Creality Ender 3

I am a 3D printing newbie. A Creality Ender 3 might not have been the best choice for a first 3D printer in my case, but I have managed to get it up and running. After a lot of trial and error, here are the videos that were helpful, which if I had when I first got started would have saved me a LOT of time:

First is just putting the Ender 3 together in the first place. The price to pay for getting a $2,000 quality PLA printer for $200 is that assembly is required, AND THE INSTRUCTIONS THAT COME WITH YOUR PRINTER ARE SHOCKINGLY INADEQUATE, YOU MUST GO TO YOUTUBE TO GET ADEQUATE INSTRUCTIONS TO PUT TOGETHER THE ENDER 3:

Yay! Your printer is put together, can't wait to print, right? WRONG. Just leveling the printer bed is more challenging than putting together your printer in the first place. You won't even be able to print mistakes if you don't get this correctly adjusted within a fraction of a millimeter, it's a level of precision so high you can't see it with your naked eye. Ironically there is a somewhat easy way to do this:

(Note: You don't need to use a sticker, a piece of paper will work fine.)

Now, finally you can start printing, with the printer assembled and the bed leveled, right? Yeah, you will be able to print the test models that came with the printer, but everything else is going to be worse than garbage until you get the software side figured out. Some vocabulary for you:

• .blend: Blender is the best value 3D software on the market (like Maya, but instead of costing thousands of dollars per year to rent, it Blender is FREE.) A model being worked on in Blender is saved as a ".blend" file.
• .stl: this is file format the 3D model has to be saved in before it can be printed.
• .gcode: is the file with the exact instructions for the 3D printer to produce the model.
• slicing: is turning an .stl file into a .gcode file.
• Cura: is the most popular slicer software, and it is free.

When you find a file you want to print online, you will usually get the .stl file, and maybe the .blend file. Once you get the .stl file, you need to put it into Cura to slice it into a .gcode file for your printer. That last sentence is where you are going to spend most of your time trying to get models to print out. Coming up with the right .gcode file for the 3D model is the biggest challenge of 3D printing. If you want to get to printing quickly once your printer is assembled and its bed is leveled, this video the best place to start: