Getting started with 3d printing!

It's a bit of a running joke that I have been waiting for my 3d printer since 2017 - this one.  It's very obviously never going to show up - and even if it did it would be so out of date now 4 years after design.  So I finally got through the five stages of grief this Christmas and got an Ender 3 V2!

This is the latest revision of the popular Creality Ender 3 series - with a new 32 bit board with a bunch more storage and quiet motor drivers stock.  It also has an updated colour LCD, power supply moved down the bottom instead of on the side and a few other little bits.  I ordered the printer from an Australian reseller and it showed up in a few days.

The packaging is awesome - all very neat and tight:

The printer comes partially assembled - following the included instructions I had the printer together and powered up in about an hour - in between making my kids breakfast:

At this point I had a crack at bed levelling manually with a bit of paper.  Simple as doing an "autohome", disabling steppers in the menu and then moving the head to the four corners of the bed manually.  In each corner you need to slide the bit of paper between the bed and the head adjusting the bed up and down using the levelling wheels below the bed so that the paper just catches.  I did a couple of rounds of this and was then keen to try a print with the included filament as is.  The micro sd card comes with two gcode files - a cat and a dog.  I printed both:

For first prints "out of the box" I was pretty impressed.  I know some have had varied results out of the box like this but mine were pretty awesome.

At this point I realised I probably needed to watch a couple of videos and read a few blogs about what the heck I was doing.  By far the best resource I was recommended so far is Teching Tech on YouTube.  He has a bunch of awesome videos.  This video is a great primer for anyone who just bought their 3d printer - I should have watched it and a few others first but where's the fun in that.  

At this point I installed Ultimaker Cura and created a profile for my Ender 3 V2 (as there isn't one in the Cura just yet) using this page as a guide.  You take the base Ender 3 and change a few settings for the Ender 3 V2.  I left the print settings alone for the moment and have just been using the default print setting profiles in Cura (all on Standard Quality to start with).  

Overall I am stoked with how good this thing is out of the box for a 3d printer n00b like me.  It's been printing most days since I got it - to balance printing with the huge list of possible upgrades and learning I'm doing!