Wfh

The prints are shinier so I guess there’s a better heat flow in the hot end, especially at higher speeds.

But my goal was mostly to replace the hotend with a well known and well regarded design.

The stock one has a flaw with PETG, I’m not sure if it’s the material or the temperatures but it makes the nozzle creep down. Very slowly at first, leading to bad looking or failed prints and horrible first layers and constant z-offset fiddling, until it suddenly and very forcefully drives itself through the build plate or the print.

• Microswiss Flowtech hotend because the original died in a PETG-related incident
• Golden PEI build plate, much better adhesion compared to stock
• a few software tweaks and manual z-offset calibration
• next step will probably be a graphite bed to fix extended heat times and taco bed.

A low friction filament path solves a lot of under extrusion issues. See if you can build a filament holder with ball bearings and/or a filament guide before the extruder. It solved all my issues with my former Ender 3.

Mostly because Enders (I used to have a v2) need tinkering to give their best. Once you’ve upgraded the hotbed, replaced the molten PTFE Bowden, printed low friction filament holder and filament guide, upgraded to a PEI build plate, added a lot of accessories, calibrated the shit out of it and learned its quirks, they’re very good.

I still use the last open source version of Joliebulle, which has been outdated af for the best part of the last 10 years but still runs in a Debian 11 Distrobox container. It’s basic but functional.

My dream project would be to fork it and update it and migrate it to libadwaita but I don’t have the time nor the skills nor the time to up my skills to do it (and I refuse to slop-code the shit out of it).