Fixing the BIGGEST issue with Resin 3D Printers BEST upgrade

magnetic Flex plates are the single greatest upgrade you can get for a resin 3D printer they don't break the B they're straightforward to install and they make your life so much easier when it comes to handling your prints and working with your printer so much so in fact that they're almost a no-brainer and when I'm buying any resin printer for myself I always factor in the cost of this upgrade into my buying decision Flex plates make it effortless and fast to remove your prints you literally just Flex the spring steel plate and the parts just pop right off they spare you from potentially damaging your prints when removing them the traditional way or from sending parts flying across the room you get to leave the build plate installed in the machine at all times this has two major benefits it massively reduces the amount of resin lost as any resin clinging to or at rest on your build plate stays there for the next print the other benefit of always leaving it in there is you are far less likely to accidentally knock your build plate out of level when removing the prints so magnetic Flex plates have a lot of of upside there is however one major flaw Flex plates simply do not scale well to bigger build plates and will almost always fall off it might hold for a month maybe three you might even get half a year out of it but sooner or later physics is going to win and that magnet is coming off now if you have a 6-in build plate or less in my experience if installed correctly a magnetic flex plate will never fail you and will last year after year through true even the most demanding of Prints but go beyond that and it gets way less certain very quickly now it's possible that new fet materials like ENFP with lower adhesion can help mitigate this and the new Tilt release mechanisms like we see on the satin four printer from igu especially I think could help reduce those peel forces and ensure that that magnet stays stuck for a lot longer but I'm curious is there a more shorefire way to achieve our goals here can we dare I say permanently affix a magnet to a 3D printer's build plate how about multiple magnets in this video I'm going to attempt to fix this issue hopefully in a way that's easily reproduced on any resin 3D printer but first I think it's important that we go over everything we need to know in order to have the best possible printing experience with a magnetic flex plate so let's start there Step One go with a reputable brand the very first flex plate I ever used was a wham bam flex plate and it is still going strong in my any cubic Photon s 3D printer these Flex plates have generously been sent to me by W bam for the purposes of this video and for use on this channel so thank you wham bam and there's going to be links to wh bam down in the video description I do recommend you check them out I personally vouch for this company and their products it's good now having said that though uh if like me you're in Australia it can be a bit harder to come buy wham bam magnetic Flex plates uh every time I try and get one they're always out of stock uh so I have had great success using soille magnetic Flex plates as well so that could be another option for you if you can't find wham bam look for soal ones those are nice quality also wham bam so success with flex plates is pretty straightforward uh and it kind of just revolves around the proper installation of the thing and the first thing you want to do when it comes to installing a magnetic flex plate is basically rough up your build surface and clean it really really well with 99% alcohol this is methylated Spirits this works great if you're going to use IPA 99% don't out so we're going to get our sandpaper but first things first actually we're going to put on some fresh gloves okay so to do this just going to take our sandpaper take our build plate and then we're just going to sort of sand it gently in a circular motion and what this is going to do is it's going to Mar up this surface with all these fine little scratches and this is just going to help give that magnet the best possible chance of adhering to the build plate now after you've done a pass of sanding you want to take your alcohol spray it down and grab some clean paper towels has to be paper towels don't use like shop rag or anything like that paper towels clean fresh wipe it down and then you want to go again okay and again just going to spray that down with alcohol fresh paper towels and so it might be difficult to see but hopefully you can see that we've added a ton of little scratches to this build plate and with the alcohol cleaning it should be perfectly clear of any debris and in particular any oils and for good measure I'm going to repeat this one more time I'm going to maybe do a bit of a wet sanding so I'll spray it with alcohol grab my sandpaper okay that should be pretty good see that there nice spray that down fresh paper towels and I'm going to do that again up here really want to make sure this thing is absolutely clean and now that is about as good as we're going to get it that's ready for a magnet if you're going to be installing a flex plate on a build plate that you've already been printing with so even though this has been cleaned pretty well there might still be some residue it might be a good idea to First just give the build plate a soak in alcohol maybe for like 30 minutes or an hour and then a quick wipe down before you do those sanding and cleaning steps that I just showed you and by the way this is like the perfect size build plate for a flex plate if you put a flex plate on this and you and you install it right it'll never come off in my experience your mileage may vary so this bit is a little bit fiddly wham bam don't say anything about removing the metal Flex sheet so I'm going to leave it on there and I'm pretty sure in the past every time I've installed one of these I've always left that on now you can remove this whole thing at once and install it that way but then you got to line it up perfect and I've done it and you can get away with it um but the the way that wham bam recommend you do it is