Recommended Immediate Upgrades to Ender 3 Pro with Upgrade Kit - Metal Extruder and Yellow Bed Springs

There are two upgrades that should be done immediately, upon assembly, with your Ender 3 Pro to help keep your bed level and avoid your extruder arm cracking, or the plastic extruder wearing down.

I personally installed both of these upgrades as soon as I purchased my printer - before I printed a single thing.

You can get everything in this Creality 3D Printer Upgrade Kit.

  • Yellow Bed Springs (in kit) - There are numerous posts in social media and forums about people having their bed constantly be out of level due to the weak springs that come with the Ender 3 Pro.  Replacement yellow springs are the #1 upgrade I see recommended.  You can get the yellow springs and the next upgrade (Metal Extruder) in this kit.   The yellow springs will help keep your bed level, and it's easier to just put them on when you are first assembling the printer.  Bed leveling and first layer adhesion are two things you'll hear about over and over: you have to get these right in order to print anything.
  • Metal Extruder (in kit) - Look on Reddit, Facebook groups, etc and you'll find tons of posts of folks whose plastic extruder arm cracked.   This is the second most common upgrade recommended and by far the most common piece that breaks.  Why not wait until it cracks? Well first of all, when you are first assembling the printer, the stepper extruder motor 1) is not yet installed, 2) it's not hooked up to the bowden tube or plugged into 3) the motherboard - and so it's easy to swap out the extruder before you assemble it. You can do it after the fact as well, but it's just a little more work - and you may risk a bad print if the arm cracks in between.  It will also cause you a lot of headache troubleshooting, because sometimes the arm has a hairline crack that's only visible on the bottom after disassembly.  It's included in the extruder and yellow springs kit, you can search for other versions as well. Note that I have seen posts of fake metal extruders where the filament has worn the extruder down.   
  • Bowden tube to Capricorn Tube Upgrade (in kit) - Finally, in the same kit is a tube to upgrade the bowden tube. This is an upgrade that is not necessary to do unless you are printing with higher temperature filaments than PLA.  However, as long as you're putting things together the first time anyway, it's a good upgrade to make.  This is one you can put off a little if you want as well.

    • These are the upgrades I 100% recommend you do immediately.  In addition, if you do not have other SD cards, I strongly recommend you buy some additional 32 GB SD cards and a different USB SD Card Reader

    The Micro SD Card is a common point of failure and frustration. It seems that the printers ship with very poor quality Micro SD cards. Mine died in 2 weeks. I've seen reports on Facebook of folks having trouble their very first day. If yours is working fine for now, I would still go ahead and buy new ones soon - because once your prints start randomly failing, or your printer starts having random issues, it will be very frustrating - and the fix is less than $10.

    Finally, the Micro SD Card reader that comes with the printer itself if you do use it, do not leave it plugged in.  It seems to overheat and melt - I've seen at least 3 posts of folks who have had melted/burnt USB Micro SD Card Readers that came with their printers.  Personally I have not had this issue, but when I bought new Micro SD Cards, they came with a larger SD Card adapter.   I use that and plug it into the SD slot in my laptop now to avoid that risk.

    More Accessories and Upgrades

    After that, if you'd like to go further, here are two more lists:

    • Accessories for Ender 3 Pro - If quality of life is important for you from Day 1, and you want to maximize your chance of easy, high quality prints - I recommend picking up the CR Touch and PEI Surface. You can see those two and more discussed on that page
    • Ender 3 Pro Longer Term Upgrades - There are tons of upgrades you can make to your printer - to make it much quieter, try different nozzle sizes and upgrade other pieces of hardware to make it print more consistently or at higher temperatures.  These are more involved upgrades, and generally speaking if this is your first printer, I highly recommend you don't do them right away - have some fun printing first and then come back to this list!

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