLA especially becomes brittle over time, and can break in the tube. This usually isn’t an issue, but on some rare occasions the pushing side of the break can slide off of and past the pushed side in the throat of the hotend, causing machine stoppage.

Also, be careful with temperatures at your hotend. I’m not certain about the Ender 3, but some printers have PTFE liner tubes in the throat leading up to the nozzle. Those liner tubes start to become pliable and deform at high temperatures (numbers vary from source to source, but ~265c is where I’ve experienced failures), leading to clogs and general bad behavior.

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All metal hotends are the way to go.

Thank you

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I have one of these and love it, I did do a few upgrades such as the petfang cooling, as well as printed cable chain for the Z and bed plate, and a couple other little things like a drawer and spool deal that uses bearings for less resistance. But all in all I love the thing and it does what I need. The only problems I seem to have with the unit is when I think I know better or do something stupid, like screw in the screw in the hot end that has a thermistor in it, oops.

But all of my brackets on my Maslow for my Z axis were printed off this thing at .2 height and like 30ish % infill and so far they are great.

Great stuff guys, the printer came in but is sitting in it’s box for now. Need to figure out a place for it to live, we have too much crap! I was going to put it in the garage but after reading up on these things I have begun to wonder if that is a bad idea.

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Being in the garage on its own wouldn’t do any harm, aside from keeping consistent ambient temperatures. It would be important to clean your build surface before prints, and to install dust filters on any fans. I’d also place them above and away from anything that produces a sizeable amount of fine sawdust.

A couple of my printers are on a little custom shelf in my office space, but I’ve been considering a migration to a wall near my work bench in the garage.

You might want to check humidity level before moving to an area without climate control. I had LOTS of printing failures only to find out the issue. (Plugged extruders, filament breaking during prints, stringy prints, etc).

I live in Georgia and even in my house, the humidity level was too high for my filament to be stored on my machine as you have shown. The material absorbs moisture fairly quickly. I solved by making a filament dehydrator. Made from a $30 food dehydrator. Solved all my issues.

Thanks, I’m in Arizona no humidity problem here. :smiley:

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Hi @ShadyG

Machine looks awesome, i also interested to buy few machines as well. I would thankful to you if you share your reviews and usage experience with me.

HI @smithnovel

Thanks and welcome! I only have the one Ender 3 from Sain Smart I linked above. I don’t do a lot of 3D printing, but I have done enough to use up a roll of PLA filiment. There are a lot of upgrade parts for the Ender 3 on Thingiverse, I have printed many of them for mine. I also printed the dust collection shute for the meticulous Z axis upgrade to the maslow. The Ender 3 is easy to work on, I have had good results with Amazon brand PLA. The biggest problem I have had was that the gears that move the filament into the extruder were not tight enough from the factory, It took me awhile to figure out and made quite a mess.

Get you a printer, put it together carefully, approach it analytically and you will do great!

Best wishes.

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Limited time deal on a Sain Smart Ender 3, I bought mine on woot also.

https://www.woot.com/offers/sainsmart-x-creality-ender-3-3d-printer-10?ref=w_cnt_gw_dly_wobtn

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I understand, thank you so much for the honest answer.

@ShadyG: Thanks for that link! I actually just ordered one myself, since I’ve been looking to upgrade from my DaVinci 1.0 for quite some time now. I’ll probably be upgrading it over time, but I’m mostly looking to print PLA parts with it anyways. One of the first real things I print (aside from benchies) may be another set of parts for my Z-Axis! :smiley:

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I have my Ender up and running and wanted to give the low-down for those who are curious about it.

My first impressions are very good. For a $200 printer, this thing is printing better than I expected it to. I’ve run it about 8 hours so far with no problems. The thing that I am blown away with is how easy it’s been to getting it printing. I spent countless hours fussing my my old DaVinci and still getting parts that weren’t even that great. That and not dealing with filament cartridges is a huge step up.

On Reddit, people were recommending watching the YouTube channel Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors. He’s made a build video which helps greatly with the assembly, as well as some videos on recommended upgrades.

The kit is relatively straight forward to assemble, it took me one night (2-3 hrs) to go from a pile of parts to an operational printer. Bed leveling took me less than an hour.

Pile o’ Parts:


Functional Printer:


Benchy Comparisons (DaVinci 1.0 on left, Ender 3 on right):


I printed the Benchy with basically the stock settings in Cura, which came with the printer. The DaVinci one was sliced at 0.3mm layer height and the Ender at 0.2mm, so some of the resolution differences are due to that. But overall print quality is significantly better.

Also, the smaller footprint is really nice. The old DaVinci took up a lot of room on the computer bench next to the Maslow. Meanwhile, the Ender fits in the same space with more room for the computer’s keyboard and mouse. I will probably build some kinda enclosure for the it to keep dust out and help with ABS and other plastics.



First (real) print off the Ender. I loaded up some of Proto-Pasta’s High-Five metallic blue HTPLA and sliced it with almost the same settings as the Benchy. I just increased the extruder temp to 225* C for HTPLA. Over yesterday, I also printed new landing gear for my quadcopter and some upgrades for the Ender.


I would definitely recommend this printer. It’s great if you’re just getting into 3D printing. The hardest part would a beginner would be bed leveling, but if you follow the instructions in the from the YouTube channel I posted up above it should be relatively easy.

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Is that the version with the bendy bed? How well does their textured bed stick; do you need to glue stick/hairspray/floorpolish/etc it? The Printrbot+ (currently in the inaccessible north) currently has pei on glass but even that likes a little glue stick help. Way back when I did a comparison study of several sticker helpers (somewhere on printrbottalk.com) and ended up sticking with glue stick.

An Ender-3 Pro is on my shortlist for the southern Mooseshop but we need to digest the new Sainsmart CNC 3018 Pro (not a Maslow but fits on a card table and looks like it can do guilloche engraving) and Jet 1221SP (needs a walker compatible bench, 2x4s in the Subie) before getting another toy^^^shop essential past Mrs Moose.

Any comments/reviews of the E3 would be greatly appreciated

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Yes, it is! Parts stick to it really well without any aid. Sometimes it sticks a little too well with flatish parts. It hasn’t been a problem, though. I just pull off the top plate, bend it a little and the parts pop right off. It’s not as flexible as I thought it was going to be, but it bends enough to get the parts off.

My DaVinci has a glass bed and the thing is such a pain. I have had a lot of trouble with bed adhesion with it. I would always have to put down blue painter’s tape on the bed to help, and usually would have to raft as well. I have yet to need to raft with the Ender.

I was looking at one of those CNC’s when I was researching SainSmart for this particular purchase. Looks like a good little machine. If I had a need for a small engraver, I would consider that. Currently, though, my Maslow does all that I would need a CNC router to do.

Gotta love the utility of their cars. I love that I can fit an 8 footer in my car with the back seats down. Quite a bit off topic, but this reminds me of needing to haul some 4x8 sheets of CDX home on my Impreza. So glad I have roof racks, and the lumber yard is within a few scant miles of my home:

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