Plate scraping after I leveled bed perfectly

[Dead3ye 2]

I have an Ender 5 Plus and I went to start my print today and after tuning the bed per both Creality method and online instructions and the hotend tip scratched against the bed plate. I've leveled my bed plenty of times and have levels, .10mm tool and others(without branching into digital levels and calibrating tools) and printed multiple things up to this point no problem. I recently installed the Spider V3 pro hotend, replaced bed springs with silicone buffers recommended off amazon and that's literally all I've done as far as upgrading. is there some sort of manual calibration or software you're supposed to install into Cura or whatever slicer you're using after installation of a new hotend?

[Slashee_the_Cow 270]

It sounds like a problem with the Z offset, which you'd have to handle on the printer - gcode shouldn't be able to make it lower than it's supposed to. Just make sure that the startup gcode for your printer in Cura has a G28 line in it.

[Dead3ye 2]

17 hours ago, Slashee_the_Cow said:

 Just make sure that the startup gcode for your printer in Cura has a G28 line in it.

I recently added a new version of Marlin firmware to my Ender 5 and that also may have made it go screwy. There are a lot of other guys with my issue who have done the same thing and no matter the amount of bed leveling the nozzle will scrape on the initial line set and the bed comes out slightly tilted. What I really need help with is the step by step (in Lamens preferably as to avoid confusion and also, I may be slightly Lamen as far as software problems) to resetting BR Touch, flashing drive, converting .HEX to .BIN (or a decent app that works) and installing factory Marlin via SD card. I already have the go ahead to send it back to Creality but I've learned a great deal from this machine and would really like to see if firmware could potentially be creating this headache or a future one with my new machine. I'm not trying to be a "Plug and Play" 3D artist, I'd really like to know the Ins and well as the Outs and so far, Slashee has been my guy. 

[GregValiant 1,258]

Then you really need to go over the Reddit and see what help the Ender 5 (or 3) users group can help with.

[Slashee_the_Cow 270]

13 hours ago, Dead3ye said:

I recently added a new version of Marlin firmware to my Ender 5 and that also may have made it go screwy. There are a lot of other guys with my issue who have done the same thing and no matter the amount of bed leveling the nozzle will scrape on the initial line set and the bed comes out slightly tilted. What I really need help with is the step by step (in Lamens preferably as to avoid confusion and also, I may be slightly Lamen as far as software problems) to resetting BR Touch, flashing drive, converting .HEX to .BIN (or a decent app that works) and installing factory Marlin via SD card. I already have the go ahead to send it back to Creality but I've learned a great deal from this machine and would really like to see if firmware could potentially be creating this headache or a future one with my new machine. I'm not trying to be a "Plug and Play" 3D artist, I'd really like to know the Ins and well as the Outs and so far, Slashee has been my guy. 

 

Please don't take the following itemised list personally:

