3D Printing Myths I used to believe... 

I used to use a folded paper, but recently I discovered that an unfolded piece works much better too.

I’ve stopped using a sheet of paper, I just get the extruder jjjuuuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssst touching the bed, and then get an overly square print anyway because the printer only works with Chinese software...

I didn't think of feeler gauges, I've always used playing cards.

@@ataphelicopter5734 time for some Marlin flash and/or motherboard upgrade no?

I've always used a single piece of paper without folding too. Never had any troubles with that, though I'm also not fussy about it either.

Only the brave walk away without watching the first layer .

@@MakersMuse I don't watch the first layer because it always goes bad when I watch it but if I hit print and come back later it's fine

What about blind people?

This group of comments is absolutely hilarious! LOL

**laughs nervously*** you guys watch your stuff? I just hit print from the other room and check on it when it's done 👀👀👀

Skunkworks?

​@@THPOOKY Skunkworks would be Lockheed Martin

@@steilkurbler4973 you're right, thank you!

a year ago I purchased an Elegoo Jupiter printer, the demo file supplied is quite possibly that same rook you mentioned, and yes no conventional milling or injection moulding can reproduce it. It sits on a shelf in my lounge a thing of beauty, in 1980 your jaw must have been dragging on the ground. During the 1950's and early 60's my father worked for an English firm called Plessey, he would occasionally tell us about things he made or saw that left me with smoke coming out of my ears, (the things that might be considered "sensitive" we weren't told until the 70's) Ah the perks of having a clever Dad. cheers

That's a neat trick, he must have had a time machine too. That file was created by the MIT students who brought you Formlabs. Around 2014, after they had the original Form1 with the birdcage model, the chess rook with the staircase in it was modeled to showcase the Form 1+. In fact if you find that model anywhere it's modeled right into it.

Yeah. That always made the most sense to me.

I found some g code for the ender 3 that goes above each poiny

I was just doing the above the screws thing earlier, didn't have any paper or such tho..(I just put the thing together today, am still noob :o)

Wow wow amazing very very clever dint think of that idea but yeah come think of it your definitely right each point will make the build plate level 👍👍👍😎😎😎thanks

@@richardbrown9035 ok, boomer

For me a 3d printr is like a baby, like my first son. I did not know what to do with him. After 3 months I was an expert in shit and diapers.

If every part of the machine is replaced by parts that were printed by the machine one at a time, is it still the same machine when nine if the original parts remain? 🤯

@@c0denam3b84 The Ship of Theseus.

you don't have to know anything about technology, nowadays you mostly just have to able to follow instructions. extelligence is coming on strong. now if we can just get rid of the gatekeeping ... I kinda get that school textbooks are made up of a lot of work and investments, but in Germany I would have to shell out thousands of euros just to get a "copy" (it is supposedly an abonnement) of the regulations regarding electric installation. and I'm certainly to lazy to go to the library

That's what I'm going through currently. I've got no real experience with engineering/computers or anything tech-related, but I'm thinking about getting into 3d printing. I am still a bit hesitant

Same

It's been fun watching the first layer with my windows open lately. It's pretty crazy what only a 30F swing will do.

Not only that, you need to let it sit at temperature for a few minutes. Otherwise it may still be deforming while your measuring.

i could never do it with the bed on. with the petg i use at the moment i use like 70 C bed temps. just kills your fingerxs

The difference is massive. On my ender 3 with glass bed the clearance probably changes +-0.15mm, almost a full layer height difference. Update: my z limit switch was causing issues. There is some variation but not as large as I thought.

🤝

Dont fault the technique at your own incapability to build the printer with straight frame. Thousands of people are using the technique just fine and it doesn't work only because you and Maker's Muse couldn't make it work?

@@TheFryPo I really wish people weren't such fucking dicks.

