www-gem

Great idea. Thanks for sharing. Great choice of laptop BTW ;)

My personal go to brand for all my filaments is polymaker. They have a wide range of products to meet all specific needs at a right price. So far I’ve tried PLA, carbon fiber reinforced PLA, and PETG.

For PLA, I like their poly terra filaments because these are bioplastic, in recycled cardboard box and spool, easy to paint, and easier to sand compared to regular PLA.

Enjoy the new rabbit hole you just fall into :) 3D printing is really nice and can be helpful sometimes too. I’ve printed some good stuff from Thingiverse or Printables before starting to create my own simple designs. You save money at some point and you have more fun than going to the store or ordering online.

It’s also great to be able to say: it’s not perfect but I made it ;)

Glad it can be useful.

I don’t understand very well the purpose of the bed lock: it basically avoid the “calibration screws” to accidentally “unscrew” while the printer is working?

You are correct. The screws will move a little bit when you print which will result in your bed being unleveled after few prints and you’ll have to recalibrate your printer. This hack will eliminate that so you will have to level your bed less frequently (because as others said, leveling your bed will be needed for other reasons).

I will not reiterate the great things others have said but I’ve used old windows to create an enclosure for my printer and it definitely helps with the prints. Also since you’re a new user and have an Ender 3, I would recommend you to take a look at thingiverse.com and printables.com - if not already done - for great tweaks to protect your printer but also to find great things to print.

For your printer, you may be interested in cable guides, filament guide, spool roller, fan duct, bed lock (they will keep your bed in place so you will not have to deal with bed tramming anymore before your bed leveling sessions)…

Finally, although a little bit off topic, if you get bored to walk to your printer to watch the prints and would like to add some level of safety in case anything goes wrong I would highly recommend considering octoprint.