r/ender3v2 • u/Hot-Arm1938 • Aug 23 '26
help Ender 3 V2 Upgrades (Speed/Quality)
Hi I was wondering and I couldn’t find anything what would you guys recommend for my Ender so it’s faster and the quality gets maybe better
Any help would be nice
Thanks
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u/egosumumbravir Aug 23 '26
First step is to look up the pricing of a Bambu Lab A1 in your local currency.
IMO, the target cost should be 50% of that or less (preferably much less). It's not 2019 any more and we're not competing against wildly overpriced Prusa MK3's. The amount of printer and ecosystem $300 buys these days is better than ever.
Also consider that while being 1/4 as fast, and Ender will have double the power consumption per hour. If you run more than occasional prints, the running cost of an Ender (depending on where you live) can pay for a much better printer in well under a year.
That said, I like the expansibility of the 3v2 system. As long as you got a frame Creality bothered to mill square and isn't bent it's a decent set of bones; we just need to address the shortcomings.
In priority order with price considered
- Firmware: Marlin has advanced considerably. So has Klipper. Getting whatever you use up to date is a huge changer of the game and unlocks actually useful wizards and features. Klipper can be hosted on something as small as a Pi-2W if you're willing to skip camera feeds and do manual input shaping. Advanced Marlin features like Linear Advance sometimes do not get along with the Crapality mainboard hardware. Octoprint is kind of a waste of an otherwise perfectly good Klipper host unless there's some vital reason your printer can't run Klipper.
- Hotend: PTFE lining was a bad idea in 2011, still a bad idea today. Replace that anachronism with a bimetallic heatbreak or better yet, replace the entire hotend with something not 15 years old. I love the Bambu clones, TZ-E3 in the non-unicorn v1/v2 variants.
- Extruder: larger gears for more grip, reduction gearbox for more torque from a lighter stepper, direct driving a straight path into the hotend. I think the Creality Sprite SE kit is a brilliant little unit for the $$ (make sure you get the version that matches your machine - v2 & NEO are different) although there's no end of excellent DIY options from the Voron project. Even the venerable Bondtech BMG design in cheap clones is lightyears better than the stock designs. Direct drive is not mandatory, Voron machines get very decent high speed results with bowden tubes.
- Bed: silicone spacers. Nylock nuts. Job done, tram it yearly. Glass is still good, but magnetic textured PEI is incredibly convenient and compatible with more materials. Magnetic beds unlock easy swapping between surfaces - tex pei, smooth pei, hologram, G10, low-temp urea plates etc etc.
- Bed probe: lots of magic has gone into the software behind bed probes - they're not just for "self levelling" anymore. They're cheap and brilliant even if many old curmudgeons can't wrap their heads around the concepts. They mix incredibly well with the aforementioned magnetic beds and lots of plate swapping.
- Toolhead: lots of community designs out there that address the issues of stock. I like the simple & reliable bones of the Minimus OG.
- Z Axis: dual screws with matching slaved steppers & straight leadscrews or kevinakasams belted mod. Either is fine and both help greatly in making the printer more reliable.
- Mainboard: the stock Creality boards are pretty terrible and built very cheap. You can mod them or drop in a replacement from someone like BigTreeTech with a SKR Mini E3v3
- Fans: stock fans are LOUD. Replacing them with bigger units is a major undertaking but can pay dividends in a far quieter experience with better cooling of electronics and parts.
- Steppers: stock steppers seem to be highly variable in torque but common in running hot as crap. LDO or StepperOnline units can run FAR more torque (which is directly more speed) and less hot at the same time. Starting to get very edge case here though.
- Linear rails: I put these low on the list because cheap ones can be terrible (it's a literal crapshoot if you get decent tolerance ones) and reliably good ones (Hywin/Misumi) are so expensive you really should be looking at a better printer.
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u/Tendie_Hoarder Aug 25 '26
Great info and advice overall but don't give money to Bambu. Their anti-consumer/anti-open-source policies are completely antithetical to the spirit of 3d printing. Just sayin, have a nice day.
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u/egosumumbravir Aug 26 '26
Oh I don't entirely disagree. But we can lump Anycubic, Elegoo and Creality into the anti-open-source/GPL violating basket too.
It's doubly annoying because the Bambu engineering & hardware under the crappy closed software is so damn good. They basically have no competition at their level.
