Member-only story
I’d thought for a long time that 3D printing was something that I would like to get into. For most of my hobbies like this I like to build the item from scratch as I find the construction part fascinating and rewarding so I had looked at the early RepRap with envy. But I never really got around to it or committed as I thought that I would not find the time during a move of jobs, countries and other changes in my life. Well as time passed, fully functioning hobbyist 3D printers turned up at affordable prices. I saw that several brands of lower end printers were on sale just after Xmas 2019 so after a little research I took the plunge and bought a Creality Ender 3 Pro online. The box arrived and promptly was put on a shelf as I was doing a a lot of work travel at the time with trips to India, Norway, UK among others. But then came the pandemic, which put a stop to the travel and also many of my other favorite hobbies like listening to live music.
So I opened up the box in late March and took the plunge. The Ender 3 comes well packed and mostly assembled, but even then it took a while to get it running. I’ll spare you the details here as there are lots of great tutorials for constructing and optimising 3D printers around that I don’t need to repeat. The main thing that I focused on was to make the frame as square as possible as I figured this would be essential to getting good prints.
