I recently bought a CR-10S Pro, and am pretty happy with it. It has some things you have to figure out in the beginning, but once you found everything, it really is a decent machine.
But what really bothers me, is that here on reddit, and other places, there is tons of information about the CR10's floating around, but not organized at all, making finding tips, upgrades, fixes, ... a really annoying job.
Can't we at least on this subreddit have one or a few sticky posts that get updated with useful getting started info for the CR10 printers, a list of upgrades, firmwares, ...
And preferably, as a community, also get to a "consensus" on which firmware, which upgrades are good, do you replace the abl sensor or not, ...
Usually i'm annoyed when people keep asking the same questions in communities, but seeing how scattered the info on these printers is, i get why we'll always be stuck in a loop answering the same questions. There doesn't seem a place where consensus can be formed, where discussion can go on longer than a day or 2 so consensus is formed, where info is even slightly managed.
It's really frustrating seeing so much knowledge in this community float around and not getting aggregated anywhere it seems.
I hope i'm missing some awesome forum or site or .... somewhere, but after quite some googling and looking around, i just can't find anything. The knowledge is there, the community is there, the sites are there, only that last step of aggregating & moderating it a bit seems to be completely missing? :s
If it's an issue of manpower, maybe some extra mods are needed here?
I had the same issue first getting into the hobby. Many hours were spent hopping between Reddit, Reprap forums, Ultimaker forums, and other sites to try diagnosing, tuning in, and tuning up my printer over the past year and a half. I did a small write-up for a comment quite a while ago about what I wished I had known from the beginning. Just in case this takes off, I'll post it here and update it with what else I've learned. Feel free to copy/compile/edit/whatever the following:
This might be a bit long winded, but here's a list of everything that I wish I had known from the beginning of buying my CR-10. It's for the basic CR-10, so I don't know how relevant all of this is to the 10S/Pro/Mini.
Setup: Watch a video and follow along. Be sure to snug every nut and bolt tight. Wobble = bad. Locktite will keep your screws from walking with vibration. Be careful about over-tightening the rollers and belts or your rollers will wear down really fast and the belts can cause a whole host of problems. Make sure that all of the t-slot nuts actually rotate into the channel. Many of the glass plates that comes with the CR-10's have a dip in the middle that will cause endless frustration. If you're bed isn't perfectly flat, replace it with a square edge mirror tile.
Everyone has their own way of leveling the bed. I've heard feeler gauges work well; I use paper to get close and then print squares one layer height tall in each corner and adjust the knobs on the fly to get the perfect first layer. You want it to just slightly squish into the bed but not enough that it builds excess pressure in the nozzle. If you can see gaps between the lines, your nozzle is too high, if it's leaving transparent lines or raised ridges of excess plastic then your nozzle is too low. If you cannot adjust the bed far enough one way or another, you can loosen and adjust the plate holding the Z-Stop for a few extra mm.
For PLA, Aquanet Extra Hold hairspray or a gluestick works well to bond prints to the buildplate. If you're having trouble with corners lifting or adhesion in general, a PEI sheet is a cheap fix that doesn't need anything to help prints adhere.
Any vibration that is able to be transferred into the table will show in your prints. Make sure that the printer itself is on a very stable surface.
Slicer Settings: I'm only familiar with Cura, so this may or may not apply. Start with the presets for whatever material you are using. If you're not insulating the bed/ putting it in an enclosure you are pretty much limited to PLA. Keep your layer heights to multiples of 0.04mm to avoid errors from partial motor steps. Change the retraction settings to distance= 6mm, retraction speed = 80mm/s, and travel speed = 200mm/s. This affects your stringing and these are the settings that work best for me. If you have an all metal hotend, try 2mm at 90mm/s.
With the stock hotend, you'll struggle to print with anything larger than a .5mm nozzle. Layer heights are entirely up to the finish quality you would like, but the general rule is do not print layers thicker than 75% of your nozzle diameter.
