 Today, I'm going to show you how to take a printer that's printing like this, and make it print like this. My name's Jim, and this is the Edge of Tech. There are many things that you're probably going to end up tuning when you buy a 3D printer. But one of the most common things to tune are the E-steps. But what are E-steps, and why the heck would you want to tune them? So E-steps, also known as extruder steps, are the number of steps the extruder motor needs to take to extrude one millimeter of filament. A few reasons you may want to calibrate your E-steps is that you change anything at all on the extruder. You put a brand new one on, a new spring, an all-metal extruder, anything at all that changes on the extruder, you want to calibrate your E-steps. Another reason is that your parts are coming out very under extruded. That will lead to bad prints and inconsistencies across all of your parts. Many times, calibrating E-steps is a very easy update. So today, I'm going to show you how to do that quick, let's do it. First turn your printer on, go to temperature, and make sure your nozzle is set to 200 degrees Celsius. While we're waiting for the printer to heat up, we're going to jump on over to the computer and go to TH3DStudio.com forward slash E-step dash calculator. There will be a link in the description below, but this site really makes doing your E-steps super easy. It even gives you instructions if you want to do it from another method. But we're going to use this site, it makes it really easy to do. For the next step, you're going to need a millimeter ruler or a caliper, I like these a lot, and a side cutter. Now what you want to do is pull the clip, if you have one, disconnect the boden tube from the extruder, just like that. So now we're disconnected. Then push some filament through the extruder just so it comes out of the coupler like that. Take your snips and cut it off as flat as you can against there, like that. Now we need to get the current E-steps of the machine. In this video I'm going to show you how to do that on the control panel by going to info, configuration, advanced settings, steps, and right down here you'll see E-steps is 92.6. You want to write that down right now. There is another video I'll link it above that you can do this plugging into the printer to a computer. But for now we're going to do it off the control panel. Now that we have our current E-steps, we want to put it in number one. So we have 92.6 is what the current E-steps on the screen were. The next thing we need to do is tell the printer to extrude 100 millimeters. You can do that by going to motion, move access, extruder, go to 10 millimeters and move this up to 100 just like that. Once you do that the filament should be coming out of the extruder just like this. Once the filament is done extruding out of the Bowdoin coupler, take your flush cuts and cut it flush as you can just like we did before. So the next thing you want to do is flatten your filament as much as you possibly can to make sure it's straight. Then you can grab your millimeter ruler and put it up against there and see what you got like that. And you can push it up against the straight edge that helps a lot. So you can actually see what we got there. Or if you have a caliper you can put the caliper open to 100 millimeters and then you want to measure it between the two larger pieces here like that. So if I was doing this it's kind of hard to do on a film but I would do this and then I would squeeze it in to see what I actually got. And it looks like this is actually short right from the factory. So it's kind of hard to see there but it looks like I have about 95.9. I'm going to call that 96 millimeters instead of 100. So we definitely need to get that fixed. If the measured E-steps are any different than 100 millimeters we need to enter that in number three. In our case I measured a couple times and I ran a couple different lengths of filament and mine actually came out to 95.8. I was going to round it up to 96 but I think I'm going to leave it 95.8. So once you have that number in here 95.8 go ahead and hit enter and scroll down a little bit and this will actually tell you what your new E-step value needs to be. In our case it needs to be 96.66. You can take this put it into the... Now we're going to take this over to the control panel on the printer enter in 96.66 and save that. If you're getting value out of today's video please smash that like button. It really helps get the video pushed out more into the community and hopefully we can help them too. Now back to it. Just a quick note it's always good to document your brand new E-steps somewhere just in case the printer doesn't save it and you don't remember what that number is. And then if you want to test it all you have to do is turn the printer off let it sit for maybe 5-10 seconds turn the printer back on and check your E-steps to make sure it's saved. So we powered the printer off for about 5 or 10 seconds we turned it back on now I'm going to go down and just go to configuration advanced settings E-steps and make sure that it says 96.66. Now that we've updated the E-steps you can pull your filament back out of the printer and reconnect your boat and coupler and put your C-clip in make sure everything's tight and that's it. Now you're on the road to great prints and you've officially calibrated your E-steps. All said and done this shouldn't take you very long once you get the hotend heated up and yes you do have to heat up the hotend otherwise the extruder won't turn and push out that filament so don't forget that part. Let me know in the comments below if you plan to upgrade your E-steps or if you've done this before. Also let me know what you think of that TH3D E-steps calculator I think it makes it super easy to do. It's always great working on getting your printer dialed in but you want to check out this video right here if you want to go even further and get some amazing prints.