I have an Ender 3 S1 that I use every couple of months at this point because it’s just such a pain to use. I have to adjust the bed tramming and z offset and run auto bed leveling for every single print and often times that’s still not good enough.
It will often take 30+ minutes just to get the first layer going down successfully.
Is this a me problem or did I lose the creality lottery?
When you’re calibrating z-offset you’re noting the difference between the probe and the nozzle.
So for that you want the nozzle heated but not the bed. Not that it hurts to have the bed heated. It’s just not needed.
Because the way you get the z offset is to find the point where probe triggers… and then find where the nozzle touches that same point.
For bed tramming you’ll want the bed heated. Although unless it’s badly warped you can get by without it and ABL should account for that anyway. What you want here is for the nozzle to be the same distance from the bed when it moves over it.
Here’s a series of comments I made for someone who was fighting issues that you might find helpful. They’re running Klipper but the mechanical adjustment and concepts should be the same.
https://lemmy.world/comment/7904011
Feel free to ask if you have any questions. I suspect you’re dealing with mostly mechanical variations which is common enough without dealing with the QA lottery you get with some printers like the ender 3