What Two Years With the Ender-3 S1 Has Taught Me About 3D Printing

3D printers were a hobby that I always wanted to get into, but could never really think of a good reason why I should own one. I've always had a knack for CAD modeling It wasn't until 2022 where I finally took the plunge with a Creality Ender-3 S1, and it's been a journey that's been equal parts joyous and frustrating.

I paid $400 before tax and shipping for this printer at the time. Nearly mid-range pricing... for an Ender-3. But the S1 is pretty far from the barebones original in terms of it's features. It has a direct drive extruder, auto bed leveling, dual driven leadscrews, runout detection, and auto resume. All in a fairly premium looking package - less of a DIYer's tool and more of an appliance.

And that's the main thing I was looking forward to with the Ender-3 S1 was it's promises of a relatively trouble free entry into 3D printing. Compared to it's predecessors, the S1 requires less assembly and in theory; less need for tedious pre-printing calibration and adjustment straight out of the box. In other words, it's a near perfect beginners printer: it requires just enough of you to get familiarized with the fundamentals, but it's otherwise a largely "set it and forget it" affair. 

Or at least that's what I was hoping for. 

Needless to say, I feel like a lot of the major printer review sites (Creality included) oversimplified how much work this printer required straight out of the box beyond the relatively simple task of building it. While I was indeed able to get right to printing in reasonable time, I had to quickly lower my expectations for what this machine was going to deliver right out of the box. Perfection was going to take time.

Bed adhesion was a huge struggle for me early on. I simply couldn't get prints to stick to the bed, or they stuck a little too well. Ultimately this was an exercise in me learning how to properly tram the bed and set the Z offset, something that is unavoidable not matter what the presence of the erroneously named "Auto Bed Leveling" (ABL) leads you to believe. But even after getting the process of manual leveling and setting Z-offset right, I still ran into inconsistent first layer problems.

As I investigated this issue, I found a pretty telling problem with the printer's construction: every axis carriage was sitting loose on their respective gantry. All that slop likely meant my exercises in bed leveling were never going to be accurate. Thankfully, the printer came with all the tools needed to make these adjustments. I turned the eccentric nut on each carriage to make sure the wheels were tight to the aluminum extrusions enough to eliminate any wobble, but not so tight that I couldn't turn them in place by hand. 

This is one of the first things that any 3D printing beginner should check on a new machine but naturally, I overlooked it being the complete noob I was. That said, eliminating the slop helped a lot, but it wasn't the end-all solution for my first layer problems.

This is where "Auto Bed Leveling" finally comes into play, which really should be called "Auto Mesh Building", because it isn't physically leveling your bed for you. Rather, the printer probes several areas of the bed in a grid pattern to build a mesh of all the variances in surface height, allowing the printer to compensate for build surface deformities that otherwise couldn't be countered by manual tramming. 

The problem is that the Ender-3 S1 isn't configured to do this out of the box. Or at least the G-codes I've sliced myself lack whatever Creality includes in their own slicer settings to enable the printer to use the mesh. Case in point, I had to add an "M420 S1" line to the default slicer G-code after the printer homes with "G28". This Marlin command effectively loads the ABL mesh before printing, and while it's hard to definitively say that this had as much of an impact on my first layers as tightening the axis carriages, they have been a hell of a lot more consistent compared to before.

I also really disliked the factory PC coated spring steel build plate that the printer is normally equipped with. I found that prints adhere to it rather inconsistently, and the finish is extremely fragile. It's very prone to damage from accidental nozzle crashes and from attempting to remove prints that stick too well to the bed. I swapped it out for a glass build plate which I found has more consistent adhesion and the better surface uniformity. Plus, it gives a really nice, smooth bottom finish.

But you're probably thinking "how the hell do you remove prints from something you can't flex?" - a pretty common and understandable concern with glass. First of all, use a glue stick. It's less for extra adhesion and more to help break prints free since you're putting a thin layer of slightly pliable material between the print and the bed. Secondly, just pop the build plate in the freezer for a few minutes after it finishes printing. Prints come off surprisingly easy after you get the glass nice and cold.

I'd often encounter warping on overhangs with trickier materials like this gold silk PETG.

I never ran into any major cooling problems with the S1 despite it's paltry single fan setup - especially with PLA. But on more warp prone materials like silk filaments and PETG, warping and stringing were constant issues. I ended up quitting on silks entirely because I could never get good layer adhesion out of them, even with higher than average temps, but with the part cooling turned completely off I was able to reduce some of the warping in PETG.

Surface zits I found were a result of too aggressive of retraction and layer change settings.

Even then, stringing and surface zit issues with PETG were rampant. I spent a ton of time retraction tuning the printer in order to eliminate I found that a 0.6mm retraction distance with no combing or retraction on layer changes eliminated the surface zits and kept stringing down to a minimum. I wasn't able to fully eliminate warping however, especially on the bow of the Benchy and I've had PETG prints partially lift themselves off the bed because they cool too quickly. I've chalked this up to having too much ambient air circulation in the room and I feel like having an enclosure might help mitigate some of the warping.

The prominent layer lines on the grey Benchy were the result of both Z-binding and too much flow.

The most enduring print quality issue I had with the Ender-3 S1 though; were Z-artifacts. Most of my prints would always have really pronounced layer lines that even after countless hours of calibration, I was never able to completely eliminate. The most drastic measure I took in hopes of combating this menace was to install both oldham couplers and anti-backlash nuts onto the printer, with my theory being the oldham couplers would eliminate any lateral slop in the leadscrews, while the spring pressure from the backlash nuts would account for the vertical slop.

