Let's try and fix this free broken 3D printer I found on marketplace.

Let's try and fix this free broken 3D printer I found on marketplace. I think I already know what's wrong with it based on this description, so let's go get it. I picked it up for free when I knew I could fix it, so I offered to trade him this Alexa for it, which he graciously accepted. The guy told me he'd leave it in his farm stand, which I found hilarious, and lo and behold, there it was. At first glance, it looks like a really nice Ender 3 clone. He also had this box of parts for it. Now we just gotta get this thing home and get it up and running. I'm really liking what I see here, and somebody really loved this thing at one point in its life. Kind of upgrades, bed leveling probe, aftermarket extruder, somebody printed this little tool caddy. Plug it in here to make sure the electronics work. Okay, it powers on. We got our box of parts here. We got another aftermarket extruder. Before I even touch it, let me tell you what I'm almost certain is wrong with it or not wrong with it. So what the guy was saying in the listing is that it wasn't able to make a good first layer. This is almost always user error. If you don't know the way a 3D printer works, it's very similar to a glue gun where it lays out melted layers of plastic really thinly and really precisely onto the print bed. Now, if the print bed that the plastic is being put onto isn't level or it's not at the right height, what the 3D printer is going to do is it's going to be trying to dispense plastic in the air, not directly down in the bed. And when it does that, there's fragments of plastic everywhere, it gets all wavy and it just doesn't work. An unlevel bed is like the number one problem of all 3D printers. Even worse is this aftermarket part they installed. This is a bed leveling probe. What this does is goes down and feels what the height of the bed is, so you don't have to manually level it. I'm assuming this guy bought this printer, didn't know how to set that up, maybe tried leveling the bed automatically, got frustrated and canned it. So I'm not even going to try anything, I'm just going to hard reset the printer and see if we can get it to work. So we're just going to pop over the settings here and restore defaults. Then just uploaded a test print file on this SD card. Now I'm just going to quickly test all the motors, make sure it's moving freely as it should. We're going to preheat the extruder, make sure it doesn't have any problems heating up. Warmed up nice and hot, I'm just going to feed some filament into it now. Crucially, I'm going to probe the bed and set the Z offset. I think this is what they missed last time. See how that little finger goes down and feels where the bed is? That's not a stock part and they probably read the stock manual, didn't do this and had an awful time. Everything seems to be working fine independently. I have 99% certainty this thing is going to print just fine, so let's queue up a file and find out. That is a pretty dang good print and a working printer, if you ask me. I'm going to clean this thing up a little bit further and find someone to give it to, somebody local in my community, maybe a maker space, library, or just somebody looking to get in the hobby. Hope you guys learned something or were at least slightly entertained, and I'll catch you in the next video.