Fool Proof Bed Leveling and Amazing First Layer!

hi we're going to talk about my foolproof method of bed leveling and getting your perfect first layer so there's a lot of factors involved it might seem complex at first but once you have it all set up and you have a process down it's just part of your daily routine and it's super fast and super easy but you have to follow the steps so in order to get a great first layer there's six basic things we really have to take care of number one we've got to worry about tramming our machine I'll talk about each one of these in a second number two we have to worry that our bed surface is as flat as possible we have to take care of it to make sure it is number three we want to make sure that our surface is as clean as possible I'll show you how to do that as well we have to be able to set our gap we have to be level our machine while it's heated to its ideal pending temperature and lastly we want to do a live level so let me talk a little bit about each one of those the first thing we're going to talk about is trapping the machine trami machine if you're a machinist you know this very well a lot of other people don't know the term this is different than leveling it's making sure that le every element of the machine excuse me is that ninety degrees it's perpendicular to each other or parallel to each other this is not about the bed itself this is about the frame of the machine you want to put right angles machinist angles to all of the corners while you're building the machine or do a little service and make sure your X gantry is perpendicular to your Z Y or Z is perpendicular to your base your base is perpendicular to your Y only with this system we'd be sure you have geometrically solid models one of the things people think is even if the X contra is off and you level your bed to that off gantry you could still produce good models this is not exactly true we could kind of see this from here an exaggerated view if your x gantry is off and I level my bed so that it's parallel to the X gantry I am going to be able to print a perfectly straight up in our model but it's actually going to be trapezoidal it's to be skewed because my geometry is off so the very first thing we really want to talk about is getting that machine next one we're gonna check our bed flatness if this is your bed we're gonna put a steel ruler over the top I'll show you that in a minute and we're going to shine a light from the back and we're gonna see if there's a gap underneath the surface of that bed if there is you don't have a very flat bed we have a problem and you probably need to Shin that up and I'll show you that on the machine in a second one of the most important factors is setting the gap so if this is our nozzle this is our build surface and this is the filament when your filament comes out of let's say a point 0 4 nozzle it will be around point 0 4 extruded piece of plastic that is not ideal as your first layer that means that it's been laid down in the air and kind of just gently touching the surface this will not stick very well and it will not give you a good first surface and it won't give you a very complete and filled for a surface the ideal is where your nozzle is close enough to the bed to actually squish the first layer a little bit that means the top and bottom are gonna be a little bit flat and the whole bead is gonna be a little bit wider than the point 4 so it's gonna be lower than the point 4 and wider than the point 4 if your nozzle is 0.4 this is your ideal first layer it's squished down pushed down against that first layer and compressed and compacted if you're too low if the nozzle is too close to the bed you might get where you get some dry spots or some non continuous bead and that's where we want to actually back it off and increase the layer let's move over to the machine and we'll have a look at what each one of these is okay so it to tram our machine we want to get a machinist square or pretty good right angle and you want to go in while you're building the machine or when you have a chance to really service in machine and put it onto each of your axes and make sure that your X gantry is 90 degrees to your Z you want to make sure that when you can that the Y is 90 degrees to your X you want to get this every single direction the machine possible and make sure that everything is as right-angle as possible this is going to help incredibly the geometry of your parts so if there's that enough I like to Tran the machine as I'm building it you never have to think about it again now the flatness of the bed surface is super important since we're talking about trying to level a bead of plastic that's point zero four millimeters and squish it down by half a point zero two millimeter which is a hair's thickness can make all the difference in the world so in order to check if your bed is flat you want to put a straight edge across it you want to get down to eye level let's shine a light and turn on the flashlight there we go we could shine a light through there and see if there's any gaps it's very slight gap in the middle I purposely bowed this slightly just be able to show this illustration you want to do this in every direction possible if you do find a gap I do recommend that you take a pen you highlight that area you take off your build surface you put a little piece of aluminum foil on right there and then you test again until you can get that bed super flip now it's going to make a huge difference okay once that we have our machine tram our bed flat that's all the setup you have to one time set up on the machine now we'll talk about the daily maintenance when you are printing the next most important thing is to have a very clean bed surface if you're printing on pure glass on PEI on wham-bam sheet with PDX you want to make sure that your build surface is super clean if you're using hairspray okay you want to maintain it with new hair spraying a little but to make sure that this is clean what I always do is I always have isopropyl alcohol rubbing alcohol CVS Walgreens anything what I usually keep it an easy they handle spray bottle I always have tons of paper towel on hand you're gonna need at least two pieces every time you do this and some triple zero or four zero still wall what I'll do is I'll take off my bed spray a little bit of alcohol on it I'll do a quick pass with steel wool this is between each print doesn't make more than a second if I let it sit for a long time I might want to do it again because dust collects in the air area and it will collect on a horizontal surface and then I clean it with alcohol and then I do it one more time with a fresh paper towel because I don't want to transfer any of the dust or the dirt from the first one that little