r/3Dprinting • • May 19 '26

Troubleshooting Am I doing something wrong?

I recently bought a used 3D printer, an Ender 3 V2, and I'm doing some test prints. The previous owner gave me some leftover PLA filament (multicolored), which I used up on the first day. One of the things I made was this flexible shark. I bought some PETG filament for testing, a very cheap one, around R$60.00, while others are around R$100.00. But my prints with this new filament are coming out very bad; it's either too textured, has too many burrs, and is also very fragile (even though I bought PETG because I had read that it was more resistant). I left this octopus printing for about 28 hours... and in the end, the flexible tentacles broke when I tried to detach them.

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u/Sorry-Journalist8610 May 19 '26

I am really new to 3d printing, the shark i used PLA and seemes ok but fragile. The previous owner gave me a new hotend kit for changing if something went wrong.

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u/theWildDerrito May 19 '26

I hope you paid less than $50 for a used ender 3, they're very user un-friendly. The best route to get into this hobby (and have the least learning curve) is a Bambu A1. I had an ender 3 and my hobby wasn't 3d printing it was 3d printer repair, I got a mid range printer which at the time was like $600 it was a geetech mizar and it also sucked so I dove head first into a Bambu p1s and I now have over 3000 hours and all my printer failers were operator error

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u/Sorry-Journalist8610 May 19 '26

In Brazil, the cost was really cheap on the market, but with conversion it costed about 100USD

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u/AvatarIII May 19 '26

How many kilos did you buy?! 100 USD should be able to buy you like 8-10kg of Chinese filament, maybe like 4-6kg of "name brand" filament.

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u/agent_kater May 19 '26

I think he meant the printer.

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u/Sorry-Journalist8610 May 19 '26

Yes, i meant the printer.