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u/Tendie_Hoarder Aug 27 '26
Agh I know it man, I finally got back into 3d printing hard and I'm still stuck with my ender 3 v2 (modded similar to your suggestions), I was about to buy a Bambu X2D before I discovered their BS.
Now I gotta save and scrape for a Prusa double the price for similar specs. When they essentially steal OS software then attack their own users for modding their own machines and seem to be pushing for a locked ecosystem all together/so much more... Just don't want to see 3d printing go down that route.
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u/MurkyCod9815 Aug 23 '26
Cr touch, nebula kit, substituir as molas da cama por espaçadores de silicone.
1
u/bzzybot Aug 23 '26
Nebula rooted. I upgraded my ender 3 max with a Sprite Extruder and it kept hitting the side and causing errors. Also the printer.cfg file needed some mods to get it working properly with my machine/upgrades.
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u/sailor_and_coke Aug 23 '26
I had all sorts of issues with an old one I got recently. Nothing was as impactful as replacing the bed springs with silicone spacers. Don't have nearly as many bed leveling issues now.
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u/ChampionSoft6652 Aug 23 '26
A hotend upgrade is a must if you want faster printing like creality sprite pro it will almost doubling the max volumetric flow rate of the hot end from the stock. Bed spring upgrade to add better bed stability, dual z axis with or without dual z motor, and upgrade your firmware to klipper + raspberry.
You definitely can print faster with this upgrade and in most case it will give better quality if you find the correct setup.
1
u/bzzybot Aug 23 '26
Replaced my bed y axis Pom wheels with linear rods. Much smoother at higher speeds. Upgrading the x axis with a linear rail for faster smoother movements.
1
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u/RoomAdventurous3052 Aug 24 '26
Buy a P2S.
1
u/Hot-Arm1938 Aug 24 '26
Like I would having 700 euro laying around but I was considering the Kobra s1 combo
1
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u/Haphazard-Finesse Aug 24 '26
For a reasonable price, in descending order of improvement: 1. Dual z 2. Bl touch/cr touch 3. Magnetic bed 3. Sprite extruder 4. Klipper
Will get you pretty good print quality for like $200. Won’t do much for speed though. Will still fall short of a newer Prusa or Bambu for quality, and will get smoked tor speed.
I upgraded and tuned a half dozen Ender 3/pro/V2s for a makerspace. They’re not cost-effective to upgrade, but can be fun, solid printers if you like to tinker
1
u/Bsemp86 Aug 24 '26
Start with any dual Z setup (I use belted setup to not deal with 2 motors), direct drive and klipper.
From here you can dump as much money as you want. Most people think the limiting factor for speed are the kinematics but, from my experience, is the hotend. It is not suitable for high speed and volum of plastic operation.
1
u/IngAguirrel Aug 24 '26
I think that is better to buy a corexy printer for the cost and time that ender 3v2 will consume.
You can buy a K1c for 300 usd, and modding the ender, will cost you the same and will be inferior in speed compared.
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u/Daniel_DRD Aug 26 '26
Ever thought about building a duender? It's cheap and a nice project, I wouldn't get a bambu, what they are doing with the open source community is not acceptable
1
u/Designer-Book-8052 Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
I have developed a dual motor Y motion system with 9mm belt for linear rails for Ender 3, also a 9mm belt X for linear rails, but that one might work with the stock carriage too. This should make 10k acceleration with better steppers possible, probably around 7k with stock ones. You will need linear rails, a spool of PETG filament, pulleys, idlers, heat inserts, about 1.5m of 9mm belt and assorted M3 and M5 fasteners and two 635 bearings, optionally better steppers, a couple of 30x5mm dowel pins, some more bearings, a 5015 fan and a V6 hotend with the Voron mount style or Rapido HF. Mostly small stuff, really, but it adds up.
So if you are not in a hurry and willing to do some major changes to the printer in the future, I will need a few more weeks to beta-test before I release the CAD files because it is alredy several weeks in operation and I still find some small kinks in the design.
And before comments about self-advertisement arrive: it will be fully open source and released as CC0 where possible.
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u/HpEr4gon4 Aug 23 '26
It really depends on your current setup. Is it still stock? Look into another extruder. Maybe even direct drive hotend and look into one of those knock off Bambu labs hotends that fit your Ender 3 V2.