Leveling the Bed of Your 3d Printer

this serves Peru with the doctor of X Channel and today we're going to cover a question that may be the most asked question across the internet about 3d printing and that is basically ask the following different ways why won't my prints stick to my print bed why are my prints failing how do I level my print pen doesn't need to be so hard to level my print bed will auto bed leveling solve all my problems we're going to answer those and other related questions today so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] I believe that one of the reasons people have so much difficulty with leveling their print bed with having print stick to the print bed with creating successful prints is because they're attempting to follow well-meaning videos and instructions that tell them step by step what to do but at times they haven't had the opportunity to learn why we're going to discuss the why today and then I'm going to show you using two printers that I've selected out of my eight 3d printers because it's easiest to see the mechanisms how you can level your print bed why you should level your print bed why you need to have a relatively level print bed before you rely on auto bed leveling and how to have more successful prints so let's start with the following slide on this slide you'll see the five things that I have found most impact the success of your print and whether it sticks to the print surface because if it moves even a little bit that prints gonna fail you're gonna get layer shifts you're going to get other issues number one what is the distance between the printhead and the surface we'll talk about this in more detail number two what type of surface do you have what you can see here I have a variety of examples this is Bill Tec a aftermarket surface that you can put on your print that it it here's to a print better when it's hot and when it's cool completely cool it releases that print more easily this is a print surface from matter hackers that I really like this is a spring steel print surface is designed to be taking put on and taken off using magnets this particular one is a replacement for the Prusa spring steel surface it is a textured surface and when you want to release your print you just bend it a little bit and the print pops off so this is a print surface I like a lot now you will see a lot of people use glass or recommend glass even using a mirror from your hardware store why do they do that it's not necessarily because it's better an adhesion of a print it's not most people that use glass put masking tape on top because the surface of masking tape adheres well to prints they use glass because it's perfectly flat and a perfectly flat surface will adhere to a print better than a surface that has any variation in it in fact my monoprice ultimate two printer comes with a glass plate that has magnets on the bottom so you can take it in and out and masking tape on the top and that's a relatively high end printer so the print surface matters in general if you're having trouble getting prints to stick and you're sure the distance is correct your print surface is level I'll tell you how to test that then I think the thing you should try is magic goo it works great for me you could dry red Euler glue stick but I find this is magical now what's the next thing you need to understand about ensuring that prints will stick to the print bed the temperature of the print bed now the temperature of the print bed impacts two things whether your prints warp because as they cool some materials in particular ApS to a lesser degree PE TG they tend to warp if they don't cool at exactly the same time so if the edges cool before the middle they tend to warp up by heating the printbed you keep that print flat on the print bed until it's done printing in addition the heat will soften the plastic a little bit and help it adhere better and the final thing that people don't think about is print temperature the temperature of your hot end makes a big difference if you're laying a relatively cool piece of plastic on a surface it's not likely to stick having a higher print temperature will help your print adhere properly to that print surface now let's look at more detail about what the correct distances between the nozzle and the print surface in the photo on the left you see an example of a nozzle that's too high the purpose of the nozzle and the hot end is to melt the filament and create a bead of filament if the bead is completely round there's very little surface area between the bottom of the bead and the print surface look at the picture in the next picture in the center picture the printhead is too close yes there's lots of surface area but that nozzle may actually be coming into contact with the print bed scraping across it and therefore there won't be enough pressure to extrude the filament in essence it's blocking the end of the nozzle so the filament can't extrude properly the third picture is what you want you want a flattened bead that increases the surface area between the bead and the print surface but has a gap between the end of the nozzle and the print surface now how much space do you need well I like to use a basic everyday post-it note it gives enough separation so the nozzle can create a bead but that bead will be oval in shape and not round so that's great what does that have to do with leveling your printbed that sounds like it's all about just getting the distance between the nozzle and your print bed correct let's look at this picture if your print bed is on an angle at all it's not completely level the distance is not the same in all four corners then the bead you're going to produce in the different corners will be different shapes and your print may adhere in some places and may not even extrude in others so you need to ensure that your print surface I'll use this matter