Turns out, neither solution really worked, and the key was actually just to ensure the nuts weren't tight to the X-gantry; which causes an issue known as Z-binding. Loosening the mounting screws for the leadscrew nuts a bit to induce a little more play was all I needed to do, and I also eliminated the anti-backlash nuts, assuming the spring pressure was adding unnecessary friction. After a flow calibration, the results were substantially better. Unfortunately, it took me well over a year to come to that conclusion, and I've had to settle for many otherwise functional parts with glaringly bad surface finishes since then.

The software side of the printer was probably one of the more puzzling parts of the Ender-3 S1. Creality offers a pretty fleshed out factory firmware that would've been more than sufficient for the entry level, print straight out of the box crowd they were trying to appeal to with this printer, but it all kind of falls apart the minute you start tinkering with it. Mesh building is slow as hell, and there's no way to make adjustments to the stepper motors or PID tune from the UI. All of this has to be done via a USB interface like Pronterface or Octoprint.

As a result, I ended up installing mirisoc's excellent custom firmware for the printer which enables and/or improves all of this functionality from the UI, but there is one caveat: the control board. Creality originally shipped the Ender-3 S1 with STM32F103 processors, but then quietly introduced printers equipped with the STM32F401. I don't know what spurred Creality to do this (possibly the chip shortage) but it wouldn't have been a big deal if they actually informed users of the change, and if the hardware between the two boards was actually equivalent.

Creality really fumbled the ball with the S1's firmware rollouts.

This caused a bit of a fiasco where Creality initially didn't release firmware updates for F4 model printers, and people ended up bricking their printers when they accidentally installed the incompatible F1 firmware. It also didn't help that there was no easy way to identify what board was in the printer. Both boards also had the stepper drivers configured in "standalone" mode opposed to "UART", preventing the proper use of the much-desired linear advance. And when it came to custom firmware, it turned out that the F4 printers had less flash memory than the F1 equipped models, further limiting the F4 model's capabilities.

Creality Print has apparently gotten much better since I used it, but I still don't see why you'd use it over Cura unless you owned a newer K1 printer.

Then, there's the slicer part of the equation. Creality officially offers two slicers for the printer: Creality Slicer and Creality Print. Both slicers are just reskins of Ultimaker Cura, neither option offers any benefits over their basis. Creality Print in particular was so buggy and crash prone, that I dumped it for Creality Slicer, and then Cura shortly afterwards after I learned the former had less features than Cura proper. Cura was slightly more work to get started on since it initially lacked any default configuration for the Ender-3 S1, but since then it has been reliable and relatively easy to use.

Fully dialed in, the S1 crushes standard PLA and PETG prints. I've printed some really nice looking decorative pieces and plenty of perfect functional parts - both to solve existing problems I've had around the house and for things I didn't even know I needed. A bigger surprise for me was TPU. It didn't take nearly as much of a headache as I thought it would to get right, and only a few slight alterations to my PLA profile got it printing really well. Granted it took a lot of patience to get to a point where I was satisfied with the print quality but once it was there, popping those first successful prints off the bed was cathartic.

This GFCI box was my first and so far most successful design I created with the S1.

95A TPU always came out looking pretty fantastic on the S1.

The layer lines were always an eyesore, but functional parts off the S1 tended to work great.

Even with all the work I put into finally getting it printing well, there were still some shortcomings to the S1 that I couldn't really easily work around without extensive modifications. Z banding from the leadscrews was still an issue and by today's standards, the S1 is pitifully slow. The most I was able to push out of it while maintaining quality was about 24 mm/s at 500 mm/s2 acceleration. It would take about an hour and a half to complete a Benchy. I could have easily switched to Klipper using Creality's Sonic Pad which would have potentially unlocked more speed via input shaping, but I've heard mixed results from it.

The old Ender-5 Pro I briefly had - y'know, the one that arrived on my doorstep in a crumpled-up box with zero padding and a whole bunch of broken parts? That was a significantly more involved printer to set up than the Ender-3 S1, nor did it have any extra bells and whistles, and I felt like it performed about as well as it's supposedly far more "plug-and-play" brethren. Perhaps my inexperience was the biggest limiting factor in the the whole story, but I can't say spending more for the fancier machine at the time was really conducive to getting better results out of the box.

Would I still recommend the Ender-3 S1 for a newcomer to the hobby? Probably not. Even though the S1 is now just $219, the newer Ender-3 SE is cheaper and features roughly the same feature set plus some additional improvements. The V3 KE is a bit pricier at $279, but it gets you linear rails and Klipper (albeit, Creality's gimped version of it). Want something truly trouble free? Splurge and get a Bambu Labs A1. It's closed source, but the performance is so good that you probably won't care. 

I'm certainly not dissatisfied with what successes I've had with the Ender-3 S1 and it was a great way to cut my teeth on 3D printing, though it definitely left me wanting more. I won't say I felt like I wasted money being such an early adopter of this printer as the experience was invaluable, but I feel like I would've had similar experiences with something half the price, and it came out so close to printers that performed so dramatically better that I did feel a tinge of envy. Rather than continue trying to improve it, I've parted ways with it - to a 3D printing newcomer to of all people, and I hope they find it just as valuable of a learning experience as I did.