you peel it a little bit and then apply it and then kind of like pull the paper as you roll the plate on so just like that we're going to peel that back a bit and then I'm going to just fold it there this might be easier if we do it at the very edge of the table here maybe like this here we go that looks pretty good nice and what you want to do is you want to apply some pressure to it and what I like to do is if you've got them uh grab some clamps like this and just use these to apply a little bit of pressure to the thing so I'm going to grab a board or something one sec here we go so here's a piece of Timber I'm going to put my build plate down on this and then using my clamps just squeeze that down there we go and now the most painful step we have to wait for 72 hours before we put this into the machine and print with it so just going to go put this aside and we'll pick this up in a couple of days set a timer for 72 hours second timer for 3 days and that's starting now you may need to install a spacer in your 3D printer equal to the thickness of the magnetic flex plate system that we've just installed now this is pretty straightforward and I have recorded a whole segment on it with some creative ideas for you on how to tackle this issue yourself however for the sake of brevity I'm going to exclude that from this video and link to it down below in the video description where you can check that out separately if you're interested so really from here on out what it's going to come down to for ensuring the longevity of your flex plate as much as possible is going to be to minimize the amount of exposure that that magnet has to any sort of harsh solvents like IPA methylated Spirits or even resin so that means don't go stick in your whole build plate now into a pool of alcohol to wash it remove the flex plate from the build plate and just leave the build plate in the machine and like I touched on before this also gives you the benefit of wasting less resin and ensuring your build plate stays level for longer so just remove the flex plate and then what I like to do before I reinstall my flex plate is just wipe down the visible surfaces of the magnet wipe down the flex plate and then lining up the front edge of the flex plate with the front edge of the build plate and magnet you can really easily just snap it back into place ready for your next print you may also want to sand your flex plate with 400 grit sandpaper if you find that prints aren't sticking very well or even not sticking at all and that can help rather than having to boost up your bottom layer exposure a whole bunch one little caveat about these Flex plates that I only recently just discovered for myself is that when you use them with flexible resins you actually kind of lose the benefit of the flex plate itself so if you're printing with a tough or flexible resin something more durable than your typical resins uh you might want to just pass on this upgrade but I just thought that would be a useful little piece of information to include here before we proceed to the final boss battle for this video and that is what do you do when one of these magnets has failed you and has begun to peel away so here's the plan I've got two types of strong magnets and these are readily available on Amazon and eBay and I'll leave links to these ones in the video description uh but these are the Search terms you want to use to find them and there should be plent of options so this is the first one I got and the reason I chose these is because this actually unscrews revealing a threaded hole so what we could do on our build plate once we remove this old magnet is drill some holes into it that this is going to fit into drop it in and then bolt it from the back and that should be pretty damn secure and if we do six of these say three along both edges and three down the middle hopefully that will be enough to hold on to that steel sh against the peel forces of our print and if that works that's fantastic and the other type of magnet that I'd like to possibly try is this one and I think these are actually a bit stronger I've got a few more of them but these ones here have a counter sunk hole in the middle and so we could pop a bolt through there have it go all the way through the build plate and then secure it with a nut on the back so the first problem that we have to solve actually is going to be when we drill this getting that drill hole to be perfectly straight up and down well actually maybe not see I was thinking about this and I was thinking like oh God we're going to have to buy like a drill press it's like a couple hundred bucks at least probably but actually the more I think about it because we're passing a bolt all the way through and securing it from the other side that hole can have some room for error it doesn't have to be perfectly straight up and down if it's like a tiny bit skewed or whatever that's fine in theory so really first things first is uh we got to remove this old magnet oh my God okay nice so here's the problem we're going to have I've just found some Flathead bolts these are M4 and these are a perfect fit for these so if I drop that in there it sits below the surface which is perfect right but it's only sticking through that much which if we look at our build plate ain't going to cut it in the middle and it'll only just reach on the edges so I think what we're going to have to do is try our luck with these because these are threaded for whatever pitch these generic M5 bolts are and I've got these in all sorts of different lengths and the fact that these threads reach through most of the build plate already if not all of it this should be a pretty sweet solution ah although hang on no because if that's poking all the way way through here and I then put a bolt in there it's going to have that much play options options what do we do so maybe we should go with this option but I'll have to make a run to the hardware store tomorrow and see if I can get M4 with a flath head that's longer cuz the only other option I don't like it is to not drill all the way through and instead or you know drill all the way through but then use a tap and