hacker print surface as an example is flat not on an angle in any direction once you ensure it's flat you need to get the distance right so the shape of the bead will be proper now how do you level your bed well there are basically two ways to level a bed manually completely manually where you set the bed distance you ensure the four corners are exactly the same and then you print and your software doesn't get involved at all in the bed leveling your software your slicer assumes the bed is level the second alternative is automatic bed leveling now how does automatic bed leveling work and in fact how does your printer know when the bed is at the proper height to start so let's first look at a printer setup with manual bed leveling in a printer setup with manual bed leveling you will have a micro switch and as the bed is moved up and I'm moving up the bed the power is off to this printer by rotating the z-axis rod you'll actually hear that click when it clicks your printer is in the home position now many of your printers will have a software function to move the printer to the home position but I like to actually on manual printers level my bed before I even turn the printer on the first time to make sure I'm not going to crash my nozzle into the print surface so on manual systems you will have a switch now on auto bed leveling systems you'll have generally one of two different types of sensors this is a semi physical actually a physical electromagnetic sensor called a BL touch and there's a little button here that comes down and then when it goes up a magnet inside senses it it's not using a micro switch that would require too much force this is semi magnetic which is why when you push this up you'll feel it sort of pulled up by a magnet the other alternative that you'll see on a lot of printers I have this style on my end or five this is an aftermarket easy abl this is a capacitive sensor what this sensor does is it creates a magnetic field and then when a metal surface or even a glass surface breaks that magnetic field it senses it this same type of sensor is used on my Prusa i3 and k3 and that comes standard on the Prusa so instead of a micro switch ABL systems use a sensor that can be used to determine the distance to the print surface but a micro switch only determines the overall height so you have to get the level in correct manually an ABL sensor will determine the height at many locations so if your print that is bowed a little bit it will know the height at each individual location and create a matrix of those Heights then your printer in software in micro code and the firmware we'll adjust the height of the nozzle based on those absolute positions so a well implemented ABL system is superior to manual bed leveling but if you have a flat print surface which is why many people with manual bed leveling use a sheet of glass to make sure it's perfectly flat then manual bed leveling will work great in both these cases you have to calibrate your bed leveling and I recommend that even if you have an automatic bed leveling surface you ought to manually get the bed pretty close to start so there's less variability to ensure more accurate prints how do you do that well on almost every printer you will find that there are Springs under the print surface if you push down on the print surface you can feel those springs depress a little bit you can see here on this monoprice select mini I can depress those strings you'll also see that there's a knob underneath you can turn by turning that knob and tightening the spring so generally by turning it clockwise you're tightening the spring you're going to pull the bed down by turning it counterclockwise you're going to be loosening the spring the spring will push the bed up so to manual your print bed you want to put the nozzle in each of the four corners and perhaps in the center and then adjust these Springs to make sure it's level okay now let me show you using the monoprice select mini because it's easy to see because I can do everything from the top how I would go about doing this I've repositioned my camera so that we can look more closely at the monoprice select mini printer this is the version 2 printer and the procedure we're going to go through here is exact the same four manually leveling any FDM style 3d printer that has a similar geometry on this particular printer the print surface is a fixed print surface it has a build tech like surface that if anything sticks too well so I always put a little bit of magic goo on it not only helps my print stick it helps them release afterwards on this printer which is quite small there are no screws underneath that would be too hard to get to instead there are hex screws in the four corners on top of the print surface and then the spring so I'm going to start by going to the front panel and selecting home press the home button and that will move the printhead to the home position I actually like to do that a couple times to make sure the printer has aligned properly then I take a traditional post-it note if you wait a couple seconds the stepper motor on this printer does release and now without changing the vertical position the z-position I can take and press on the print bed and put a post a note under my printhead now I go a little bit in from the corner and I want to see if I can just slide that around a little bit and it should feel some friction I should have to and if I go to slide it with one hand it should Bend up a little bit but if I go to slide it with two it should slide nicely so that is proper alignment for this corner if it slides too easily then I need to raise the print bed up in that case I would turn this counter clockwise these screws happen to require very little rotation in order to release a lot if it's too tight I would turn it clockwise just a bit so then I take and I manually move my printhead to the