If it's an ender 3 / pro / v2, get new springs, the orange stronger ones. That, or 3d print the spring guides for it. Your levelling isn't the problem if you went through 17 times in one single levelling go, it's the springs buckling or the mounting plate not staying at the right place on the screw. Could also be the cable connector at the back, since that one goes out of angle easily on the ender 3 v2 that I have (until I got the guides). If you're levelling 1 time, or even 2 times per level "session", then you're also unlevelling it. You have to remember that if one side goes up, the other goes down, ON BOTH AXES. Because of this you don't instantly reach level, you gradually move closer and closer to it, so you'll need to go at it about 4 or 5 times to get a decent result if you have to start with big adjustments. If you get new springs and the guides you'll at least have to do this much, much more rarely. For anyone else with an ender 3, get yourself the Jyers marlin firmware with manual mesh levelling (CHECK IF YOU HAVE A 4.2.2 OR 4.2.7 BOARD FIRST), and you won't really ever have to adjust the screws again. Make sure they never change (guides and fasten completely, go back 1 rotation, then kinda level it okay-ish) and then do the "create a new mesh" thing in the levelling menu. You'll use microsteps on the nozzle to reach level (which means no touching or pushing the bed, great!) and it creates a mesh for compensation, sort of the same as the BLTouch! You'll also have to make sure to add the correct starting GCode in your slicer to make sure the printer uses the mesh for it's prints, otherwise get ready for spaghetti. (make sure to adjust the endstop switch thing on the side tho since you fastened all the level screw thingies and might need to go lower than that thing allows)

@TheFryPo Well, first of all, I would give a little more thought to how you express yourself here. So there are several factors, on the one hand we are talking about a printer which costs about 250 dollars new. In this price range, it is hald often so that not all Tolleranzen adhered to. In the production it is also never possible to make everything perfect. The Ender3 V2 has a few problems. It is also a very big matter of luck. I have seen a couple who made out of the box everything great. Others had many problems, fortunately there are enough prepared files. When leveling make it so long until you have a passage at which you no longer have to adjust anything. It is a matter of practice. But there are also other factors, ev some glue. You can buy these for the printer or even a glue stick can work wonders. Otherwise you can also try to increase the temperature of the bed to 65 or even 70* This is no problem with PLA.

I'm sorry I took so long 😩

Tom has been calling it Tramming for years.

@@MakersMuse You're forgiven. Thanks for forwarding your findings to us. =)

As a machinist I took it upon myself to design a bracket I can just attach a dial indicator to and tram my bed correctly. Kinda blew my mind a piece of paper was considered the “standard” when working in hundredths of a mm.

I'll have to get my printer sorted and do the same with the dial meter, I like that idea

Ya I was gonna say I’ve never heard this in the 6 years I’ve been printing. I’ve also been using a sticky note that whole time and I’ve never had an issue.

i only fold over when printing with PETG as if i print too close to the bed it sticks TOO well and is difficult to remove.

Yea that's what I've done for 6 years now and if I notice the first layer looks a bit wrong I just tune it in offset settings. I think getting it perfect is more important when you do the whole bed manually, but I don't know why anyone still bothers with manual bed tramming when sensors are so cheap now.

@@user2C47 Is that even a thing? Mine just connects to the z axis endstop connector on my Ramps board and then you just configure it in settings.

@@user2C47 The inductive sensors are really cheap, i got a few of them a few years ago for an average of $1.60 each, though i imagine with shipping and all that it could be more expensive now. I tested them and they worked OK, but i don't use them now since i decided to print on glass. What i have now is just something i cobbled together from random junk i had, a micro 3.7g servo dangling a short leg with a mouse button switch. But then i have the pins on my board to wire a dozen pieces of extraneous equipment to it, so my situation is of course different. Anyway you connect ground of the sensor to ground (available on endstop connector), supply to 12V (splice from a fan or something), and the output via a diode to the active pin of the endstop connector. Diode points with the marked line towards the sensor! It will allow the sensor to pull down the board pin to ground (or nearly so well enough to read), but will not allow to pull it up beyond internal pull-up of the processor. A suitable diode type is standard small-signal diode, 1N4148. Silicon rectifier diodes shouldn't be used, because they're slower, and during switching can leak a high voltage spike. A Schottky diode can be fine, but might be an extra risk and there's no need in it at all, standard diode is good.

I don't know if it's the "right" answer, but I've been preheating my bed to printing temperature, and my nozzle to 70% of printing temp. It's hopefully close enough to get the thermal expansion close enough for levelling purposes, but not hot enough to let it drip.

