re: 3D printer. Ender 5 pro or something else?

I had an Ender 3 for a few months. I had a product to print and sell and it did pretty good printing about 50 parts (400 hours), then it gradually started shitting the bed. The extruder would slip and the head would clog all the time, and it would randomly fill the display with Chinese symbols or flash “thermal runaway”.

I replaced and upgraded too many parts to count before it wasn’t worth it anymore. Made decent money with it, but you get what you pay for with these. If I did it again, I would get a Prusa or Dremel.

For real......I didn't get this printer to work flawless out of the box and expect it can be a production printer. That's kinda retarded for my 350 dollars printer much less his 189 printer.

I've only been printing with the black Overture PLA I got from Amazon and some orange eSun PLA+. The only thing I changed between the 2 was make the nozzle temp higher for the PLA+ per the temps listed on the roll. So far results have been great. Still need to fine tune somethings and get the BLTouch to probe faster (takes like 8 min to probe), but it's nice not having to frick with the bed at all. I haven't tried PETG or ABS yet.

Z0 is if the nozzle was touching the bed. The offset is where it is going to lay the plastic. Usually the bed (the surface you are actually going to print on) is leveled with some kind of gap (paper, card, etc.) and then users adjust the z-offset during print using the knobs under the bed until the desired squish is achieved.

The BLTouch makes this process pretty easy as you only calculate the difference between the probe tip and nozzle tip once, start a print, double click the knob under the LCD and fine tune the z-offset until you get the right squish.

gotcha, shouldnt be too difficult. my bed is level just need to zero the nozzle then set the offsets for the specific profiles

Yep.

That's right. I wouldn't have it actually touch the glass or whatever surface you are printing on when you home as there is no real benefit to the machine knowing precisely where the nozzle touches the surface of the bed is and you run the risk of clogging the nozzle mashing it into the bed. The point where the nozzle touches the bed is not the "real Z0" you are concerned with anyway. This is why you are using a z-offset, to tell the machine where you want Z0 to be. Think of it this way, in your drawing the distance between A and B is not an empty space when you are printing, it is where the filament goes and the filament extends from the nozzle and is touching the bed, therefore that is Z0.

I think a better practice is to set it up so that when you home the machine X goes to 0, Y goes to 0 and Z goes to a sheet of paper's distance above whatever surface you are printing on, metal, glass, etc. From that point and through experience you should know that PLA likes printing at this z-offset, PETG likes printing at this z-offset, etc. and set that in your machine when you go to do a print.

I haven't had any extrusion issues yet. I did swap the extruder out for the metal version and added the Capricorn tubing and fittings. I also haven't printed anywhere near that temp.

Have you printed since the mishap with the extruder? I'd check the PTFE tube in the hot end to make sure it isn't deforming at that temp or has moved up creating a gap between the tube and the nozzle.