At microcenter, open the box and get one of their inland filament $10 off coupons and use it to buy the filament (the black island PLA performed better with the hot head at 215C temperature).
I bought an enders 3 pro during Thanksgiving. Super cool gift to give. Learning about the possible upgrades is part of the experience. I would skip on giving anything else but the printer and filament.
I still use the stock bed, that I leveled and compensated the small warp in the middle/center of the bed with 3-4 small stacked sheets of aluminum foil. Spent around 2-4h on assembly and fine tuning, and several hours of printing without problems.
After 2-3 weeks and the need to make small adjustments to the bed level to keep it golden, I bought the better springs (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GHNVNVF/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_06BTGBGGSXDQS3P17JBF). I have not adjusted the bed level since (2 weeks and no problems).
Last tip: don't forget to heat the bed before trying to adjust the level (wait for 5-10min for the temperature to reach equilibrium). Once, I adjusted it cold. This was the cause for my first failed print.
Nice gift choice!
Okay - you potentially have other issues though. Here’s my guesses:
1) There’s something else causing resistance at the hotend - either partially clogged nozzle or poorly seated nozzle with a big melted filament goober inside the hotend. This added resistance is causing your extruder to chew up your filament - and leaving a clog in the tube itself.
2) Your extruder arm has a crack in it, and as a result is not putting enough pressure on the filament and is instead grinding it, and leaving a clogged up mess in your tube.
If it were me, and I had to come and fix your printer - I would come with this BMG Clone extruder and this kit of Capricorn tubing and nozzles (I'd also throw in yellow bed springs - it's not needed for your situation, but it's a quality of life improvement that everyone should have). When installing the tubing in the hotend - be sure you have the tubing properly seated and use a new coupler on the hotend.
With these things - your printer would not only be fixed, it would increase the reliability so you aren’t fixing and tweaking things constantly.