Why does my printer suck so much?

This is unfortunately the risk of the cheaper machines. Some people claim they have no issues, but you see many posts like this one that have constant problems or have spent a bunch of money to upgrade their machines to the point where they print consistently.

The cruel reality is that the cheaper machines are better for enthusiasts that have more knowledge and are ok with the printer being their hobby rather than printing, but they tend to be bought by people just coming into the hobby because they don't want to invest in a reliable printer until they know whether they like it (or simply can't afford it).

I did the exact same thing when I bought my first printer. I had already had experience with reliable printers and am very mechanically minded, so I thought I was ok to buy one that I knew I would have to tinker with. Eventually I came to the realization that to get it to the point where it would be workable the time and money would just about buy me a Prusa instead.

I had an ender 3 as well. Every time I used it I had to calibrate and level it, and watch the the print for the first few layers to make sure it was going to work. I’d estimate it had failed prints around 50% of the time. Eventually it died and I got a anycubic kobra printer. It is so much better it’s unbelievable. I leveled it once when I first assembled it. Since then I haven’t calibrated it or leveled the bed once. I’ve done over 100 prints on it with a 0% failure rate. It is truly a printer where I can tell it to print something and come back 10 hours later and have a perfect print.

You might have lost the lottery. I've printed 5 spools of parts with my work's Ender 3 Pro without having to adjust the bed level after I first set it, and that doesn't even have auto leveling.

Make sure your bed is clean, and make sure your gantry and frame is square when you assembled it. It might also be your type of filament or Z offset

I’ve owned and used 2 other printers before the one I’m currently using. Always had struggles with bed leveling and first print adhesion. Tried tape, tape with glue stick coverings, hair spray, messing with temp settings, you name it.

I bought a Bambulab P1S and I’ve only needed to level the bed once. Immaculate first layers. It’s a whole different class of machine.

Save up your money and get a better printer. They truly make a world of a difference.

There are so many things you can do to make these cheap printers reliable that I really could not list them all. When it comes to bed and first layer issues here are the biggest ones

Make sure your X gantry is tight and not sagging. The eccentric nuts on the guide wheels should be set so that there is very little play. If you lift the left side it should not move much without raising the gantry.

Tram your bed with the screws almost bottomed out. Loose screws mean that the bed is moving more and will not likely hold a level for long.

The bed must be warm during abl. these things warp and twist like crazy when you heat them. You will not get good results on these cheap ass beds if your machine measures its shape cold.

If you are not using a pei coated sheet to print on buy one asap. It is a superior print surface and a huge leap in print technology. It’s less important with pei, but it is worth noting that the print surface must be clean. Oils from your fingers mess with adhesion to the print bed.

Those are the big ones. There are like I said a million little things you can do. These things can be made into reliable work horses but it takes A lot of research, work, time, and often money to make them such. My ender 3 has cost me more than a prusa would have, which is pretty dumb tbh. On the other hand, it’s mine and there is no part of it that I do not understand. I like my printer. It’s very fast, very reliable, and I made it that way.

Maybe check for loose screws, that's one of the most common issues. And your Slicer settings, maybe it isn't saving or restoring the Bed Levelling data.

I started with a cr10s that I actually got for free. The first print was amazing, then every following attempt just shit it's pants. I spent about 20 or 30 hours trying to look up what the fuck im doing wrong. Tried reprinting again and again and again tweaking settings only to fail and it was extremely infuriating. I then started disassembling and reassembling and found that my problem was a broken cable.

Point of the story is I learned so much about 3D printing trying to figure out why the prints are not working. Now I got 2 more printers and if something goes wrong I can easily identify what's wrong.

Don't give up hope. It could be that you have a broken machine, but it's more likely that your settings are just wrong.

Bit of both really. Ok, the bed tramming is normal, even GREAT printers need it done every few weeks or so. The physics and mechanical properties of how the bed is held down mean changes in temperatures and normal shifts even in an ACed house mean they loosen naturally a little every day and after a few weeks they will be bad enough someone who likes a really level bed will need to clear them again. After a few months any bed that isn't welded down is going to need to be redone.

