The Ender 3, Calibration, and the Art of Working Things Out

The Ender 3 is the kind of machine that draws you in with its simplicity and keeps you hooked with its potential. Straight out of the box, it’ll print something—not perfect, but enough to make you think, “I can make this better.” And that’s the start of the journey: the endless pursuit of calibration perfection.

Take ABS printing, for example. ABS isn’t exactly Ender 3-friendly—it warps, it curls, and it laughs in the face of your basic setup. But you’re determined, so you grab a plastic bag, drape it over the printer like a makeshift heat tent, and hope for the best. And weirdly enough, it works—at least until the bag melts, or the smell of heated plastic becomes unbearable.

But that’s the beauty of the Ender 3: it teaches you ingenuity. You start small, adjusting retraction settings, bed leveling, and flow rates. As your confidence grows, so does your ambition—upgrading the hotend, replacing all the fans, putting on a linear X and Y rail kit, maybe even messing with firmware. The prints get better, your knowledge deepens, and you start to believe you’re building the perfect machine.

Until one day, you’re not. You’ve calibrated, tweaked, and upgraded so much that the printer you’ve poured hours into is somehow producing worse results than when you first turned it on. That’s the paradox of the Ender 3: it’s a gateway to mastery, but it’s also a reminder that perfection is often the enemy of good enough.

And it’s funny—life’s kind of like that too, isn’t it? You start out thinking you’ll figure it all out, that with the right tweaks and adjustments, you’ll eventually get it right. But as time goes on, you realize it’s less about finding perfection and more about working with what you have, as it changes.

That’s how I see what I have with her, too. Things shift and evolve, but she’s been a "constant", like the one thing in all this that doesn’t need calibration. Sure, nothing stays the same forever, and I know that includes us, but that’s part of it. It’s not about freezing things in time—it’s about being with someone who can move through things with you, letting the process shape whatever comes next.

Whether it’s a 3D printer or anything else, there’s no perfect formula—just the journey of making it all work, one adjustment at a time.