Background: This thread actually starts on a different thread: Lightyear 3D Magnetic Build Plates for Bambu Lab Printers - #28 by NeverDie
However, because it evolved in a direction that was different from the topic of that thread, I’m continuing it here rather than there.
What’s new since then: I washed the G10 with Dawn while scrubbing it with a blue Scotch Brite, as suggested by others on that thread. Then I adhered adhered the G10 build plate directly to the heated bed using 5 small strips of foil tape.
Now for the good news:
Based on the previous experience, I planned to pre-heat the garolite at 90C for a half hour before starting a test print. However, I checked its temperature after 10 minutes, and it was already reading surprisingly close to 90C, so I started the print early. I hadn’t expected it would heat up as much as it did, or as quickly as it did. I’ll measure temperature sooner in the future to better pin down how long it actually takes to rise to the target temperature.
Anyway, I was absolutely amazed at just how well the first layer turned out. It printed perfectly and had flawless adhesion:
Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t show the detail, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. It’s beautiful.
Because of what happened in my earlier attempt, prior to scrubbing with Dawn using a blue Scotch-Brite (see prior thread for details), I was worried that the PETG maybe wouldn’t stick for the duration of the print, which is why I gave the model a 25mm brim. Had I known the first layer would turn out as it did, I maybe would have thrown caution to the wind and not bothered with any brim at all. Nonetheless, because of that prior episode, I’m approaching this topic with incremental conservatism, so I’ll cut back on the next print and see whether it continues to hold as well as it did on this print. The last thing I want to do is have the printer launch a blob of doom when I’m not looking and proceed to stuff the printhead with melted filament. So far that has never happened to me on my X1C, and I prefer to keep it that way. I’ll lower my guard later, after I’ve gained enough experience with this garolite build plate to have reasonable confidence it won’t happen.
Worthy of note: the model I printed had a lot of layer shifting going on. The reason is that the 5 pieces of tape I used to hold down the garolite to the heated bed were on just 3 sides of the heated bed, rather than all four sides. I hadn’t taped the fourth side on this first print because I wasn’t sure it would be needed and because being in the back without much space behind it, that rear edge is quite simply trickier for my adult fingers to tape. As a consequence of that omission, the garolite shifted about during printing, resulting in the layer shifts. I suspect adding two pieces of tape to the rear edge may be enough to hold it in place. Surely some amount of tape will be enough, but I can only guess what the minimum amount might be.
A long-shot possibility:
For small enough prints, an alternative to tape–or perhaps a suplement to tape–might be holding down the build plate by putting some strong magnets on top of the garolite. However, at the moment that approach seems fraught with risk, and It would require some strategic placement to be 100% certain 1. they never are in the path of the nozzle as it does its travel moves and 2. never could be under any circumstances, including all possible error conditions. I don’t know enough about that to want to risk it, but if anyone here does have a complete enough understanding of that to make suggestions or recommendations, please do post.
A possible lesson learned:
I still spoofed the X1C by saying it was an engineering build plate–there’s no option at all for picking anything but a bambu lab’s build plate. I think next time I’ll tell the slicer it’s a textured plate, because this time, after having told the slicer it was an engineering plate, it went about its lidar assessment after printing the first layer, which is maybe (?) a total waste of time. Not sure whether the lidar is somehow tuned to the engineering plate and whether it would produce garbage results for anything else if it thinks its an engineering plate when, in fact, it isn’t. Anyone know?