His last point about bed leveling is very interesting. Based on this idea, you really don't need to go out and buy feeler gauges. You can just use any solid metric item (such as an Allen wrench or raw scrap metal) and hop the Z axis to the size of that item.

Oh, I get it. At first I read "next thickest" as the thickest one you have, minus one. You mean, the next thinner guage from the final tramming height you're aiming for.

In firearms the two over/under gauges are called "Go" and "No-Go" gauges. If the bolt closes on the No-Go gauge(larger than spec) it is unsafe to fire since clearances have become to loose, and if it can't close on a Go gauge(smaller than spec) the clearances are too tight and could be equally unsafe to fire. If it closes on a Go gauge but does not close on a No-Go gauge(in between the to dimensions) then the firearm is within safe firing specifications.

How do you know what the target clearance should be?

@@endz0r The advantage of a feeler guage is that it has its clearance printed on its side. It doesn't matter which clearance you choose. It just matters that you know your clearance, and you move the z-axis to the right height. Say your feeler guage is exactly 0.45 milimeters. Then you move your z-axis to 0.45, and you keep adjusting the bed height until the nozzle rests on the guage without pushing or moving the bed down. When you're done "tramming" the bed, you know that if you move the z-axis to 0.1 mm, the nozzle is exactly 0.1 mm above the bed. Does that make sense?

You can slo use a strip of a beer/soda can if you do not have a gauge

Did that already ;-)

Definitely, a lot of us are new to 3D printing and it's hard to get it right. I have two 3D printers, both Anycubic. One resin and the other filament. They both worked great straight out of the box, but soon as I bought new filament and resin I had to learn how to change all of the settings to get a decent print. That's why I'm here. There are a billion tweaks out there, not all of them work and not for all printers. I subscribe to maker's muse and others I like, to watch their earlier videos and get the basics of 3D printing. But some of the info is out of date, so it would be nice to have a bit an up to date refresher on the basics.

It's really not that big of an issue. I do it once every time I change a nozzle. Then if you see a first layer going down thin, or thick you tweak it a bit, but once set it stays there.

All I do is manual level. Done it 100 times. The thought of adding a BL touch seems like too much effort for me now when this simple method works.

@@court2379 that's It. Bed leveling is something I do every other month, if much. All the time it's just some fine tuning between one job printing and another.

Anyone with great experience will tell you auto tramming your bed is faulty, and almost NEVER correct without some manual leveling first. I a printer with an auto leveler, but I always manually level it first, then allow the mesh.

trusted auto level once cost me a new bed on a 2hour old printer now manual set to make sure then auto level and watch the first layer just in case its 5min extra

It is great but I fucked up my bed earlier with paper trick and needed to buy a new one (it’s already scratched ) that’s what happens when you give a 14yo a ender 3max

Yeah, I'm excited to try it, I have to level my bed very often since I change nozzles a lot, (I print minis and large parts on the same printer)

I thought so as well. The funny thing is since we stopped tuning up cars with "points" I can't seem to find my set of feeler gauges.... Wow, i'm old. Edited to add... I bought my first printer an Anet A8 Plus back in November. Angus and many others haven't given very many points to Anet for many valid reasons. However, it's mine and I claim it. Over the course of the last six months I've grown to love it. At first, getting the bed right drove me APESSHIT. It seemed like I was constantly tweaking / adjusting it for damn near every print. However, knock on wood (i'm screwed now I'll have to adjust it), the last couple months it's been dead on in the sweet spot and my prints have been just amazing. I'm moving forward and building a core xy next complete with auto bed leveling. I'm stoked and can't wait to start the project!

@@Diesr Or a 40 year old. I'm a big supporter of letting that fourteen year old get in there. They learn the same as us old guys. We screw things up, we learn. Also, they are sharp as tacks. I believe they learn a hell of a lot quicker.

@@TheJacklwilliams I just picked up a feeler gauge at Harbor Freight for this exact purpose.

