The bl touch is the first thing I’ll be purchasing, where is the most reliable place to get a good one, afraid the replicas won’t be accurate after reading some reviews
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Just gonna pitch it again,
If you tighten the bed springs 3/4 of the way down and adjust your z axis stop to match, you will only need to turn a knob an 1/8th of a turn every dozen prints or so.
Or just use tighter springs.
Or a tiny bit of blue loctite.
Or buy a bltouch, wire it up to your board, print adapters so you can use them with special fans, and spend more.
Been printing with 2 x ender 3s for a long while now and have zero interest in an auto bed leveling system 
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Just Let me play with my toys dang it.
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When ordering from aliexpress, I recommend trianglelabs. They make excellent replicas of hot ends, extruder sand electronics.
I’m using a clone BP touch without issues. The flatter the bed the better. A mirror tile or quality glass
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Ugh… my board upgrade didn’t go so great lol.
Was definitely quite. But kept getting TMC connection error.
Tried updating firmware and it would seem okay. But if I turned it off and on again I would get the same error and if I tried to print it didn’t do anything.
XY &Z worked via manual axis controls as well as auto home but that’s it.
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Hell yeah dude. Was it truly just a plug and play?
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Yep. I literally got really stoned, drank two beers, unplugged one at a time and plugged back in on the new board, turned on, and now I’m printing some petg for practice. Literally plug and play.
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Perfect. I left my Amazon gift card at home and will be buying 2 of them asap.
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It’s sooooooo quiet…
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What’s the board called? (Trynna find it on amazon as the sound of the ender 3 annoys the shit outta my mom (just day printing) and me when I’m sleeping…)
Thanks man!
Thanks @skunk and @SeanHacker! I’ll get to upgrading the printer soon!
Also, the little rubber cap that went on the extruder and extruder block fell off… I printed some stuff with it off and it seem to be doing better actually…
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@skunk I honestly think you going over the top in upgrades. The point of this printer is how cheep it is and the quality you get for such a cheep printer.
Some upgrades will add new issues the cable chain you making has been known to jam or put extra strain on Some points of the cable causing damage.
My recommendations for Ender3
1 $4. stranger bed springs
2 $5. glass bed
3 free. print PCB fan duct (older model Ender 3 only)
4 free. Print filament guides
5 free. print a better hot end fan duct
6 $14 mettle extruder.
If you PCB fan ducts on top you have the older model so older heater block and PSU I know thay were old popular upgrades so don’t know how much there worth thinking about exchanging as iv have the newer model
Screen back covers, knobs, quieter fans all personal opinion if it’s a upgrade or not. I class them as aesthetics not upgrades
Any thing past that I’d would say look at getting a higher grade printer to start with. $150 printer + $150 upgrades straight out the box id start looking at the CR10 or prusa 3i or Ender5 to convert to direct drive and encase for ABS/flexible filaments
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Thing about the ender 3 is that it’s a great printer to learn how a 3d printer works as you aren’t served with everything out of the box and in the worst case, if it breaks you haven’t paid a huge amount of money for it. Though I am a bit sad that I missed that the Ender 5 only was like 50$ more than the Ender 3 Pro when I bought mine during a sale.
Also for 150$ + 350$ or so in upgrades = 500$ you could get a 3D printer with linear rails, direct drive and TMC2209 drivers and a lot of other fun stuff and it’s still 250$ cheaper than the Prusa MK3 kit.
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@DEEIF You absolutely need that heat sock. If your hot end block doesn’t stay hot, you will get clogs and issues soon.
@Darkie02 I couldn’t agree more. It’s super exciting finding random things to print when you get it but majority of it is unnecessary or just for random convenience.
@krindor are you just putting $350 in upgrades out there as a random number?
Majority of upgrades people have suggested here total up to under $70 (glass bed with pei, metal extruder, silent board if you need it). Direct drive conversion is only $35 more.
With all that, I total up about $260… Or $490 less than the Prusa mk3. 
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Any of you guys using octoprint?
Also is anyone using E3D V6 hotend?
I hated octoprint. While messing with settings in the web UI, it canceled several of my prints. Overall it was wonky so I stopped using it. Other people recommend it all the time so it must be ok.
I’m using the microswiss hotend. It printed petg for me fine.
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