I’m Not a Tinkerer, I’m a Writer: Why I’m Fed Up With Creality

I’ve had a lot of fun with 3D printing, and as with many things that I do, I went in boots and all. Originally I started because my wife was doing it, and to help her I got started as well. We made all the usual useless stuff like dragons and lizards, lots of sheep and dogs for the grandkids, even a nice vase or six.

We’ve got a couple of Ender 3 Neos, and a Voxelab Aquila (A Creality 3 clone). We also have a Creality Sonic Pad, which was quite handy because it let us send designs to the printer over wifi and monitor them from a desktop.

3D printing was, and still is, an interest my wife and I enjoy together, and we create stuff. The problem is that when things go wrong, they can go really wrong. I’m not just talking about stupid stuff like models sticking to the plate and prints that failed due to error

I get upset when there are serial software errors or machine failures, and you have to go looking for spare parts, and you discover that rather than updating the Ender as new improvements were made, they released whole new versions. Picking through those conversions to find the parts that you need is a proper pain, especially if the part that you buy isn’t the right one.

Then there’s the Sonic Pad itself! Released in September of 2022, it received updates until January 2024, and here we are in 2026 with nothing much since. And when the Sonic Pad goes wrong, you have to go searching for answers to the problem, which makes matters worse.

I recently spent most of Sunday night diagnosing problems with the thing when it started spitting out error codes. It meant a crash course in SSH (Secure Shell) for Windows to find the problem. Then, after I’d been through the wringer a couple of times, I worked out that the Sonic Pad/printer USB system wasn’t communicating. So I changed USB cords, did a thousand restarts of both units, and still no joy. The last thing I did was plug the USB cord into my computer, and bingo, the PC picked it up.

Now if I wrecked something by getting the filament stuck in the extruder, which I have done, and which I’ve learned to repair myself, even to the point of buying an extra one just in case, it’s my problem, not Creality’s, but these problems aren’t my fault.

I had been looking at upgrading to the Creality K2 Plus, but I’m thinking of looking elsewhere, given the maker’s history of similar models that don’t sit well together, and that aren’t supported after a year or two. As I said in the title, I’m a writer, not a tinkerer. It’s fine if people want to tinker, and I do enjoy fixing things, but when the fixing becomes the point of the hobby, rather than actually creating stuff? I don’t think so Creality!

Anyway, the question that I’m asking myself now are things like “do I really need something as big as a K2 Plus?” It really is getting beyond just a hobby machine, especially at the prices asked.

I had looked at the Bambu Lab range, but am a bit wary about being caught up in a system where I can’t make any mods at all, and if machines like the P2S are moving that way, I don’t want in. I must say that I do like the A2L from Bambu, but it is just another bed slinger at the end of the day.

Other machines that I am looking at presently are the QIDI Max4 and Kobra S1 Max, and again, the size of the community using them, plus the quality and openness of the firmware are questions that are worth asking. At the end of the day I want a machine that is going to be able to be upgraded over time, and still has more than eighteen months of support from the manufacturer.

For the present, I can live without the Sonic Pad if I have to. The Enders are still doing their job sometimes, and their simplicity does allow one to test projects and play with ideas, so they will still have a place in our workshop, just not as our main machines.

Update: We did end up buying another Creality machine, the Creality Hi. It’s come with its own story, but that can come in another article. We decided to donate the Voxelab and an old Ender 3, with a new motherboard and CR Touch kit for him to play with and learn from. The “Hi” was intended to introduce us to a multi color system, and provide a bridge between the Enders and a larger machine next year. We were expecting a relatively smooth transition. Did we get it? Find out soon!