If you print in the middle only, your loosing a hell of a lot of build surface/space/plate what have you. Best to get the issue sorted and dial your machine in so it works consistently and as intended

Agreed! It affects final model accuracy which isn't something often discussed .

I kinda doubt many people thought their bltouch was physically leveling their bed.

@@rayaguilar9085 I see it all the time. Folks think exactly this, and are flummoxed when it just won't work, to the point of taking it off. Even on a machine like the Ender 5 Plus which requires the bed leveling probe as the Z endstop.

Yep! And is especially important for larger print beds made from aluminum which have the tendency of being warped or dished slightly. I think the dual Z leveling is pretty cool and actually is more proper leveling

1. Re: "it's not auto bed leveling." On some specialty printers it is, they usually have 3 independent z lead screws that can actually tram the bed for you. 2. Re: "the topology adjustment method fails at certain angles." Tom showed it working at some pretty extreme angles in the past. Obviously the parts came out skewed, but he basically tilted the bed as far as it would go IIRC.

You don't need a video. Follow the paper method. Go to an automotive store and pick up a feeler gauge set... it looks like a swiss army knife except with a bunch of flat sheets of steel. They should have metric and imperial thicknesses etched on them. Choose the one that matches say 0.25mm... adjust the head to touch it until there is a slight drag. Now you know where 0.25 above the bed is. Adjust the z stop in the software to be 0.25 lower so the printer knows where the bed actually is. Run the home command. Then lower the nozzle to Z = 0. The nozzle should just barely touch the bed. If the bed moves then the nozzle is too close. Adjust the Z stop or offset Done. If the nozzle is really far away then you didnt add the 0.25mm to the z stop value in software. If you do this check before printing then you wont drag your nozzle through the bed :p Note that your bed will have a certain amount of warping when cool and when heated it will be different so you might want to also try lifting the nozzle to your first layer height... say 0.3mm then move the nozzle all around the perimeter and through the y 0 axis to make sure your nozzle doesnt contact the bed. You can do this while cold and heated to verify it wont hit. A BLtouch and Bed visualizer plugin for octoprint gives a beautiful 3d mesh of your bed. It is not very flat. Even on a thick mirror it isnt very flat.

@@someguy2741 and don't forget visual inspecting. Printing a skirt can help a tonne

Been doing it with the feeler gauge for years. Works exactly the same way as paper. I use a .102mm one. Perfect 1st layers every time.

Or buy a bltouch

Does the printer really go to 0 on Z axis when leveling? I've found a configuration file on my BIQU B1 SD card that sets the leveling height to 0.2mm so I use the .2 gauge and the first layer comes out perfect.

I've been thinking about using them, but I feared that the feeler gauges might damage the bronze nozzle tips. Is that something we should be concerned about?

@@MohammadHassan-ud8iq use a brass feeler guage to avoid damage.

@@MohammadHassan-ud8iq If you don't smash and try to force the gauge into a gap that is too small there should be no problem. The gauge itself is thin and fragile. So there are chances that if you damage the nozzle you also damage the gauge by warping it. Just use all your tools with proper care and everything should be fine.

I think it's more down to the fact that a steel feeler gauge may well damage a brass nozzle eventually. But if the frame is true then one would hope you don't have to use the gauge very often...

@@christianbarnay2499 You can run a fine stone or sandpaper along the edges of the gauge just to remove any burrs or sharp edge that might scratch the brass. I'd be more concerned with tiny scratches on the nozzle flat causing stringing etc. than actual wear (glass is pretty damned hard and I've managed to accidentally run the nozzle low enough to the bed that it left brass tracks on the glass but the nozzle didn't suffer too badly! It's *even* wear)

Exactly my thought. I've never heard of folding the paper. Just use it unfolded! It's a lot thinner!

Yeah idk why he would fold it

still tho the method kinda sucks

Following 3d printing heavily for 8 years, this is the first time i have ever heard anyone talk about using "folded" paper to set the nozzle-to-bed clearance. A single sheet of standard paper used to measure the gap has worked flawlessly for me on every fdm printer i have ever used. Too many people dont realize that the single sheet thickness is meant to set the height when the nozzle and bed are COLD. The thickness of the sheet of paper is about perfect to compensate for the expansion of the nozzle\bed at printing temperatures. Setting the gap when the nozzle/bed are hot will result in too much clearence.

