I recently bought this smooth PEI plate (delivered late April), and it’s been working really well with adhesion compared to my textured PEI plate. But now It’s adhesion is really horrible, I always wipe it with antiseptic isopropyl alcohol before every print. And I’ve only ever printed with this plate in PLA without glue. This is a first layer print to show where it’s failing the most, using Ender PLA, and the generic PLA profile. Now my texture PEI plate has better adhesion, can someone please
Pleas don’t. A microfibre cloth, diswashing liquid and plenty of warm water will remove any residue rather than spreading it evenly across the plate.
Speaking of which, applying a few lines of PVA glue stick and then using a wet paper towel to spread a thin and even glue film across the plate is SOP for my smooth PEI. It is also a good indication as to what actually happens when wiping a plate with isoprop…
As for the textured plate and in case it is “cleaned” in the same manner: Be prepared to it suddenly loosing all adhesion when its “valleys” have been filled sufficiently with residue washed in by Isoprop. It takes a lot of vigorous and repeated scrubbing with a stiff, clean brush, diswashing liquid and lots of warm water to get it to perform again once this happens.
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EnoTheThracian has already covered most of this, so I’ll just address one point: isopropyl alcohol.
It’s true that some people use this alcohol - I do too, for that matter - but you have to be very careful about when and how you use it. Firstly, regular dish soap without additives removes 95% of dirt and breaks down grease. You only need the alcohol for the remaining 5% of residue - when you’re doing really demanding printing jobs. So you want to push the printer to its limits.
Important to note: Soap is not a replacement for alcohol, and alcohol is not a replacement for soap - they basically serve different purposes!
You should always start by washing with soap; you should only use alcohol if soap isn’t enough, which is rarely the case. Otherwise, you’ll damage the surface of the print plate over time. Most importantly: Apply the alcohol in a very thin layer using a spray bottle so that it evaporates quickly. Under no circumstances should you soak the print plate in alcohol and scrub vigorously.
And again: For normal cleaning and normal printing, 95% of the time you won’t need any alcohol at all.
I always recommend checking out the bambu Wiki for things like this!
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Guess I should do more research than a single google search. I know not to wipe isopropyl on textured, but I was under the impression isopropyl was all you needed for the another PEI plate. Thanks a whole bunch!
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