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Ender printer upgrades

Umuju

I’ve been printing for several years now and am constantly trying learn more and improve my quality and speed. I have owned Qidi, Creality, Anycubic, and Bambu printers and done basic maintanence repairs to complete rebuilds on some of them. My two E3pro printers are my most reliable workhorses as they have been giving consistent prints for a couple years although they max at around 60-80mm/sec for quality prints of PLA. They have stock marlin firmware, dual Z, 4.2.7 boards, and one has a BLTouch and Bowden tube setup, the other is using a sprite pro extruder without auto leveling. I was able to get a couple E5+ printers at a steal knowing they would take some work to get going and was able to make my money back on selling the one that I kept stock but got running well. The one I kept has a silent 4.2.2 board and a Biqu H2 extruder. I’m waiting on the delivery of a sonic pad to convert the printer over to kipper. I know that I will get better speed and higher quality prints from this upgrade, but am curious if further tinkering would be worth the effort. I figured I would start up a discussion to see how many on here have done similar upgrades and see what kind of improvements can be gained to gauge how much further I take these printers instead of just selling and purchasing more of the newer technologies.

  • What issues did you have with your Bambu printer?

  • Auto bed leveling with BLTouch or similar, PEI spring steel printbed are a must in my opinion. If you really want to tinker around with upgrades, convert it to use linear rails, swap the board for something with TMC2209 or similar stepper drivers to be able to use UART mode with Klipper,

  • in reply to dougw

    I’ve had to replace the main board in my AMS after one of the chips fried, but they sent the replacement within a week under warranty. I’ve had a partial clog that I couldn’t clear and had to replace the nozzle. I’ve had filament getting chewed up inside the extruder and had to pull all the gears out to clean it fully. I adjusted the tension on the gears and haven’t had that issue in a little over a month now. I’ve had to tighten my belts/pulleys as I was getting layer shift on the same spot of every print. And now I’m trying to get the purged filament to stop clogging the chute which I’ll be spraying the chute with PTFE (with the chute removed from the printer) and see how that works.

  • in reply to vmate

    I use glass and PEI and only prefer the pei for the ease of removal, especially on large builds. To use the TMC2209 I would have to upgrade to something other than the 4.2.2 board that is already in my E5+ or the 4.2.7 board I have as a spare. Is there a performance advantage to using something like the SKR mini E3 over one of the boards I already have? I know my current boards support klipper over the sonic pad, but I am willing to go deeper into modifications if the benefits are justified

  • in reply to Umuju

    Replacing the board with something like an SKR wouldn't improve prints, just make life a bit easier, with UART mode you can configure all driver settings from klipper, you'd have more IO, more fan headers, so you can PWM control all fans on the machine, and so on.

    If you care about things that affect print quality, one more thing I forgot is doing resonance compensation. Get an ADXL345, mount it firmly on the extruder, and let klipper do its thing: www.klipper3d.org/Measuring_Resonances.html