bit of extra cure is going to go a long way and then I put my bed back on the machine and I'm ready to print so these pieces I always have at my machine and now we're going to talk about bed leveling coming for bed leveling we're gonna need just a few tools we're going to need some regular copy paper I happen to like the 28-pound thicker coffee paper better I don't have it with me right now I just cut a bunch of strips and keep them here you're gonna want to have a pair of tweezers so you're making sure that you've cleaned off your nozzle and make sure you have no drips there and to level your bed you're gonna want to keep the bed to the temperature you're printing on it's super important so I've already preheated the bed and the nozzle up to the which are printing on I've already set this a little bit off so I can show you how I level and I have a G code that I use that stops at all four points over each one of the the knobs the adjustment screws for a couple of seconds each gets progressively faster and it keeps on making circles around until I get this right it's really a good idea to have a G code that doesn't like that I have mine for the end or two for the end of three for the Sierra ten so your ten 400 and 500 I put those up on the various groups I'll probably supply links to those for you guys and you can always take my G code open in TextEdit and change the X&Y points to adapt for your machine we'll go ahead and run it once you have a G code you put it on your SD card you run it like you want a regular key code so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just print from card my G code on this case my key code in this case is into three level okay and it's already preheated now this is just gonna home I get my paper ready while it's homing I generally put it right underneath so I don't have any drips of plastic I'm time using this paper to collect it off now one of the goals that you want to do is you don't want to move any one knob too fast because if you move it too aggressively and the other three knobs are already at a plane you can risk bending your own bed so you want to move all the three knobs all four knobs excuse me in a very progressive fashion and I want to feel that there is grip right now there's no grip so I'm going to move the knob until this grip if there's too much grip that they can't push it underneath without a bending it's too much that's kind of fine I could feel the tension I don't want to put any tension on the bed while I'm doing that because there are Springs I would compress it that's too loose that's too tight there it is and I'm going to go around all four corners and I'm going to keep on repeating this process until I'm not touching any corner at all and the reason why is because every time you adjust one corner you're kind of setting the other ones off so we want to try to get them all generally in the general correct vicinity and then fine tune and then we want to this is a little bit too tight so I'm gonna back this one off okay now it's going to do a center verification I don't adjust when it's at the center it's just to see how flat the bed is and how the level is very nice now I want to go around and I want to fine-tune once that I can do a full circuit of all five points without touching a knob then I can stop that's perfect there's a little bit of drag on the paper I can get to go underneath and it doesn't Bend and fold it's like a perfect height this is too tight I'm gonna back off a little bit that's very nice a little bit loosen up yeah there you go a little bit there we go okay so the next one should be the good one I touched a couple of knobs there so I'm going to go around again I would say be patient don't stop your process too early go around all the points until you're not touching enough once you've done that you've successfully printed well the nice thing about my G code is it speeds up Aries every circuit that it goes around it starts off I think at 5 seconds per corner then goes to 4 seconds and 3 then 2 because now if you have to touch anything it's very little that's a slight hair too much perfect [Music] okay I'm gonna stop it even though I should go around one more time because I do want to show you the live level I can stop a friend like any other print now what is live level live level is whenever you're slicing your model I like to print a skirt as much of a distance that I can away from the model so it gets close to the edges so my models here in the center I try to print like a 12 millimeter 14 millimeter skirt I'll do one two or three passes of the skirt one layer only you don't have to build it up in the air and the reason for the skirt is as its printing I'm looking at that bead it should look wider than the point four millimeters extruded meat it should be flat top and flat bottom and it should be consistent all the way around and it gives me the opportunity to slightly adjust on the fly the wider this is as it's printing that skirt layer the more that I can see if one end is a little bit too thin one end is too fat if there's some dry areas and I'm just on the fly so I'm gonna go ahead and say to print a file this has a spread around it and just making sure that I clean nozzle if you like to have a ND tool kit I'll give the link to my tool kit and my different tools here as well I always keep the tweezer around so I can grab any excess material my own Zico does a white on the Left y-axis okay now it's printing the first layer of the first strip of the skirt you can see it's pretty nice it's very flat top it's definitely wider and then a regular extruded piece there's no bare spot so it's not too close this is a little bit thin so I'm gonna just crank that a slightly closer slightly closer maybe the right side is a little bit in left back could be a hair closer okay and I'm just talking about the very very minimal movements okay now it's actually printing the part what we'll do is we'll pause and we'll come back as it's completing the first layer and we'll see if we actually did get a wonderful first layer okay it's just finished its first layer starting on the second layer and as you could see that is a nice smooth closed first layer all the pieces of flat top and pretty much all running together alright some little gaps I might want to set my extrusion with a little bit tighter on this that's a pretty beautiful first layer we can come back when it's time to pop this off and have a look at the effect of the layer against the build surface see how nice Latino you

Channel: Wham Bam Systems

Views: 111,683

Keywords: 3d print, 3d printing, 3d print help, first layer, bed level, wham bam systems, beginners guide, 3d printing getting started

Id: 8VgVwCeaovQ

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018