getting the height of the first layer of your3d print perfect plays a huge part in whether or not the print will actually come out successful. so today, you’ll learn what a good firstlayer looks like and how to achieve it. aprintapro reached out to me for this sponsoredvideos series to be featured on their printaguide platform. launching in january, it’ll be home to 3dprinting tips, tricks and guides. check out aprintapro and the printaguide siteat the links in the video description below! essentially, what you are trying to accomplishwith a properly set nozzle height is good adhesion of your printed part to the printbed.
there are a few other important bits to that,which we’ll look at later, but let’s first start out with the nozzle height, or, moreaccurately, setting the correct zero position for the z-axis. 3d printers don’t have away of sensing when the nozzle touches your build surface, but rely on an endstop or aseparate sensor to probe the bed. for both cases, you usually need to manuallyset the zero position. the exact procedure differs from printer toprinter, but the general idea is usually the same: use a thin piece of paper for stifferbeds and a thicker piece, like a business card, for springy beds and adjust the endstopor sensor offset until you can feel a slight resistance from sliding the card around whenthe printer moves to the zero position for
the z axis. make sure the nozzle is clean and, ideally,heated up so that any boogers will get wiped away by the paper. start in the center of the bed for a firstrough adjustment, and if your printer does not have a sensor-based autotramming or autolevelingfeature, make your way around the bed and repeat for each adjustment point. move the printhead as close as possible tothe adjusters and tweak them until you get an even resistance at each of them. the fine tuning to get the height will needto happen with a few test prints.
of course, for this way of adjusting the nozzleheight, you should be sure that your 3d printer is neither over-extruding nor under-extruding,as that will throw off the look of the layers. so start a simple print, and watch the firstlayer being laid down. if there are visible gaps between the individuallines, you need to set the nozzle closer to the bed, if you can see the nozzle diggingthrough previous lines and can’t see each line clearly when you look at the bottom ofthe printed part, try setting the distance a bit higher. to check how well the entirety of your printbed is aligned, check out the sample files linked in the video description.
some people recommend going for a bit of anoversquashed look, but i generally prefer the height set perfectly and then workingwith the following tricks to increase adhesion if necessary. first off, make sure the bed surface is ingood working order. if you’re printing onto bare glass or aspecialised print surface like pei, buildtak or even unheated bluetape, give it a quickwipedown with some alcohol to remove any greasy spots. if you’re using gluestick, printafix oranother wipe-on or spray-on adhesive, you can usually freshen that up with a damp towelor by simply applying a fresh layer altogether.
also, use your slicer’s settings to increasethe extrusion width and height for the first layer only - this will have the extruder pumpingout proportionally more material, which not only really smooshes the plastic against thebed more, but also makes the first layer more resistant to little adjustment errors - sowith that, there’s really no need to get the bed perfectly flat and bump-free downto the last 10âµm. typically, you can go as far as two timesthe nozzle size for width and a full nozzle size for layer height, but this is prettyextreme and will likely overstress your extruder. to counteract, try going slower for the firstlayer only. this is also a good idea in general if you’restruggling to get the first layer sticking
well. printing at a slower speed will give the filamentmore time to heat up and also warm up the bed surface a bit with the radiated heat fromthe heater block, making it easier for the first layer to stick. to get a similar effect, try raising the temperatureof the heated bed and the nozzle by 5 to 10â°c just for the first layer - many material andbed surface combinations will stick much better just with that bit of extra temperature. keep in mind that many cheap heated beds willbow up or down as they heat and cool, so when using this tip, keep an eye out for the secondlayer as well and use a constant temperature
for the heated bed if you see the second layergetting overstuffed or separating from the first one. alright, so i hope this video is helpful toyou. if you liked it, give it a thumbs up, considersubscribing to the channel, and because youtube is being sorta weird about it, remember toalso click that bell next to the subscribe button or you might end up missing some videosaltogether. also check out the affiliate links from thevideo description to shop on amazon, ebay,
cost of 3d printing plastic,matterhackers and igo3d, those don’t costyou a single penny extra, or if you want to support this channel with a spare dollar ortwo, head over to patreon and get access to
monthly q&a hangouts and more. and that’s it for today, thanks for watching,and i’ll see you in the next one.
