How I Got Started Printing

It started with a coworker named Alex. He had an old Ender 3 sitting at work and I had been curious about 3D printing for longer than I could remember. I kept seeing those rainbow articulated dragons at fairs and farmers markets and I just kept thinking — you could do so much more with this technology than that.

So I did what any reasonable person does. I went on Marketplace and traded some guy for a Creality CR10 Max.

Bowden extruder, knob leveling, glass print bed. The glass bed was genuinely nice. Everything else was a lesson in humility. My success rate was not great. I was printing whistles and benchies and honestly had no business running that machine yet — I just didn't know enough. I can't speak for other Creality printers but that specific one was not for me. Eventually I traded it away too.

What came next changed things. I picked up an Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro and I was hooked almost immediately. Still knobs, but the assisted leveling routines were more capable. Direct drive extruder made a noticeable difference right away. The machine was faster. My success rate was still nowhere near where it is now but I could feel the difference.

I had that Neptune for a few months before grabbing a Neptune 4 Plus. At that point I had just bought a house and was in the middle of renovating it — two printers running side by side while the walls were still open. That's probably where it really started.