next position I've pressed down on the print surface just a little bit to make sure my printhead doesn't drag across the surface and I do the test again this one might actually be a little too loose so since it's a little too loose I'm going to rotate this just a little tiny bit counterclockwise so that seems about right now go to the next position do the same test go to the final position let's do the same test and then I like to move the printhead to the middle now if it does not seem calibrated properly in the middle but it was calibrated in the corners then your print bed may not be level so you want to check one other thing you need to get a metal ruler and put it on your print surface and it should be perfectly flat if it's not the solution that many people use is to obtain a sheet of glass the right size of their print bed and put that on top of the print surface perhaps clipping it on with binder clips and then leveling your print bed with that glass in place now once you've taken and done this you've leveled your print bed I would recommend you go back and home again and then double check each of the positions when you've completed that it's now time for your first print so prints that I like to use are very very simple I go into Tinkercad or you can find these on Thingiverse and I create a square when I slice this print I put a skirt around it that will give me another rectangle around the print itself so I'm going to go here to my printer I'm gonna go to print and I'm going to select my bed level print and tell it to start okay now at the beginning of this print it's printing a skirt over here it did print what's called a waistline or an index line that's just to ensure that any filament hanging from the end of the nozzle is removed and I'm going to take and pause this for a second using the menu here and what I want to check is that the print line is the right style of bead now it will look relatively flat but it will be solid if it's broken up you're probably too close I also want to ensure that if I rub on it gently it does not rub off so this looks absolutely perfect so I'm going to restart this print if it was not correct I would have adjusted any of the four corners based on where this line was not tight enough in fact on the end or five because it has these really big knobs underneath I find that can actually do it while it's printing okay we're looking now at the front panel of my under-five that I've updated with an EZ ABL capacitive probe and I've updated the firmware to go along with it on a printer that has an auto bed leveling system to fine tune the distance between the nozzle and the print surface you adjust the V offset and what I'm going to show you how to do that the purpose of adjusting the corners is to get the surface more or less flat and then you fine-tune the distance with Z offset if you don't have an auto bed leveling probe you have to fine tune it with the individual knobs so I'm going to go to you control motion probe Z offset the location of this setting is different on every printer and the value is different on all of the printers that I own that have auto bed leveling systems the value is a negative number you'll see on this printer it's minus two point two seven five now that's going to ensure that the nozzle is the right distance from the print surface so when I print my calibration print I can't rub it off with my thumb if it's too close it will break up those calibration lines because the nozzle will be coming into contact with the print surface so the offset is used with an auto bed leveling system after you get the platform relatively flat manually well folks says the monoprice select mini continues to print the calibration print to ensure this print that is level it's going very very well you'll see there's an index line which was the first line it printed and then the actual print is inside we need to summarize the things we learned the idea of leveling of print bed is to ensure that the nozzle is the right distance from the print bed in all four corners and in the center if your print bed is warped it will be okay on the corners but not in the center and in that case many people use a sheet of glass that will be very very flat but if you use the sheet of glass you're going to need either masking tape or some type of adhesive on top in order to ensure your prints succeed after you manually level your print bed if you have a printer with an automated print leveling system it will measure the distance in many points with a manual only system it's only measuring it at one point using a micro switch so Auto bed leveling is superior but if your bed is really off the auto bed leveling will fail and you'll have to manually level your printbed first in addition to having a properly leveled printbed extruder temperature the speed you print at and build plate temperature will impact how well your print adheres to the print surface well folks I hope you learned something today if you did give me a thumbs up share this video anywhere you want you can share it on Facebook and Sheridan on Twitter you can email a link to it it's there to help educate the community thank you for watching and let's continue to learn things together [Music]

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 34,147

Rating: 4.9311004 out of 5

Keywords: creality ender 3, bltouch, th3d, ezabl, 3d printer, 3d printers, 3d printing, 3d printing nerd, bed leveling 3d printer, auto bed leveling sensor, auto bed leveling ender 5, nozzle height 3d printer, 3d printing for beginners, bltouch auto bed leveling sensor, monoprice select mini 3d printer v2, monoprice maker select v2 bed leveling, ezabl vs bltouch, z offset calibration, auto bed leveling, abl, bed leveling, creality, 3d print, 3d printed, calibration, tutorial, step by step

Id: yzyy2e5cHAg

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019