Hello everyone. I recently purchased Bambu Lab’s 3D Effect Plate, but I’m having trouble getting my prints to adhere to it.
For context - I am currently printing a chess board. This chess board is made up of four 4 by 4 segments that will snap together using projections neat the bottom of each square. I am printing the board segments facedown so that the plate’s pattern will transfer to the stop surface of the squares for an aesthetic bonus.
However, I am having problems getting filament to adhere to the plate. Her is an example of what I am talking about, with the supports for the projections:
As you can see, the bed adhesion is giving me difficulties. The initial purge line works well, but the supports either clump nastily like this or do not adhere to the bed altogether.
What can I do? I’ve already bumped up the bed temperature to 60 degrees and washed the plate with soap and water, but those steps do not appear to have made any difference.
Please help me out before I tear my hair out.
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I should probably provide some more context. The chessboard module looks like this:
I have also tried increasing the nozzle temperature to 220 degrees and that does not appear to have helped.
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Did you apply the Effect Sheets yourself or did you get a ready made plate?
When I made mine, I had to painstakingly pull off the original stickers, clean up, apply the sheets and then had some trouble to get anything to stick initially.
After a while at temp however, the glue seemed to smooth out and settle further. So nowadays, I only get failures on them when forgetting to clean, setting the wrong bed type or not increasing temps.
So if your plate is new, you may just need to give it a good heat soak.
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I got them ready-made. Thanks for the advice. How long should I heat it for?
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Stupid question but have you washed it in soap and then not touched it? Specifically the touching part.
You’ll also want to be sure you set it to “smooth high temp plate” in your slicer because the textured plate is, well – textured and it means the machine compensates height-wise for said texture.
also check if you fiddled with the z-hop at all and do a full calibration.
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Okay, I’m making progress. I bumped up the bed temperature again to 65 degrees and slowed down the initial layer. Now the four supports at the right edge of the model are printing correctly for the most part, but the bottom edge is still giving me problems. When the printer starts there the filament clumps onto the nozzle and causes the support to detach. Without fail.
Any suggestions?
I am afraid that I do not know how long it took. I was trying and trying … until I noticed that it got better. And then I had the same experience on the second plate I did.
As for now there still being a problem at the front and the plates being much more sensitive, there are the usual potential causes.
Heat: Either a bit more heat soaking (heat beds are usually a bit colder at the edges), or there may be a slight draft.
Local plate distance: If the bed levelling is just slightly off, it may cause this local loss of adhesion. To test, you could try printing a 0.2mm thick square at the front (and one in the known good loaction) but with a line width 50% larger than the nozzle diameter. They should both stick but the one at the front should show signs of underextrusion. If that is the case, you may need to do a bed tramming.
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After some more experimenting I’ve been making progress. Here is a 4 by 4 segment of squares I printed recently:
You are looking down on the segment - the surface with the texture is intended to be the playing surface.
As you can see there are a few defects with the corners of the white squares, but the black squares are printing pretty much perfectly.
I should probably mention at this point that the white filament is a generic PLA matte filament, while the black filament is Bambu’s own PLA matte. Might that be a lead to solve this problem?
How long have you dried the filament for? I was having trouble with my PLA that I only store in a sealed container with dessicant and its only about 2 months old, but after 12 hours in the dryer the filament prints like a dream again.
A well dried and calibrated filament should print as nicely as a Bambu filament with the right settings. The Generic profiles are usually quite good despite being slower.
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