Jump to content

Ultra-flat beds for production printing


Recommended Posts

Posted · Ultra-flat beds for production printing

We're getting ready to print several hundred small parts on one of our machines, and one thing that is being obnoxious is the subtle curvature of the acrylic build platform. The parts all have critical tolerances, and so printing with a thick first layer is not possible, and depending on the part's location on the bed, it seems there is a 0.1ish variation in first layer thickness, which makes getting all copies reliably stuck to the bed a more tedious process than I would like.

I know there are plenty of people on this forum who are doing high volume printing - what are you using for a build platform? Aluminum? CF? Acrylic that just happens to be flat? Just dealing with it?

 

  • Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Posted · Ultra-flat beds for production printing

    mic6 aluminum is... well... wonderful. It's very very flat. But make sure you always put kapton tape on it and then blue tape on top of that potentially. This is because you don't want to ever scratch it (aluminum is softer and easier to scratch than steel or glass).

    If you get an aluminum plate do not get any other type of aluminum. Get mic6. Look it up on wikipedia.

    However you might also have warping/bowing in the hardware that moves the head around!

    An alternative would be to characterize your bed and adjust all the Z values depending on XY position. This would be a great plugin - it would add a Z coordinate to *every* move that has only X and Y. And adjust Z by up to .2 or .3mm depending on the XY location. Wouldn't that be amazing?

    The plugin itself would be quite easy to write. The hard part would be characterizing your bed.

     

  • Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Posted · Ultra-flat beds for production printing

    Yeah, I've been eyeing some MIC-6 from McMaster for a while. I guess it would be a good purchase if I ever wanted to add a heated bed as well. It's cheaper than CF, too.

    Seems like you'd need a pretty nice probe to digitize the bed, but I'm sure people are doing it regularly in some industry. I have a 6 axis fabrication robot and we do something similar when milling irregular objects, though that is with a few less decimal points of precision.

     

  • Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Posted · Ultra-flat beds for production printing

    For about $2 you could pick up a piece of 3/32" window glass cut to fit on your acrylic bed. Mask it up with blue tape and binder clip it to the acrylic. Bump your Z switch up and level to the new surface. Better, get 2 or more panes so you can swap them out.

    As noted, the acrylic isn't really flat, so there might be some risk of breaking the glass - but hey, its cheap. Worse, the glass may teater, but it should be easy to shim it up with something.

    In the states, Lowes will cut glass to size for you. No need for tempered glass. I'm running plain wndow glas on my HBP.

     

  • Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Create an account or sign in to comment

    You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

    Create an account

    Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

    Register a new account

    Sign in

    Already have an account? Sign in here.

    Sign In Now
    • Our picks

      • Introducing Universal Cura Projects in the UltiMaker Cura 5.7 beta
        Strap in for the first Cura release of 2024! This 5.7 beta release brings new material profiles as well as cloud printing for Method series printers, and introduces a powerful new way of sharing print settings using printer-agnostic project files! Also, if you want to download the cute dinosaur card holder featured below, it was specially designed for this release and can be found on Thingiverse! 
          • Like
        • 10 replies
      • S-Line Firmware 8.3.0 was released Nov. 20th on the "Latest" firmware branch.
        (Sorry, was out of office when this released)

        This update is for...
        All UltiMaker S series  
        New features
         
        Temperature status. During print preparation, the temperatures of the print cores and build plate will be shown on the display. This gives a better indication of the progress and remaining wait time. Save log files in paused state. It is now possible to save the printer's log files to USB if the currently active print job is paused. Previously, the Dump logs to USB option was only enabled if the printer was in idle state. Confirm print removal via Digital Factory. If the printer is connected to the Digital Factory, it is now possible to confirm the removal of a previous print job via the Digital Factory interface. This is useful in situations where the build plate is clear, but the operator forgot to select Confirm removal on the printer’s display. Visit this page for more information about this feature.
          • Like
        • 0 replies
    ×
    ×
    • Create New...