I didn’t want to glom onto the warped heat bed topic with this, so here’s a new topic to discuss my planned build of a custom heat bed. The intention is to remove the plastic tray and PCB heater from my P1P, and then drop this new bed and heater in its place.
A custom silicone heater from Keenovo will cost less than $100, and a 258mm sq x 1/4" thick cast aluminum plate is less than $60. So for the sake of argument I’m guessing this design will come in at $175 or less after adding a TCO, thermistor, power terminal block, etc.
Here’s the basic design for the custom Keenovo heater:
C, G & H are keep outs for the 5mm machine screws that will mount to the metal tray already in the printer.
A is a keep out for a ground screw.
B & D are keep outs for stand offs for a ceramic terminal block that will connect to the power terminals from the printer, a TCO and the heater itself.
E is a keep out for a TCO and an NTC100K thermistor. The thermistor will just plug into the socket on the board on the metal frame.
This is the ceramic terminal block I purchased on Amazon.
Sounds like a nice idea, but since the printers use a stress gauge for homing Z, I wonder how the printer will react to the extra weight? Before going through all this, you might want to just place the plate on the bed and make sure it will sill home.
If the new aluminum plate and silicone heater are too heavy for the stress gauges, I’m planning on adding a “coil over spring” that rests between the aluminum bed and stock steel triangular frame. Such a spring should be able to offset the weight of the new heat bed so that the weigh resting on the stress gauge tabs is equivalent to the stock plastic tray + heat bed combo. Fingers crossed…
I know I’m asking for trouble here…and really don’t mean to give any offense - I’m just curious:
Is there a reason you’re going to this kind of extreme (and risk) to address an out-of-flat bed that is
handled by the auto-leveling routine of the printer
addressable for engineering applications that require a flat bed through the simple expedient of applying some painters tape to the bed (beneath the build plate)
No offense taken… I’m a retired engineer and I like to build things. This isn’t necessary by any means, I just want to see if I can do it.
I’ve already used foil tape to more or less level my P1P bed, and I’ve even printed on borosilicate glass.
But if it does work as I hope, it’ll be a less than $200 “upgrade” that anyone could use on their Bambu P1P. Still brings the printer in at less than $900 overall.
I have bailed on the project for the time being. I ended up going a simpler route, and removed the magnetic sheet from the replacement bed Bambu has already supplied. Then I used a high temp RTV adhesive to secure a 10" square piece of borosilicate glass I had. There’s a magnet stick on the glass and that’s my new perfectly flat build surface for now. Basically I decided to save some $$$ for now and use what I already had on hand.
Sometimes you gotta go for the 80% benefit with 20% effort approach!
Our X1C at my office got a really bad stock bed. After much coercing, they sent a replacement which was significantly worse. More persistence netted another replacement. This one is marginally better than the original, but I still haven’t taken the time to install it yet.
I recently bought an X1C personally and it has a much better bed. But could certainly be better.
Coming from my other printer, which is a fully custom Ultimaker Original with a cast aluminum tooling plate for a bed, capable of a probed RMS error across the whole build surface of 0.012mm; I would definitely prefer a better build surface on the X1C. I will say the tap probing is a beautiful thing.
Since I have one replacement bed that is really warped, I will probably tear that down and modify it to see what solutions come to mind.
I’m honestly thinking of bonding on Borosilicate glass myself too, the bed flatness on these is an issue, my decade old Makerbot manages 0.06mm from end to end and most of that is just bow from the cantilever mounting. Brand new P1S and it’s 0.2mm out already after a couple of heat cycles.
