11 Of The Best 3D Printer Upgrades Of 2023

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There was a time when you got your new 3D printer home and the second week was spent printing upgrades — remember that fan duct that changed everything? (The first week, in case you've forgotten, was for resolving bed adhesion problems). A lot of those upgrades and mods are making their way into new off-the-shelf products, but there are still some that many users will want to reckon with. A few other upgrades are relatively new, if not in concept. then in the fact that they've been refined to the point that they're practical for a mass market to fiddle with.

The fun of owning a 3D printer is "fiddling with" it. Even the cheapest commonly available consumer printers (the Creality Ender 3, for example) will work out of the box, give or take that week spent on bed adhesion. With these consumer-grade 3D printer upgrades you can make your experience easier, more reliable, faster, or quieter, all while using an expanded slate of materials. Though, you'll still use FDM printing with standard poly filaments most often. Printing metal hasn't reached the home market yet (unless you have a nitric acid bath and a kiln sitting around in your rec room), binder jetting will set you back $100,000, and newer methods like injection continuous liquid interface production are just a happy dream so far.

Of course, some things never change at all. Remember how cool the idea of automatic bed leveling was a decade ago? If you're in the market for a new printer, you'll probably end up with one. But let's take a step back.

Bed leveling was long a kind of grueling rite of passage involving temperamental springs, counterintuitive Marlin menu-diving, and sliding cardstock of just the right thickness under your nozzle until you found just the right resistance. After a brief flirtation with Harbor Freight dial indicators, along came automatic bed leveling. At the time that mostly meant the BLTouch, a vaguely indecent-looking, syringe-like contraption that (like so much of 3D printing) seems like an idea that's too basic to actually work. It was an open-source Indiegogo project that used a metal pin and a hall effect sensor to map the Z-axis height of your print bed at various points. It doesn't actually level your bed but adjusts your g-code output to compensate for differences in height.

The BLTouch was the only commercial product you could find for a while, but the market has fairly exploded with options. BLTouch has graduated from Indiegogo to OEM, and most new printers have some form of auto-leveling. Competition brought alternatives like the CR Touch's use of an optical sensor rather than a hall effect sensor. If you're looking to upgrade an older printer, a newer auto-leveling sensor might be just the thing.

Sometimes upgrades aren't about performance improvement but about proper function. The all-metal Bowden extruder is a great example. Many printers use a Bowden tube setup, including those from Creality and Ultimaker, and some of the stock extruders are surprisingly fragile devices. It's more a matter of when the plastic components on the older extruders will break than whether they will. An aluminum extruder is immensely stronger and more durable, and can even come with Capricorn tubing, which some find helps with printing TPU. You can also upgrade your printer's brass extruder gear to a steel version that may be more durable and less prone to slipping. You can even upgrade the push fittings that attach your Bowden tube to your extruder and hotend. Each upgrade makes a little difference in a hobby where a little difference is sometimes all the difference you need.

Some upgrades make a substantial difference, like moving to a direct-drive extruder. Bowden setups have their attractions (including a lighter, faster print head), but a direct drive setup dramatically shortens the distance between the extruder and the hotend, which eliminates most of the play in the filament and shortens retraction distances. This makes the use of flexible filaments far easier. But it's possible that direct drive extruders can also lead to problems with extrusion consistency, as Prusa users found out when it became obvious that the Bowden setups on cheaper Ender 3 printers outperformed Prusa's direct drive.

You can certainly upgrade your printer's motherboard to reduce noise, but there's a simpler way. So simple, in fact, that one wonders why the printer's manufacturer didn't do the upgrade in the first place. Rubber motor dampers predictably reduce the noise of your printer's stepper motors, and reduce the transmission of vibrations to the other parts of your printer. Like the rubber decouplers used for audio monitor stands, these dampers would physically isolate the 3D printer's frame from its stepper motors. It accomplishes this by being screwed only to the frame on one side, and only to the motor on the other. No screw attaches to both the frame and the motor, so the only connection is vibration-dampening rubber. Some also speculate that the reduced vibration must necessarily mean higher-quality prints. You can pick up a motor damper and a heat sink for a NEMA 17 motor for $8 at PrinterMods, which claims a 5-10 decibel reduction in printer noise.

If you have an older printer and you want to move forward without the expense of buying a new model, a motherboard upgrade might be the approach for you. They're mostly touted as quiet-running control boards, but there are a lot of potential benefits under the hood. The most obvious is that the 32-bit microcontroller that replaces your old 8-bit microcontroller is much faster. That faster, smoother operation leads to reduced noise and, in fact, one manufacturer's upgrade board is even called the Silent Motherboard. Depending on the model of upgrade board you choose, other benefits include increased precision; newer versions of printer firmware; updated, higher-quality driver boards; support for Wi-Fi and cloud printing; support for touchscreens; and faster printing.

Popular higher-end upgrade boards like the Duet 2 can be pricey, costing upwards of $200, and include better drivers like the TMC2660, which offers more micro-stepping levels for smoother and more precise operation. But you can get a 32-bit board for far less. The Creality offering is about $40, while the BIGTREETECH SKR Pro V1.2 Control Board runs about $60.

If you've listened to the 3D Printing Today podcast, you've heard hosts Andy Cohen and Whitney Potter endlessly discussing tool-changing and multi-material printing. Indeed, multi-material upgrades have been in the air for years, but simply didn't work very well (or, at least, weren't friendly for the average consumer), until now. There are actually a number of viable technologies in the wild these days, including dual extruders and systems with multiple nozzles to handle different materials. But the most successful so far seem to be multi-material filament handling systems like the Mosaic Palette 3 and Prusa's Multi Material Upgrade (currently MMU3).

The Mosaic device works by splicing together as many as four different filaments. It is platform-agnostic and can be had as either an add-on to any 1.75mm desktop 3D printer or as a dedicated, fully enclosed commercial printer that can handle as many as eight filaments for as much as $11,499. The Prusa offering, out of stock at the time of this writing, runs $299 and reflects lessons learned during the previous MMU generations. The Prusa MMU3 is compatible with the Original Prusa MK4 and Original Prusa i3 MK3S+.

This simple, cheap upgrade doesn't make your printer work better, but it makes you work better with your printer. Long in the domain of DIY mods, now commercially available runout sensors can, for a few bucks, prevent failed prints that waste an enormous amount of time. They also now come standard with many new printers.

The idea behind the filament runout sensor is simple. A basic switch determines mechanically when the filament is no longer present in the feed leading to the extruder. When this switch is thrown, an OctoPrint plugin handles the news by pausing the printer. OctoPrint is the easiest way to handle runouts, but the mechanism can also be directly wired to the control board. There are a few plugins available to handle the filament runout event, each with different capabilities and supporting different sensor configurations. Unfortunately, none appear to handle sending notifications (aside from desktop pop-ups), but notifications can be accomplished using webhooks and other methods.