Perfect Prints

Perfect prints — start here

The Ender-3 V3 KE is a good printer out of the box. With an afternoon of calibration it's a great one. This page is the short, opinionated path from "it prints" to "it prints well" — in the order that actually matters. You don't need to do all of it at once; do it top-to-bottom and stop when your prints look the way you want.

Golden rule: change one thing at a time and print a test after each. If you tweak five things and the next print is worse, you won't know which one did it.

The order that matters

Calibrate from the machine outward — mechanical first, then the first layer, then motion quality, then the slicer. Doing it out of order means redoing work.

1. Mechanical basics (do this first, no excuses)

Belts tight, frame square, nozzle clean, bed not warped to hell. Software can't fix a loose belt or a wobbly gantry — it can only paper over it. Five minutes here saves hours later.

2. Z-offset + bed mesh — the first layer

This is 80% of whether a print "looks good." Get the nozzle-to-bed distance right, then let the printer map the bed so the first layer is even everywhere, not just in the middle.

• Live Z-offset baby-stepping is built into the screen (Tune tab, or tap the Z-offset while printing) — nudge in steps down to 0.001 mm while watching the first layer go down.
• Bed mesh maps the bed's hills and valleys so Z compensates across the whole plate.
• KAMP (adaptive meshing + purge) only meshes the area your print actually uses, and lays a smart purge line right before it — faster, and a clean nozzle for the first move.

→ Full walkthrough: Perfect first layer (Axis Twist + KAMP)

3. Axis Twist Compensation — when mesh isn't enough

Classic KE symptom: first layer is perfect in the middle but squished on one side and lifting on the other, left-to-right, and no amount of bed mesh fixes it. That's the X gantry being very slightly twisted, which tilts the probe. The on-screen Axis Twist wizard measures and corrects it.

→ Same page: Perfect first layer (Axis Twist + KAMP)

4. Input shaper — kill ringing/ghosting

Those faint echoes after sharp corners are vibration. Input shaping cancels it so you can print fast and clean. The KE has an onboard accelerometer, so you can measure and apply input shaping right from the screen's input-shaper tool. Your config may already hold shaper values (from a previous calibration — check Tune → Input Shaper, or look for [input_shaper] in your config), but running the calibration yourself dials it in for your machine. Redo it whenever you change an axis's moving hardware — see After a hardware change.

5. Pressure advance + flow + temps — the slicer side

Corner bulges, gaps, over/under-extrusion — these are dialed in your slicer and with pressure advance. This is the last 10%; don't start here.

6. Skew correction — for parts that must be square

If you print functional parts and they come out as slight parallelograms, Skew Correction squares them up: print a test square, measure three lengths with calipers, type them into Tune → Skew.

7. Quieter, cooler motors (optional, nice quality-of-life)

TMC Autotune computes better stepper-driver settings from your motors' specs — quieter, cooler, sometimes smoother. Doesn't change dimensions, just niceness.

"Which one fixes my problem?"

What you see	Most likely fix
First layer uneven middle-vs-edges	Bed mesh / KAMP
First layer squished one side, lifting the other (left↔right)	Axis Twist Compensation
Ghosting/echoes after corners	Input shaper (screen tool)
Bulging corners, blobs, gaps	Pressure advance + flow (slicer)
Parts not square / parallelogram	Skew Correction
Loud or hot steppers	TMC Autotune
Layer shift right after a pause/resume	Pause/resume fix
"I changed hardware — what do I redo?"	After a hardware change

Changed some hardware?

Don't blindly re-run everything. After a hardware change tells you exactly which calibrations a given change invalidates, which are safe to leave, and whether you need to "reset" anything (spoiler: almost never).