@@jasond9824 people just need to understand how much friction you need on the paper and you won't have issues

@@TheRattleSnake3145 How much friction do you need? I always struggle with that.

@@gavinsauer1608 for me and the brand of paper I use, when I push the paper away from me it's not enough friction to start crinkling the paper but I can still feel something.

@@jasond9824 yesss, I'm glad I'm not the only one who pointed that out - done cold becuase it's safer too! A feeler gauge is pointless for accuracy if it heats up with the bed/nozzle and expands - it's all just about being relatively correct!

you really thought you would sit there 8 hours waiting for it to end?

for some reason my ender 3 v2 is magic compared to everyone else's. I maxed out all the max settings on the printer with jyers marlin firmware, set all the speed related, accelleration settings and jerk settings in the slicer to the highest number that makes any difference (about 150mm/s on everything except travel, which is 200), and now also run my prints at 200% speed in the tune menu, and for some reason my prints are turning out fantastic O.O the printer is literally on my desk, going so fast it sounds like a fucking vibrator and everything on my desk 100% agrees with me, and im not having any problems. I don't understand why on earth this is working at all, from what Ive read this is a recipe for monstrous spaghetti, but nope? Also, it's the stock ender 3 v2, no mods added yet, nothing, just the firmware. I did a 16 hour print yesterday in 3 hours and it's my best print yet Does anyone know whats up here?

@@liveen low standards or memeing XD

@@werdnaf well, with current knowledge, I had a shitton of ghosting on my prints, and small details usually wouldn't turn out very accurate. So mostly low standards. Outside of those two things though, yeah 100% legit, i bet anyone can do this as well if they're not doing tiny or super-detailed prints. A simple box for example can go from 5 hours to 20 minutes at no real cost, since, well, its a fucking box, who cares about ghosting haahah. I did lower my settings though since nowadays I do mostly print detailed things, and I'd also like to not have a vibrator for a desk

Always get me perfect first layers.

I do paper and then adjustment by eye during a test print and it works perfectly. It just takes a bit of experience to be able to know your machine and do it quickly.

I use a dial indicator to micro adjust the nozzle height after the initial paper. If all four corners 0 out then I tend to go with it and use a .2mm first layer.

While I agree that the paper technique work for "beginner", they will all come to the realization that it's a bad way to level the bed (just like he kind of explain) and we are printing and mostly all trying to get dimensionally perfect parts. So why not just use a professional Gauge tool kit exactly made for this instead of using a mere piece of paper that probably change more in height than my morning turds.

CHEP, your easy bed leveling video and the gcode you made to go along with it is one of the first things I direct people to when they are getting started with printing since so many people have a hard time tramming their beds properly. I run your bed level gcode before I start pretty much any print--taking that two minutes to make sure my bed is still trammed each time and make tiny adjustments saves me hours of frusteration later.

same, i often didnt want to print something because i was too lazy to level my bed

New to 3d printing. Can that be added to any printer? How?

@@t.pisani8239 Pretty much every printer. You'll need a sensor such as bltouch; if your firmware doesn't support it, you'll need to install Marlin or similar.

I found it to be more of a pita to get working than it's worth. Takes me less than a minute to manually level.

@@collegestudent6071 How is it a pita? Just stick a inductive probe next to the hotend, set the z offset and away you go. It's much better not having to constantly check the bed hasn't moved or having to watch the first layer go down just to see if it's correct.

Wanna do it even faster? Use a dial indicator. Cheap ones work too. I think I'll make a video on this...

Ayee

Protopasta comes on cardboard spools and makes their filament stateside

@@danielescobar7618 And they're just across town from us. That's exactly why we've partnered with them. - Perry

@@outofdarts I’m right in the neighborhood too! I have a few machines in my maker soace

They can be Upcycled, into a custom storage system. Though FULL Recycling would be a pipe-dream

What kind of guage thickness should one use?