die set to actually add threads to those holes I'm not super keen on that idea i' prefer to secure these magnets from the back with some nuts but uh yeah interesting so let's let's come back to this tomorrow so I think I've got two options I can saw these off make them shorter which I'm not super crazy about use these bolts and then after I drill through the build plate counter sync with larger holes I don't think I'll have to do it on the edges but for the center I could counter syn with a larger drill bit so that that way the nut can sink down into the build plate I think that might be my best option okay so first thing that I want to do is line up all of these where they need to go and then the next thing to do is going to be to Mark each of these holes so we're going to go in with a 2 mm drill bit first I wonder is can I secure this down better so there we go we got that clamped down that should work pretty well hopefully God damn that's noisy good thing is the Metal's super soft so it's easy to [Music] drill okay that was a 2 mm I'm now going to step up to three and then I think we'll finish it 4.5 and then 4.5 okay so that's the drilling done and now those bolts should fit comfortably through these holes yes excellent now to clean up this horrible mess okay so there's all of our holes and they're looking pretty good so all that's left to do is yeah I got to add counter syncs to the three in the middle now to do this one in the very middle I'm going to have to remove this bracket thingy but uh yeah that should be pretty straightforward then we can put this all together and see how it goes unfor Al I haven't really quite got the right tool for the job here I think the best drill bit would be one of those what are they called forcer drill bits or whatever but uh we're just going to have to make do with this and try our best not to go all the way through okay will that work I wonder oh you see that it's in there all right quick test fit yes okay yeah that's totally going to work all right sick that should be plenty before I reinstall this plate I'll install our Center magnet first yes it's grabbing a that's fantastic we're in business reattach this top plate won't tighten these all the way down yet this is our leveling mechanism now more magnets M4 bolt in there and I'm grateful that these are grabbing and that the M4 bolts not just spinning around in there that makes this install easier but uh yeah wow that's two let's keep going ooh that one is sitting a tiny bit proud which shouldn't matter there should be clearance in the vet but still that's not great nice that's how that's going to work for the rest of them nice and simple you know what I'm a freaking idiot I miscounted my screws and I think I'm actually short by one that one's going to be okay but then okay uh I've got a counter sync one by the tiniest amount oh that's kind of annoying hopefully I don't go all the way through we did it look at this monstrosity hell yes okay where's my flex plate here we go you ready oh my God okay it's on there and uh it's uh it seems to be holding quite well yeah hell yes okay we're going to have to install a new spacer in the machine I think but uh God we're just about ready okay so it looks like we have added about 7 and 1/2 to 8 mm I'm going to call that eight and I'm going to figure out an 8 mm spacer and add that to the printer and then we'll update the settings in the slicer and then we should be good to go so there's our old spacer and if I just rescale that in the slicer like that that should now be perfect for our modified magnet system let's give this a go so all we got to do is just modify the profile for our printer and just subtract the thickness of our new flex plate system from our total Z height uh so right now this is reading a default of 245 so our new value is going to be 237 and so that's important because now we will know when we're slicing stuff what our limit is in terms of Z height right so the first thing we're going to print is our rafts of adhesion and we're just going to make sure that we have in fact leveled the machine correctly and hopefully this prints this will also tell us as well if this is a complete waste of time if our magnets aren't strong enough or if we're onto something here and then we can try some other prints and really put these magnets to the test and now I just want to check real quick there's enough clearance in there oh yeah there's plenty plenty of room for our new Frankenstein build plate all right so get that on tighten it down connect our power Photon this machine's seing some so the uh the screen's a bit dull that's okay here we go good stuff okay now we just got to tighten that up and we should be golden how exciting is this got a bit of a Frankenstein resin here to try out uh this is essentially a 50/50 roughly 5050 mix of any cubic highspeed resin and any Cubix tough resin Ultra cuz I was a dummy and threw away my tough resin Ultra bottle so we'll see how this stuff goes who knows might be really awesome God that's going to be a to clean let's have a look okay well it's still on there and as expected it has pulled a ton of resin on top of it uh so that is unfortunately one of the trade-offs here but I'm dying to know are our adhesion rafts present on this flex plate no they are not oh no where did we go wrong I actually don't even feel them on the FP uh so I think this LCD might be dead turns out yes that LC CD is in fact dead luckily though I did have a replacement on hand ready to go are you serious it's the right size but it uses a different connection what the apparently there should be an adapter board and cable but I searched high and low and could not find anything in desperation I turned to the internet to see if I could order a new LCD kit locally and get it here quickly but all the options are international with long lead times I even tried scouring used marketplaces to see if I could score a deal on another mono x no luck there either though and at this point I'm getting desperate this might be crazy that I just noticed something here so on this Carriage we've got bolts at 0 25 75 and 100 by 25 Saturn 3 0 25 75 and 100 by 25 they're