Ender 3 V2: The new toy that’ll help me up my maker game

I’ve long had an interest in 3D printing, but I’ve never really made much of an effort to get into it.

That said, I have previously purchased a printer – an Anet A8 – a few years ago, however, the one I received had a faulty control panel that I never got around to replacing – so it sat in the corner gathering dust, never being used.

Fast forward to 2022, and I’m ready to give 3D printing a proper go – which is why I’ve just picked up and played with my latest toy – a brand new Ender 3 V2 printer.

Why an Ender 3 V2?

A close friend of mine has an original Ender 3, and they absolutely swear by. These printers have also been at the tippy top of the “best budget 3D printer” lists for yonks, offering a balance between print quality and value, offering a great entry point for novices like myself to jump in.

Another reason that prompted me to pick one up was that they’re currently on sale at most retailers, as part of the January sales. I picked mine up for around $250, which is 20-30 bucks under retail. While this might not sound like much at first, it’s enough to cover the first couple reels of filament. You can pick them up for around this price on Amazon.

While there are other options – and after a fair amount of research online – I figured that the Ender was the best pick for me, and certainly worth the few extra bucks over some of the cheaper options out there.

I also wanted to avoid ordering direct from China, so as not to repeat my earlier attempt at 3D printing with the Anet A8. Thankfully the Ender product line are stocked in-country by several notable retailers, offering quick shipping and far easier support and returns if anything were to go wrong, not work, or be missing.

Putting it together

I was surprised at how straight forward the printer was to build, with the included instructions being super clear, with plenty of easy-to-follow illustrations. The English was less so at times – but the pictures more than made up for it.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not the best with these sorts of things – however, even I was able to complete the build in just over an hour. The whole process from box to ready-to-use 3D printer was relatively simple, and far better than my experience with the Anet A8.

Once you’re done putting it together, you’re going to want to head over to Thingiverse and download “Ender 3 V2 Bed Level”. This tool will helps get the print bed level with minimal effort, cycling from corner to corner while you use a handy piece of paper to get the bed perfectly lined up.

One thing I’ll point out – and mostly because I saw the odd comment about this on the tools Thingiverse page – as that it won’t cycle corners automatically, you’ll need to toggle pause/print to do this.

Setting it up

While I’ve been at this 3D printing thing for all of five seconds, it’s already clear that it involved plenty of trial and error to get right. I learned this immediately, as instead of stopping to properly configure my printer, I jumped right into my first print – which went about as well as you’d expect.

Three failed prints and a few Google searches later, I was good to go – printer all setup, working as intended. The first thing I did was to implement Cura settings specifically for the Ender 3 V2, as recommended by ALL 3DP.

I made one change to the settings recommended by ALL 3DP – the speed – which I reduced from 50 mm/s to 30 mm/s, as suggested by Reddit user Galactik. This change worked an absolute treat!

The settings I’ve settled on and have been successful with so far (touch wood) are:

Nozzle temperature: 200 °C

Bed temperature: 60 °C

Speed: 30 mm/s

Layer height: 0.12 mm

Retraction: 6 mm at 25 mm/s

Infill: 20%

I also made sure to avoid any unnecessary complexity by throwing all sorts of software into the mix, instead sticking with the Creality Slicer that’s included on the bundled SD card. The program is super easy to use, so I don’t see much point or reason to switch to anything else – but perhaps that will change once I get a little experience under my belt.

My first print

I decided to skip the customary 3Dbency print – mostly because all I had to hand was the sample filament, which wouldn’t be enough for it, but also because this is a blog about dinosaurs, so it seemed fitting to go for a dino-themed print instead. For anyone who follows me on social media, you might have seen the Arduino project I made before Christmas using an Adafruit LED matrix to create a snowy, Christmas scene, featuring the same dinosaur character – something which made it an even more obvious choice for me.

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I also didn’t want anything overly complex for the first print, so figured the pixelated T-rex from the Chrome browsers dinosaur game would be a good pick. Thankfully, Thingiverse user John21 had the perfect model – so I grabbed the STL, opened it in Creality slicer, and I was good to go.

As I mentioned earlier – it too four attempts to get a successful print. The first three had all the usual issues that you can expect to encounter as a newb – blocked nozzle, print wouldn’t stick to the bed, so on, and so on.

After tweaking the settings, my fourth print was flawless – turning out great, without any issues or difficulty. That print took just over 2 and a half hours to complete.

What’s next?

Now that my 3D printer is all setup, it’s time to get on to some projects.

If you recall in my last post, I purchased an old Ugobe PLEO on eBay just before the holidays at an absolute bargain price. But there was a catch – the robot was incomplete, having no battery.

It makes sense to first work on making a new battery pack for my PLEO. Thankfully there are plenty of resources online for just that, including a printable PLEO battery pack case on Thingiverse – which is where I’ll start. In fact, I’ve already made a start, and will publish an update on the project in the next few days.

Beyond that, I’ve got a few things in mind – so, make sure to watch this space for updates on my upcoming 3D printing projects.