These days, the world of 3D printers has no shortage of good budget options. The results from these printers are more than usable, but there's still a clear difference between a budget model and something more premium.
However, in a lot of cases, you can narrow that gap significantly by upgrading some components, with the first and most impactful one being the heatbreak.
Why cheap 3D printers feel worse than they are
In order to cut costs, many cheap 3D printers ship with a PTFE-lined hotend. These are cheap to make, easy to assemble, and "fine" for PLA at moderate temperatures. The problem is that PTFE degrades with time and use, and although it's thermally stable up to about 260C, above that it will degrade faster and release toxic fumes. it also has a tendency to shrink and warp. Even when it's working as intended, it limits flow rate and how fast you can print.
The degradation of that lining can manifest as heat creep, partial or full clogging, and inconsistent extrusion . Your filament can start sticking where it shouldn't and retraction doesn't work the way you expect. With particularly long prints, the odds of something going wrong increases.
All of these things are exactly what happened to me and my Creality K1 Max, which started out working flawlessly, but after a few hundreds hours of printing began clogging constantly . I spend more time cleaning out the heatbreak than actually printing, or it at least felt like that. The printer shipped with a little PTFE tube feading into the hot end, and this was usually where the clog happened.
Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek
Unfortunately in this specific case I couldn't just replace this with metal, but Creality did release a hotend upgrade kit that included an all-metal heat break from the extruder to the nozzle.
Creality
It wasn't that expensive and did the trick, but with many printers you can simply get a cheap drop-in metal heatbreak instead.
The upgrade that changes everything
Cheap printers spend most of their build budget on getting the motion system right, which is to say that the bones of these printers are often quite good. So, by upgrading the heatbreak, you're building on top of a solid foundation for a better end-result.
When I installed a heatbreak and hotend in my K1 Max all of these issues went away. Not a single clog over hundreds of print hours following the upgrade. This was literally the only thing I changed. I haven't even seen the inside of the hotend since making the switch.
My Centauri Carbon, despite being one of the cheapest printers on the market, ships with a metal heatbreak as standard. Since it's designed to print higher-temperature filaments, a PTFE heatbreak wouldn't be suitable. The upshot of this is that I still haven't had a single clog on this printer over something like 500 hours of printing, though I probably will need a new nozzle sooner rather than later.
How this tiny part makes prints look shockingly better
So why does this help so much? Well, once the thermal zone is under control, many of these mysterious problems go way because you have a smooth and consistent path from extruder to nozzle. Metal heatbreaks allow for precise control over where heat should and should not go, and temperature control is essential for the extrusion process.
Now retraction in reality acts the way the slicer simulated it should under ideal conditions. Layer lines become sharper thanks to consistent and predictable extrusion. Long prints left overnight don't fail because the filament isn't softening and hardening in the wrong place. I can't describe how annoying it is to check in on a print only to see that the printer has been printing air for the past few hours.
Why this should be every beginner's first real mod
If your printer uses a PTFE heatbreak, then it's worth replacing it (or the whole hot-end) with a new metal heatbreak. Depending on what's possible for the model in question. This is cheap and easy to do, and in most cases you just need to run a new automated calibration and tuning, so your printer can learn the thermal properties of the new parts.
Of course, if there's nothing wrong with your prints and you're happy with how it runs, you should leave it alone. But if you've been pulling your hair our over mysterious issues that no amount of fiddling with settings can resolve—this is the prime suspect.