@@koentju3 I used a 5 thou (from AutoZone IIRC) from comments in this paper v guage vid ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9JAlERd41NQ.html

@@koentju3 depends upon your chosen material layer height, if your layer height is 0.2mm then a 0.2mm gauge will work. An even better solution would be 2 gauges, one at 0.19mm and the other at 0.21mm as a "Go - No Go" solution, where the 0.19 gauge should pass freely but the 0.21 gauge is blocked by the nozzle. This will get you within 0.01mm of your chosen height, easily close enough for FFF/FDM printing.

@@bss369 thank you bro, I'm heading to Harbor Freight ASAP.

@@thh420 Cheers, glad to help.

Has to be DIET Coke?

How about IPA?

FWIW, standard wall thicknesses in aluminum beverage cans in the states tend to hover between .0030” and .0035” plus a little for coating. BUT, it’s seldom the same thickness all the way around due to the challenges of maintaining alignment during manufacture it may be a touch over .004” in some places and barely .003” in others. It also gets thicker near the top and the bottom. I bet it works pretty well though. I’ve certainly used it for shims more than once.

Setting bed height to zero rather than the thickness of the paper is a new one for me. Can not wait to try it.

Sydney has trams too, they call them light rail... Which they took out in the 70s and then a few years ago decided they had to tear up the entire CBD to bring it back... they LEVELED the CBD *badumtss*

@@jayinstandarddefinition I wondered that. Interesting

Nah, they'll think that you have a milling machine and adjusted it so that the bed is 90 degrees to the head. Machinist have used the term "tramming" for a while, way before 3D printers appeared.

@@kurtbilinski1723 Ah, yeah I remember that. Too bad none of my friends would know what I'm talking about. They probably imagine it means sniffing blow up the crack of a ho.

I often end up with one knob coming loose

I find that method to be the easiest, it's so simple, and can be done visually

not just that but the skirt helps a lot for me - I was getting issues with prints coming off the bed during printing and the skirts, while slightly annoying to trim, increase the contact area with the print bed and much reduce any such issues. A couple seconds with a knife is a lot less time than restarting a print several hours in because it didn't stick.

@@randommcranderson5155 hey buddy, your talking bout a brim I believe. A skirt isn't connected and is meant to prime. A brim is connected and has to be cut off after completing but is a major help in preventing warping. :P

What is that? haha

@@MakersMuse skate is this Legendary regular user on one large 3d printing discord community with 19 000 members. Legend has is that all his printers are cursed and that continued exposure to him in chat will get you exposed to skate's curse too. Print fails? Skate's curse. Printer not working? Skate's curse

@@MakersMuse even i know who skate is! He and his blue neko girl mk3s are cursed to wet-petg hell! xD ( you should really consider joining the community)

@@YunFuriku It's not a myth if it's real

Skate's curse fried 4 of my mainboards back to back .____.

I’m ordering a MK3S+ soon, super hyped for it

Isn't that a little close? I know that .1mm is too far from the bed. I use a .063mm (.0025in) feeler gauge to level/tram my bed, it requires only a little adjusting while printing a calibration pattern on the bed.

What paper is 0.03" thick? A Post-It note is 0.0035"

@@1pcfred Apologies. My memory was faulty. Barring the bad numbers, the concept still holds. Single thickness and then remove the offset due to the thickness.

@@birdmun paper can certainly get you in the ballpark. Which for desktop 3D printing is close enough.

My makerbot in 2014 said to use a business card.

They're not tramming. Tramming measures the perpendicularity between a head and the table. There's no way you can measure that on a 3D printer. You turn the spindle around when you're tramming. 3D print heads don't rotate. Least ones attached correctly don't.

Yep, you're right. Can't see any other way to describe it, although it's approximate. 3D printing is approximative too, so ... well ... let's say it makes sense even if it's not totally true. :)

@@Lidocain777 the term is used as a convenience even if it isn't entirely accurate it conveys a specific meaning that is understood.

People saying "tramming" just gets on my nerves because 99% of 3d printers have no idea what tramming even means. Everyone knows it as levelling so just call it that.

Awesome! no worries.