Z offset and bed auto level follow from that. You need to redo them when you do the tramming anyway.

I would say run your printer more often but that won't fix it. You're running against physics and nothing can stop that. Maybe you can store up prints for say 6 months and then do them all in a week or so and you only have to do this once?

I have an Ender 3 clone, a Voxelab Aquila, that I got as an open box. I think its bed is a little warped, or it's possible there were some parts that were not perfectly square that I still left alone when I finished putting it together. I don't have auto-bed leveling or anything.

I will not say it's trouble free, but it's no nightmare. I have to tram every 5-10 prints assuming I don't try to get the print off the glass plate without gently removing it from the bed first. I also wipe with a little alcohol before every print, and occasionally use a little gluestick if it's being a butt, but overall it's all very livable. Tramming can be tedious as it's never quite perfect, but I generally get good first-layer adhesion (especially if I use a brim), with a touch of elephant foot. For a hundred twenty bucks two years ago, it's been a good purchase, though these days I think you do better even without hunting for a MicroCenter Ender.

I'm not sure about the S1, but I have the ender 3v2, and had issues with the first layer when I first got it as well! However, I eventually installed jyers firmware and a touch probe on it, and since then, my prints have been flawless ever since, and I haven't manually leveled my bed in years! I basically used the jyers firmware and touch probe to build a 100 point mesh of my print bed, and then included g code before each print to do a 3 point tilt check to align this mesh to the bed, which basically realigns the virtual mesh to the bed even if it might have shifted! And since it's only 3 points, it's super fast and can be ran while the nozzle is heating up before every print!

On my i3 clone, printing leveling wheels that fit pretty tightly on the bed screws (so they wouldn't back off) and swapping coiled metal springs for silicone bushings greatly reduced how often I had to level my bed. After that, the most useful thing I did was swapping an ultrabase glass bed (this was before PEI spring steel was widely available) and getting in the habit of keeping it clean.

Like others said, consistent leveling can be a pain on cheap printers like ender. Your printer have 4 leveling screws while you need only 3 points to define a plane. 4 screws are recipe for problems on such a small plate, and then they also ship deformed bed plates or frame...

There are better quality machines available, but there are also so many people with enders that print amazingly well. So you have to decide if you want to dig deep enough to fix/upgrade/tune/thinker until quality is accaptable. Some people enjoy tuning more than printing, while some want to spend money on more like plug&play experience

Dunno what is different on ender 3's after v2, but on my bed slingers I used a klicky probe to get the measurement for each screw position, and just hard mount something like ~10mm or whatever it took to clear the motor mount stainless cylinder spacer and nylock nut to mount the bed. Then 0.1mm stainless shims added to the spacer stack as needed until the probe numbers are as close to the same as possible. IIRC each screw is torqued to 8nm or so using a small torque wrench. I think I did 6 or for things threaded into the aluminum but the bed should be fine higher if they are all the same. This should make the bed mesh stay mostly the same for longer so I run a really ridiculous subdivision on the mesh since it doesn't seem to need updating.

I feel your pain. I bought the Ender 3 S1 when they were first released and the bed was severely warped. I can get it to print, but only part of the plate is really usable. The time investment for every print isn't worth it for me so I don't use it anymore. Luckily, I have other printers.

I have the S1 plus. I've upgraded everything from the bed to the extruder.

The biggest benefit I've seen is from removing the stock software and using klipper. It's a lot to setup and calibrate, but it works well.

I moved from an anycubic mega s which was fully upgraded and worked without an issue for the most part but was a faff to use, to a bambu p1s with ams and oh my god, I actually enjoy priting again. It's not 1 print a day now, it's 5-10 all perfect quality and finish. It's honestly made priting fun again and not a chore. Well worth the jump