It’s been suggested multiple times that you need to clean your bed with dish soap and hot water. I recommend this as time and time again people come here with adhesion problems and it turns out that cleaning with IPA turns out to be the issue. If you don’t want to listen to this advice that is fine but I’m done with helping at this point as it’s a waste of my time.
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its been sitting on “70c” according to the touch screen but the bed is still at 60c according to my gun. even turned off my shop fan. I am baffled man. so do i just have to alter everything before slicing now? is this normal?
We do 10,000$ film restoration jobs with this alcohol in addition to PRT and some other really nasty chems. if it had impurities it would be in our scans we also had to trial and error before finding a supplier with pure IPA with no impurities. if this ipa isn’t right we can get sued big time because the impurities can and have ruined film prints and permanently stained films during our R&D days.
And I’ve helped hundreds of people on this forum with adhesion problems and run a Bambu print farm with thousands and thousands of hours on the machines. But you do you. Cheers
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Its not the IPA that is the issue. The issue is that it is usually left to evaporate. And frequently the same cloth is used. So all the stuff it took up has been spread around the build plate in a nice thin film once the IPA is gone.
To get rid of the gunk, it needs to be washed away from the build plate. Water and dish washing liquid has pretty much won out on this.
For better adhesion, there’s also the option to use glue (even on the textured plate). Same story as with the cleaning but in reverse. Use a PVA glue stick, draw a few lines across the plate, take a clean and quite moist cloth to spread a thin film across the plate and you have a good adhesive/water soluble relase film.
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Then why do both plates have the same problem in the same cold spot? I keep my hands off the plate except when peeling TPU. Wouldn’t it be a more sporadic problem if the plate was dirty because I’ve experienced dirty plates before, this ain’t it. it matches the cold spot. this alcohol was used to fill scratches on Huey Lewis films that are priceless, its been used to clean damaged negative, its been used to restore PG&E’s film library. we have hundreds of restoration and scanning clients all over the world with most of them coming from IRON MOUNTAIN of all places. if this IPA wasn’t gone though with a fine tooth comb we wouldn’t be in business. We are also the ONLY place besides Andre Martin(who trained us) that repairs Motion Film Cameras on the west coast. Attention to detail is EVERYTHING in this workshop or we would not be here. so forgive me for overriding your experience but I can assure you my plates are clean and i am not new to this AT ALL, just new to Bambu and its automation.
I also use disposable Kimtech wipes(the same wipes we use to clean camera optics) to wipe the plate.
That is much better than at least 95% of printers do. Nevertheless, I’d recommend the water and dish washing liquid approach as it get’s the stuff out of the deep grooves of the PEI plate.
There can also be other reasons. In rare circumstances users have reported that the PEI plate has locally lost adhesion and they were only able to make it usable again by taking a steel sponge to it. Strange, but true.
But perhaps it’s best to get back on topic. Did you take the measurements straight from the top to rule out that this can explain the missing 10°C? The cold spot, from your last measurements, seems to have gone away.
ripped apart my closet to find my Flir for you. does this settle things? bed is set to 45c down from 60c so its a bit warm still relative to temp sensor in the bed that said it was at 45, but there’s the cold spot again. no fans on. why is it at 104? 45c is 113
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Can you feel wind from the fan at the door of the printer? If you can and it was running during the dragon print, if temps were low enough and the door was open, air currents could contribute to the adhesion issue.
I’m not sure what kind of heater is used in the print bed. I’d guess it’s some kind of laminated flat heating element that covers the entire bed to within some distance from all edges. If that’s correct, then unless the heater has a defect, it should heat the bed uniformly. Under ideal conditions there would not be any hot or cold spots.
To get to basics, I’d recommend taking the build plate off, closing the door, and setting the temperature to something like 55C, letting it equilibrate, and shooting temperatures -normal to the bed- after removing the top window just for the measurements. Look for even temperatures all across the bed. If there are cold spots, see if you can map them and generate a map. If there is a physical defect to the heater, that should reveal it (or find the cartridge heaters if they used them).
If the temperatures are even across the bed, put a build plate back on, let it equilibrate, and measure again. Someone mentioned the possibility of filament bits or other debris being trapped between the build plate and bed. Look carefully since black can hide. But if the temperatures across the build plate are good, it’s not the printer. It could be the build plate though.
If you get this far with it, please try using dish soap and warm to hot water to wash a plate carefully, thoroughly rinse it, and dry it gently with a clean paper towel, and handle it only by edges where a model won’t be printed or use something like cotton gloves which I bet you have.
Since the defect seems localized to a certain area on two build plates and you’re under a time crunch, you could block out the areas outside the area of interest so you don’t waste time and filament. At this point it would be things like air currents intruding into the chamber, other settings, filament issues, or something else. I’d even use a different filament when I test printed since a good print would narrow it down faster than a bad one.
Localized adhesion issues don’t eliminate the filament condition. It could be marginal and air currents or something else could just be putting that region over the edge. Filaments seem to have become a real issue recently so it’s worth asking. That’s why I asked if you have/use a dryer. The printer can also dry filaments.