Printer paper is typically .1mm or .0039"

@@Kyrazlan well i stand corrected, just grabbed my calipers and measured. i swear i remember in machine tool 101 they had us mic printer paper and it measured .003 but that was 15 years ago

actually you're wrong. u want 2mm not 1 which is why he folds it. a lot use shims and business cards. it's funny how much in denial people who print are. they act like they know everything and can't learn. well bed you're wrong

@@rmi2548 Why do I want 0.2mm? Not folding a paper worked very well for me, and ultimately we need a consistent thickness, not an exact thickness. When the distance is the same on all corners I can then calibrate the actual distance changing the Z offset. When I fold the paper, there's more amount of material that can be squished, making the measurement less precise.

I use bible paper.

K

@@dodgyaz is it better than baking paper?

@@Pengquy Probably not but it has more edge.

I've found a single piece of 20lb printer paper works very well. A 24lb sheet is too thick - enough to actually matter. 20lb, my prints have good adhesion all the time (barring some other issue); 24lb, they don't.

G28, then G29. bl touch has bed levelling which you can use to estimate the compensation at each corner. Don't need the dial gauge anymore.

but it is a tool you cannot print XD

@@deimosmen I mean if you can dial in your printer enough you actually probably could!

because a piece of paper really is good enough, considering the thickness is pretty consistent. In 10 years I've not had a problem with it and it's what 99% of people use.

Same here: pre-heat PLA, change filament to actual color, Auto home, disable steppers, 4 corners and center with paper (unfolded), I feel the fans sucking at the paper = perfect Daily routine, 30s … Bought gauges: oily mess, 0.1 mm gauge is soo damn thin … no fun at all

Just out of curiosity, Angus, have you found the JP-8000 and (what looks like an) ARP 2500 to improve the quality of your first layers? Cool stuff!

Replace the bed with a mirror. Even cheap plate mirrors are extremely flat. A downside is that it can be hard to get the print off the mirror until it cools completely.

I spent hours making sure my printer frame was square when I was building it. It paid off in the end. I rarely need to make adjustments to the printer now when I start a print.

you are leveling your bed to the squareness of the frame. IE traming.

@@NZSpides Me too, but apparently the gantry was not screwed tightly enough and the end farther from the z-screw sagged a bit... just enough to make cylindrical stuff print off axis.

@@e_neko 😂 hate finding lose screws after a build.

@@LadyTea Just partly true. You level the bed to compensate for the offset to the Z home position. A well built frame technically could work with just adjusting the Z home sensor position given the bed is already set parallel to the XY plane. But while typical 3D printer beds are not designed rigid nor accurate enough for this, there are more screws to achive tramming too, in Z direction. But there aren't any in XY relation, so one still have to make it accurate partially. But why not just make it completely accurate? Non-squared frame will never give you dimensionally correct parts, which does matter when you use it for scientific purposes.

Doesn't matter. It's used generically, and they haven't acted to protect the trademark, so it's legally a generic term. That's how trademarks work.

@@TrueThanny Sorry, you have been misinformed. It does not become generic because Stratasys hasn't enforced it. As long as they use and maintain their paperwork with the USPTO, they still "own" the trademark. It is up to Stratasys to file against others in court to "enforce" ownership rights. They can do so at any time as long as they use and maintain their mark with the USPTO. This is a handy guide to trademarks: www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BasicFacts.pdf

You just know some hobbyist out there has an Ender 3 with their Z-axis at 45 degrees to vertical. "But I use a spirit level AND a laser level to set the bed perfectly....why are my prints failing?"

resin prints are the way to go if you want strength.

what kind of printer? paper has worked fine for whole bed prints on my ender3v2 for over 500 prints now...

@@deimosmen It's a Powerspec-branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 from 5 years ago. Granted I was new to 3D printing so there were a lot of moving parts, figuratively speaking, as I was trying different filaments, temperatures, bed materials, software, and learning how to level the bed (among other things). I was also printing parts to improve the printer itself, so certainly switching to a feeler gauge wasn't the one thing that gave me success. It did give me reproducibility, however, because it's pretty obvious when you're at the desired height with a feeler gauge. The printer is still going and I know all its quirks so nowadays if a print fails it's most likely because I forgot I mucked with the slicer settings during a previous print.