Your first print: Now, you're technically ready to start printing. To get the best detail there are a few extra steps that you'll need a decent set of calipers for. Measure your filament diameter in several spots over a few feet and average it. Set that in your slicer and print any size cube with wall thickness equal to your nozzle diameter. 0% infill, 0 top/bottom layers.
Once that prints, measure what the wall thickness actually came out to and divide your set width by your actual width to determine your flow percentage. For example, I'm printing a white PLA with a 0.4mm nozzle. My walls came out to 0.42mm thick, so I set my flow rate to (0.4/0.42) which is roughly 95%. Print the cube again and measure the walls to confirm that they measure 0.4mm now.
Finally, print a Temp Tower to determine what your ideal temperature is. After that, print away!
Mods: Don't go crazy on mods right away. These printers work great out of the box. Add mods to address individual needs as they arise. That said, print larger leveling knobs if you value your thumbs.
I recommend the Petsfang for airflow, this wire bar to relieve stress on the bowden, and Z-axis braces if you want to do anything taller than 6" without getting distortions. If you plan on printing ABS or PETG, insulate the buildplate by backing the hotplate with an insulator like a carbon fiber welders blanket or aerogel. That will allow the buildplate to reach 106 easy enough, but you'll still experience layer separation in ABS if you don't have an enclosure.
The heated bed on mine eventually died, so I replaced it with a 110v silicone heater. It heats up to 110 in about 10 minutes now.
If noise is a concern, stepper dampers are fairly cheap. A lot of people upgrade the hotend to something like an E3D or Microswiss, which can lay a lot more plastic, and upgrade the cooling fans.
A RPi running Octoprint is a game-changer for monitoring your prints remotely. Set it up with a webcam and never worry if you're printing spaghetti while away from the house.
Gcode: I changed my starting Gcode as well. With the stock profile in Cura, I was getting this bit of extrusion above the buildplate that would stick to the model. Your can edit this in "Manage printers." I changed it to:
This causes it to extrude a short fat line up the left edge of the buildplate (be careful of your clips!) and then retract and move quickly to pull any strings or excess filament before moving to begin the print.
I also changed my ending Gcode to:
This change just makes it so that the build plate comes forward instead of back when the print finishes.
My most common issues: If the control box sounds like a plane about to take off, that's normal. The fans are really cheap and a little bit of light machine oil can quiet them without needing to replace them. If you're getting mysterious blobbing or your prints are coming out really brittle, you probably have a partial clog. The needle they send with the printer is for clearing this. Get the nozzle hot, use the needle to scrape out the inside of the nozzle to break loose the clog, and run filament through at the top of it's temperature range to hopefully flow it out. If that doesn't work, I burn mine out with a torch, quench in water, then soak in isopropyl alcohol before letting them air dry.
Take your time and look closely at what went wrong when things fail, because things will go wrong. This is very much a hobby of incremental improvement and patience, but the community here is awesome. Good luck!
edit: I forgot about Firmware: The stock firmware doesn't come with Thermal Runaway Protection enabled, which is something you want if you don't like fire. If you have the older MELZI board on the original CR-10, you will have to flash a bootloader using an Arduino or another serial programmer. After that, you can use the Arduino IDE to upload firmware directly to the printer over USB. There are several great guides out there, just read through completely and don't cancel anything halfway. I managed to do it without ever having used an Arduino before.
I'm currently using the TH3D Unified firmware because I've got a silicone heater and E3D hotend, but before that I was using the latest version of Marlin. The unified firmware is built off Marlin and has presets for most common printers and aftermarket components. Both worked well for me.
Thanks, things like this should really get stickied. Because by the end of the weekend it'll already have fallen of the front page, and will just be another blip in the scattered info :(.
Also, once stickied, people could add other useful things, and this list could grow over weeks/months by combined knowledge >_<
I'm really missing that aspect here