Filament that Lasts Long and can be Polished

[curious aardvark]

lol - the problem with the ender series is that they were deliberately engineered to 'just work'.
The cheapest prusa standard i3 will happily chug along at 150mm/s (and mine is even made of plywood).
A standard ender 3 will chug along at 50mm/s.
And it's purely down to how creality changed the design.

Now you CAN fix the built in problems.
Although while I have seen plenty of dual z screw fixes - and once you've done that moving to a direct drive extruder is a doddle. I have yet to see any easy fixes for the bed mount system.

Prusa use two side rails to give equal support to both sides of the print bed with cylindrical bearings on steel rods.
Creality decided to go for a central piece of alumoinium extrusion with the bed riding on horizontal wheels that sit in the extrusion slots.

The thing to bear in mind is that the difference between a succesful 3d print and a failed print can be non-level bed with a few hundredths of a millimetre difference.
A bed sliding on cheap wheels along a slot in cheap aluminium extrusion - is never ever going to be really level through it's entire travel. And if you print to one side or have an asymmetric print with most of the weight on one side - it can only be unlevel.

So that's why the crreality machines are not as good as many other designs around.

They deliberately set out to make the cheapest 'functional' printer they could.
They also decided to give a lot of them away to youtubers, who generally give positive reviews in the hopes of receiving future free hardware.
Their marketing dept should win some kind of business and industry award.
They have managed to sell people glass and make them believe it's diamonds.

Now, many people don't care if a print takes 3x longer than it should. Or that they spend more time fiddling around than printing.
I like my printers - once setup and tuned - to just work. And they all do.
I have not changed any hardware in 5 of my printers. because you should not need to.

All the sapphire needed was a non-corrupt firmware a totally non-technical 5 minute job.
The few other changes I made - still use the original hardware - but it's now all optimised to print to the machine's full potential.
And they were pretty straight forward to.A nd as I'll stick them on thingiverse - eevrybody else can just print 4 objects and do the same.

they are Not strictly necessary for the printer to work really well.
BUt why race a ferrari at 50mph when you know it's actually capable of 200mph ?

Now lets talk about auto-bed level, while I'm on a roll (lol).
What auto level ACTUALLY does is to make a topographical map of the print bed surface. taking note of where it's not flat.
If you have a flat print surface and if the bed stays flat during the printing process - there is absolutely no need for auto levelling. A simple manual level is all that's needed and if you use nylock locking nuts on your levelling bolts - it's a once a year job - if that.
Honestly can't remember the last time I levelled my delta.

Auto level is mainly of any real use if you have either a non-flat build surface or a method of moving the bed around that does not keep it totally flat.

Why is auto level a bad thing ?
Because it relies on either the print head or bed moving in the z axis to match the non-flat areas on the bed. And those extra movements have to be done for every single layer of the print.
That slows things down, introduces extra vibration and potentially adds errors into the print.

The only setup where bed levelling is a viable alternative to a flat bed is the delta print system
Where the print head naturally moves effortlessly in three dimensions and conforming to a topographical map makes almost no difference to speed or quality.

For all other machines where you are either moving the bed up and down or with i3's the x print gantry - it's a really poor substitute for a properly flat print bed.

None of this is opinion or conjecture - it's all common sense, fact and bloody obvious to anyone - whether you have a engineering background or not.

But creality have managed to convince a large part of the 3d printing community that up is down and orange really is the new purple.

Even whiole condemming their policy of deliberately selling poorly designed machines - you HAVE to admire their sheer nerve and the ability to do sell these machines :-)