Knowledge Transfer of the different kind
With the Ender 3 now being my second printer and one that comes out of the box with relatively carefully tuned profiles (Prusa Slicer comes with an experimental Ender 3 profile which works just fine) I am now in a much better position to actually debug the issues I have with my original Anet A8 based printer.
The problem I had with that printer is that of course, for such a heavily modded printer, no tuned profiles exist. So I tried a lot of different things and was successful only up to a certain point. Now, with the Ender 3 being available as a control subject, I can start messing with my other printers settings by comparing where the differences lie. So far, this has proven to be extremely successful.
The results are pretty satisfying and now I have two printers that seem to print extremely well and so now I can start treating one of them (The Ender 3) as my workhorse and can start to use the other one as a more experimental platform – In theory it should be much better at printing difficult filaments and I have a hardened steel nozzle lying around I need to mount on the Hemera so that I can start playing around with more abrasive filaments.
This suddenly became a lot more fun because I am seeing positive results where as before I was mostly stabbing at the void with tweaking random settings to no great effect. Carefully comparing profiles and finding the places I've ignored (or have simply gotten wrong before) was super helpful.