Hello -
Does anyone have an alternative to the engineering plate? (which seems to have been discontinued)
I use it for many projects and it has a subtle texture which is not as aggressive as the textured plate and not as smooth as the smooth plate.
thanks
The Smooth PEI plate works as a good replacement.
Edit: Sorry, did not read your post well enough. So, no, apart from the Smooth PEI, I am not aware of the kind of alternative. May need to look at 3rd party plates.
There is a new Bambu build plate due for release mid November. You might want to hold out and see how it performs.
Are you looking for the original engineering plate which looked like enamel paint, or the newer version which looks like a plastic coating?
The original- but as long as there is an alternative that has a similar subtle texture, I’d check that out.
I would also love a subtle texture. I love the classic BuildTak surface for PLA, that I used on my old printer. Tried to replace the coldplate sticker with a BuildTak sticker, but it didn’t work at all and stuff was just unremovable. Any try to increase the first layer distance in the slicer didn’t succed.
I haven’t seen any similarly textured buildplate yet.
Did you try the Buildtak selection Textured PEI plate in the slicer?
I loved Buildtak too.
I think that would make it even worse: The textured plate needs a slightly closer nozzle, because it senses the tops of the bumps, but has to set the nozzle height to the average of tops and valleys. So they put it 0.05mm closer than they measure.
I copied this exact part from the gcode of the structured PEI into the gcode for the cool plate but reversed the correction to -0.05mm. I played a bit with the value but it didn’t help much and I lost motivation.
It would be really cool to have a PEI plate with that structure. Maybe there is a way to treat a smooth plate yourself? Maybe sandblasting with very small glass balls? Or pressing a BuildTak Sticker into a smooth PEI plate, using it as a punching tool 
I thought it was the opposite: the nozzle senses the valleys and the system averaged to a 0.05 higher Z.
My bad.
Hmm, my idea is, that the nozzle tip is rather large compared to the texture. so it would touch the tops first. But it would be totally worth to just try it with the structured PEI selected. The Buildtak is already dead anyway. I will do that as soon as I find time and report here!
If you want a texture in between the smooth and textured an aftermarket PEZ/Polyura plate has that. Not sure if the new supertack plate is similar or not.
Also if you wore out the engineering plate like me, you can peel away the cool plate from the other side and it will have an engineering plate underneath the cool plate sticker.
Thank you - I just ordered one - appreciate the reply.
Its got great adhesion as well, print PLA cold etc. The finish is semi-gloss.
Can’t wait to try it out. It’s amazing how little things like that make us so excited. Lol