But I don’t know for sure just what is going on. This is just a way you might be able to solve it and get the prints you want.
I’ve seen that dragon printed in that filament. It’s really a nice print. Hopefully you can get this solved in time.
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Now that is useful data! You do have a cool region back there.
I don’t know the construction of the bed but it could be all sorts of things. Maybe it just wasn’t laminated properly or whatever stuck down fully.
At this point though, I’m betting the best path forward is with a Bambu trouble ticket which totally blows your plans. Maybe someone else has insight and a suggestion that will get you fixed faster?
I haven’t looked but with the bed at the top of the travel, maybe there’s screws or something on the bottom holding things together that might be loose or something? Maybe there’s screws on top clamping? It depends how it’s built if you have a hope of fixing it on your own, but maybe you can?
Hope you can get it sorted but those images tell the tale. I would have suggested an IR image but nobody “normal” would even know what I was talking about. Hopefully it’s easily fixable though and not a wait for a new bed. As a consumer item there is a bit of symmetry in those images. I hope that’s not intentional.
Yep. Not as dramatic as initially, but definetily visible. I’d recommend to open a ticket with Bambu. Even if it is just to ensure that you report a possible warranty case within the period.
Since Bambu will probably ask you anyway, support your ticket with further FLIR images at 2 different temp settings and maybe add correlation data with the laser thermometer data. That should be enough information for Bambu to respond appropriately.
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for now I can settle with stuck dragons till i get my plate fixed. rather that than nothing at all.
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One thing to keep in mind is glue stick can be used on textured PEI to help release models. See Eno’s post above. I’ve never used it but have had models with silk PLA filament be almost impossible to get off.
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Lot of good info in this thread. Sorry I wasnt around for the meat of the discussion. I did go and shoot my bed with my Flir E5. Here are my numbers.
I know its been discussed about the bed washing and all. But if this was my bed, I would wash with soap and water. Then a new bed level.
Temp wise my bed is good. I print ABS everyday and I never have anything come loose unless the bed is dirty.
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That looks beautiful for temperature distribution if I’m reading it right. 1.4C from coolest corner to the center and symmetric. Apologies for doing this but for others not familiar with these kinds of things you can’t just go by color or brightness since those can be scaled and are frequently autoscaled. The coloring makes it look like there’s a big difference between the center and edges but that lets you see the full contour the best.
Skaard’s temperature difference was 15C so definitely something going on with his print bed and/or heater.
Each picture was taken right after an autocalibration.
Each picture shows the range of the picture in temp degrees on the right side. Each picture shows the middle or at least the area where the sensor is.
The build plate was removed also.
This info is just for clarity for future comparison.
I dont doubt that something is not right with @Skaard bed.
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something isn’t right with he whole printer. its on layer 9 right now and the Part fan(the one in the extruder assembly) is not spinning up for anything but filament swaps and i can spin it up manually but Alas it goes back to 0 next layer. wtf is going on?
Paused it while it was changing filament and pulled the lid off to check the cable, it then proceeded to wipe the head and almost smash my fingers despite saying it was paused. cable was slightly misaligned.
why a cooling fan and controller would need to use multiple different power pins to run itself is beyond me because now it runs like its supposed to. it uses a different set of pins to run the fan during priming than it does during regular printing sequences. this thing is WAY more complicated than it needs to be.
also the fan runs like its supposed to now but doesn’t reflect that its running in the touch screen gui unless i tell it to run manually. prob just needs a reboot
Dish soap and hot water, and scrubbing it nice and hard in a circular pattern back and forth really helps with bed adhesion for me. I don’t bother with IPA because it’s not so great at fully displacing oils from surfaces unless the part is fully submerged in it for several hours, where dish soap will bind with the any oils and fully remove them from the plate surface. Some will say use only a couple of drops of dish soap, but personally I give it a liberal squirt. It all rinses off easily in the end, just don’t touch the plate again afterwards with your hands or anything that may have oils on it.
Also, I’ve had GREAT success since I upgraded from the cool sheet to a smooth PEI and textured PEI sheet. Both work fantastic for adhesion and don’t seem to be nearly as sensitive to reusing them many times between thoroughly recleaning with dish soap and hot water. Best of all, no glue stick required for PLA prints with them 
Still doesn’t explain the temperature discrepancy between the back left corner and front right corner though. Does it even out after you’ve let it come up to temperature and set for 10 minutes?
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It’s not the impurities that may be in IPA that is necessarily a problem. It’s that IPA is not a binding agent for oils. IPA simply displaces the oils and moves them around. As the IPA dries, the oils that did not get pushed off the bed just resettle on the bed, and the ones in your paper towel or whatever you’re using to rub it into the plate still have any oils picked up in the process are still there and get pushed right back onto the bed as you attempt to clean it with the evaporating IPA.
You don’t need to listen to us of course, but it might be a good idea to look up the actual chemical interaction between IPA and oils if you feel it’s important to you to use IPA.
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