Easy z-offset adjustment for your 3D printer.

one of the most confusing thing for a lot of people when it comes to 3d printing is how to get the z offset just right the z offset is the distance between the printer nozzle and the bed so this is something that is quite difficult especially if you're a newcomer to 3d printing a lot of people get scared by the zed offset uh because they're afraid that they're going to scratch their bed or they're afraid that the nozzle will hit the bed and this is something that actually acts as a deterrent for a lot of people from getting into 3d printing i know that when i first was thinking of getting into this hobby i would watch youtube videos and it really scared me when i thought about the idea of having to level the bed and get the zed offset but the reality is that it's not that difficult leveling the bed getting the correct z offset is fairly easy if you do it manually or if you use a automatic bed leveling system such as the bl touch or the cr touch now in this video i'm going to show you how to get the z-offset just right with an automatic bed leveling system such as the bl touch or the sierra touch if you want to know how to do this stay tuned and i'll be right back [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so setting the z offset is tricky for a lot of people and if you have an automatic bed leveling system you still need to set the z offset just right it has to be done properly because otherwise your prints aren't going to turn out so an automatic bed leveling system like the bl touch or the cr touch they set the mesh of the bed but the automatic bed leveling system has absolutely no clue about the zed offset what it takes care of is an uneven bet but you always need to do the z offset manually so in the case of my printer as you can see here the distance right now from the bed is 10 millimeters so it's the distance of the abl probe from the bed and this does not take into consideration at all the z offset so maybe showing you exactly what i mean will help to clarify it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring down the probe and i'll show you what i'm talking about so now the probe is down and i'm going to slowly lower the z-axis and we'll see when the probe engages with the bit so i'm going to go to motion move axis moves that axis and i will move it at one millimeter increments so let's move it down and see what happens at zero here the probe should engage with the bit and it does however as you can see the nozzle is still very high off the bed there's a lot of distance between the nozzle and the bed which means that if you print this way the filament is just going to extrude in mid air so we need to close the gap between the bed and the nozzle and that will constitute your zed offset and that's what we're going to do now but first we need to heat the printer nozzle and the bed so that we can get it to be exactly the way it will be when we print so before we do that we need to re-home the the printer and we need to also heat the bed and the nozzle so we'll go to temperature and we'll heat the bed to 60 degrees okay so we'll heat the bed to 60 degrees and will heat the nozzle to 200 degrees now one thing that's going to be very important is to pull the filament out of the bowden tube because if there's any filament oozing from the nozzle it's going to get in the way of us doing a proper z-offset so we'll wait for the extruder and the bed to heat up to the right temperature and then i'm going to raise the gantry and i will pull the filament out of the bowden tube now here's the thing you don't have to pull it out all the way if you just pull it about to here so that it's in the bowden tube that way you don't have to reinsert the filament from scratch just put it up here and um that way uh it's not going to get in the way of the calibration of the z-axis when we're done that we can just put it back down to the extruder okay so now that the temperatures are where we want them to be we're just going to move the z-axis we'll move it up and we'll take out the filament as you can see there's a lot of filament here right and it's oozing out a little bit so i'm just going to remove the filament all right so it's up here right now and i'm going to clean off the filament that's in the nozzle here just gonna take that off okay there we go perfect and now we're ready to do the z offset alright so i'm going to have to home the printer again so now that the printer is homed we'll start doing the actual z offset calibration and uh for this you'll need a piece of paper i like to use a sticky note like this it's something that's worked for me but you can use any piece of paper really it'll work so we're going to put the piece of paper under the nozzle like so and then we're going to go to motion move axis and move z and we're going to move down in one millimeter increments so we know that at zero the nozzle is still way off the bit so we can quickly just move it down to zero and sure enough the nozzle is way off the bed so now we're going to go and move it down in increments that are a little uh smaller so we're going to go to 0.1 millimeter and we'll slowly move down 1 2 3 4 5 6 seven at eight at eight the nozzle is just touching the paper at nine okay at nine i can't even move the paper so this tells me that nine is too much so i need to go down further than eight but not quite as far as nine uh uh 0.9 millimeters so the way i'm going to do this is by just going to smaller increments so i'm going to go to 0.25 millimeters and then i will move down 0.25 and i can still move the paper and at 8.850 the paper is perfect so now i can move the paper but the nozzle is grabbing the paper which tells me that the z offset is .850 so basically i'm going to take that number i'm going to write it down and then i need to actually input that number into the z offset command which you will find here configuration pro probe z offset and this is where i need to put in minus eight five okay so minus eight five and that is my z offset so at that point once you've done that you need to save your settings so store settings and now your z offset is stored to eprom so we can now go home and we'll see that the z offset is um shown in the numbers that will be on the screen all right so we've got here 10.85 so the z offset has been set for the printer okay so the last thing that we need to do is print a test to confirm that the z offset has been set correctly and that the print works well across the entire bed typically this kind of a print would be one or two layers high and is merely meant to confirm that the bed is level that the automatic bed leveling mesh is working and that the z offset is the right distance from the bed to ensure that the print has the optimal amount of squish while it's easy to create a simple print on your own i went to thingiverse and downloaded this customizable bed level calibration test by tim fu while during the print it was evident that the layers were going down very well and that there was just the right amount of squish i really thought that this turned out very very well typically you want the layer lines to stick you do not want them to be too close together however or too far apart now before i go there's another thing that you should know when calibrating the z-offset you may run into a problem where you can't lower the z-axis below zero if this happens it means that the z-offset soft limit switch function is turned on in your firmware this is used as a safety measure to help protect your bed by preventing your nozzle from smashing into it so you'll need to turn this off with the m211 s0 g-code command before you can proceed with calibrating your z-offset the easiest way to do this is by using the g-code terminal in a program such as octoprint now given that my z-offset soft limit switch was on i needed to turn it off myself in any event this is all there is to setting your z offset properly i hope that this beginner tutorial has been helpful to you if it has i would really appreciate it if you subscribe to the channel and also click on the notification bell subscribing to the channel inspires me to make more video content and it costs you absolutely nothing so until next time happy printing and i'll see you soon bye [Applause] you

Channel: Create With Tech

Views: 69,771

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Id: r4BDIGixU7Y

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 26 2021