1. Firmware. Much as it annoys me in many ways, I'm just running the latest version of Creality's firmware. Although I don't know if you have to for adding a BR touch, because the only Creality printers I've used have been the E3V2 Neo and E3V3SE, both of which have the totally-not-a-ripoff-named CR-touch sensor, so I'm not fixing what isn't broke.
2. That you're not alone in having this problem is a good thing. It means either you didn't mess up or you did, but not in a stupid way. Also hopefully some of them have figured out to fix it.
3. The term is actually "layman's terms", a "layman" being someone who is not particularly knowledgeable in any subject, although the term originally meant someone not of the clergy. Either way, someone who does need to have things broken down to them so they can understand them.
4. Sorry, I've never actually dealt with converting .hex files to .bin. To be honest, I'm wondering if they're the same thing, just with the extension changed so it'll open in a hex editor by default. I don't recommend testing that theory without doing your own research.
   1. Layman's terms: a hex editor shows a file in hexadecimal (base 16), uses 0-10 and A-F as digits, the advantage being that it shows bytes as two characters rather than 8 binary characters so it's easier to read and you can fit more on screen. A lot of hex editors will also show the plain text version conversion of each set (if it can be converted into text).
   2. My theory is based on .hex (hexadecimal) being a file intended to be read in a hex editor, and a .bin (binary) file intended to be executed by a computer.
5. The following things are based on an "if an Ender-5 acts anything like the Ender-3s I've dealt with"
   1. When trying to flash firmware, if a memory card contains a firmware file with a different filename to the last time it installed firmware, it will consider it an upgrade (even if it's older firmware).
   2. You sometimes need to make sure the firmware for the display is compatible with the firmware you're running on the printer.
      1. When Creality's instructions for updating the Ender-3 V2 Neo's screen to insert the microSD card with the firmware into the slot on the back of the motherboard, they mean it quite literally. You have to unscrew the back of the display unit and there it is, just sitting in the middle of nowhere on the back side of the motherboard.
      2. They fixed this with the E3V3SE's display unit by putting a microSD card slot on the outside.
         1. The E3V2 Neo also used a microSD card for the printer itself, but the E3V3SE uses a full size SD card slot, so you need two different cards (or an adapter) to update the screen and the printer.
   3. Apparently they can be quite finicky with the cards they'll accept. Ideally you need a card between 2GB and 16GB in capacity, formatted as FAT32 with an allocation unit size of 4096 bytes:
      1. It's actually really frickin' hard to find cards that small these days, and they'll usually cost about as much as something four times the capacity. Fortunately as someone who owns far too many gadgets I just started grabbing memory cards and sticking them into the card reader to see their capacity until I found one.
      2. The cards and readers Creality ship with their printers last as long as the honey chicken does once I arrive at my local Chinese buffet. That is to say, they do really, really nice honey chicken. Oh, and the cards are shit.
6. It's actually pretty great you want to learn the ins and outs of these things rather than take the easy route of "get someone to fix it for you". I however didn't want to learn the ins and outs of replacing a hot end so I took advantage of Amazon's generous return policy when a shoddy filament kept clogging the Bowden tube on my E3 V2 Neo. The problem was that one print worked for half an hour, then after I left it running and came a couple of hours came back and the head was just dancing in midair and it had barely made any progress since I left it. All that time with the hot end running at 210° and not transferring it into filament basically cooked the rubber boot that surrounds the end. Next time after I printed something (successfully, with a different brand of filament, and the brand that clogged is on my blacklist) there had been enough room around the rubber boot at the nozzle for filament to cover the whole hot end (how the hell does it go up?) and when it dried that cut the thermistor wires, which were apparently next to impossible to replace or fix (not that I know how to solder).
   1. I've taken advantage of Amazon's generous return policy three times, the other two:
      1. Another brand of filament now on my blacklist clogged the extruder/hot end (while not being visible from the outside) that I couldn't get it out, and I didn't feel like disassembling it, especially given it includes the extruder on an E3V3SE.
         1. Oh, and that brand used the most stupid spool design design I've ever seen. The hollow part is just a completely smooth plastic tube, which meant that the vibrations from moving the print bed creeped it forward bit by bit, eventually making it come off the front of the spool holder (which has a stopper on it) and crash down onto the front part of the bed. Since the E3V3SE only has ABL, no manual levelling at all, not exactly a great way to keep the print surface level.
      2. This time wasn't at fault: I was using the filament unload program in the printer's menu, and not realising how close it was to the bed, when it was purging the old filament it also happened to melt the PC top layer of the bed (revealing the magnetic layer beneath) in the home position. Since it levels and homes the Z height in that position (if you move the somewhere else and run G28 Z, it just moves the head back to the home position and does it there). Since the seller on Amazon I bought it from didn't have replacement build plates, I got a refund on the whole thing.
7. Cows actually make great pets, at least if you're not in an apartment. They're very gentle-natured, you don't have to take them on walks or mow your lawn any more. It's just that if you're going on said lawn, watch for land mines.
8. Slashee's your gal 😉 

[Dead3ye 2]

11 hours ago, Slashee_the_Cow said:

Slashee's your gal

It's funny you put this because when writing the line "Slashees my guy" I literally deleted and wrote it over a couple times arguing this could be a slashee guy or a slashee gal. I retract. And thanks again, you've been so much help.

[GregValiant 1,258]

The male form would be "Slashee_the_Bull".

Edited March 19 by GregValiant