the same I wonder can it be done surely not surely you couldn't take the zc carriage and build plate of an any cubic mono X and Transplant it into an eligo satin 3 there's no way that could work but I've come this far already and I'm dying to know if this flex plate mod has worked and I not about to shelf this project for a month while I wait for a new LCD kit to get here oh my God oh it's perfect I don't need to do anything else holy okay uh glove glove glove glove going to tighten this up and level it oh my God is it that simple here we go this will be the real test now does this magnetic flex plate upgrade work let's find out okay I heard something and I see flex plate place your bets do we have rafts oh that's horrifically messy holy okay yeah we've got rafts that's amazing all right let's try and do the flex plate thing yes okay oh it's drippy definitely messier than my normal flex plate workflow look at this we got them all except for that one I'm pretty sure if we increase burning time we'll get that one too I'm now going to try and print something big and really push this thing to the limits and we'll see what we get something I want to keep an eye out for as well is layer shift so just like if you can imagine the build plate separating from the magnet slightly and then reattaching but shifting ever so slightly so you could experience layer shift that way but these look okay these are looking pretty promising all right so I've just sliced up the Epic speeder model from Dungeons and dreadnots and we will know pretty quickly if this build plate can handle it or not because it's going to be that raft where it fails if it fails going in [Music] look I've been trying to swear less but holy this shouldn't have worked look at this this is absolutely insane let's grab it hell yes that is not bad at all okay can we do it can we do the puppet yes oh it's perfect oh [Applause] stoked okay let's get this cleaned up and then I think we'll do one more print and we'll really push it to its limits and then I think we'll call this video done and so the way to do this I believe is going to be to quickly wipe these magnets down and so now when I install this flex plate it should not Splash anything oh that's perfect stoked stoked stoked stoked stoked stoked stoked stoked stoked bit of a torture test here 9 40 mm bases printed directly on the build plate this is kind of like a worst case scenario these peel forces should be pretty extreme and possibly when we get to this second half of the print here these are all going to act like little suction cups and be even more hardcore so let's see if this works oh my God yes I can see them all okay so I guess yeah at this point I feel quite confident saying that this mod is totally worth it if you've got a larger 3D printer like a satin or mono X or a whatever Frozen Mighty and you've been struggling with flex plates where they fall off after a month or two months or however long this might be the answer there's a little bit of work involved and there are some trade-offs it's going to be a bit Messier but yeah I I am so stoked with this project this has really tickled my brain and the fact that this is like the any cubic mono X build plate transplanted onto the satin how did we end up here this this is so great all right let's just run off some of that excess resin look at that incredible all right here we go son of a okay I really should have done that pointing downwards not outwards whoops I knew that why did I make that mistake wipe down the flex plate yeah this is a pretty easy workflow a quick wipe down of these magnets and now we should be able to just pop this back on with no mess like that perfect welcome to the end of the video If you enjoyed this or you found this helpful and now you're about to run out and do this modification yourself do me a favor buy us a coffee would you head to buy me a coffee.com once in the6 side or patreon.com once in the6 side you can also click the join button down below this video and become a member I think we have super thanks enabled too so there that do you want to be the the first person to super thank me and I don't think I've got one yet you know what's cool though if you do decide to become a member you're going to get a bunch of STL files including this epic skimmer model from Dungeons and dreadnots but that is just for the month of May 2024 that is an exclusive reward for channel members but there's also a ton of files that will be available for all time in perpetuity via the welcome pack and there's some great stuff in there from artificers Mini Sin Studio Dow Miniatures and myself like this awesome plain tabletop gaming base pack but yeah there's also a ton of Miniatures that are also exclusive to this month and those have generously been contributed to the channel by Arcane whiskers artificers Mini Cross Lancers DM stash Dungeons and dreadnots m3d seon mid Raven bones minis steam TSU Stone Forge and tractor minis I'm going to leave links to all of these artists down in the video description and I highly highly encourage you to go check them out cuz they're all wildly talented and they are all producing phenomenal sculpts for our tabletop Hobby and I'm just I'm so grateful to them for their contributions to this Channel and helping make my membership a more valuable subscription to all you 3D printers out there so big cheers thanks for watching this one I hope this I really hope this one's been uh inspirational and helpful and uh if yeah again if you've been struggling with flex plates give this a go use my affiliate links in the description to pick up your magnets and bolts and nuts and all that stuff it's another great little way to help the channel and share your uh share your builds as well in in the in the Discord all right that's enough of this one cheers bye-bye oh also I'll release a longer cut of this video for channel members so you can see like the full process of transplanting that any cubic build plate to the satin all right cheers

Channel: Once in a Six Side

Views: 29,249

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Id: 59CGZ5tS7NA

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024