Bambu’s instructions for the textured plate is to wash with dish soap and hot water rather than IPA. I have not used glue on mine and pla, petg, and tpu have worked great.
For a smooth surface I have been using the wham bam pet plate with excellent results, though price with shipping was steep for a single sided plate. I did order a replacement sheet for it after the fact to have a back up.
I’ve never used glue for the Bambu
The code is there, but the offset is 0.00. Here, we are lowering it by 0.04.
I don’t know why people are lowering z-offset instead of just increasing first layer bed temp.
Smearing the first layer isn’t even theoretically better than softening the first layer with bed heat.
WhamBam who’ve arguably done more testing with build plate surfaces than anyone on the planet, just advise increasing bed temp if you have adhesion problems with PEI or PEX.
The issue is that the texture slightly increases the probed Z height, so the nozzle is lowered to compensate. At least that’s my theory.
Correct, if you check the start gcode there is a part for that:
;===== for Textured PEI Plate , lower the nozzle as the nozzle was touching topmost of the texture when homing ==
;curr_bed_type={curr_bed_type}
{if curr_bed_type==“Textured PEI Plate”}
G29.1 Z{-0.04} ; for Textured PEI Plate
{endif}
My experience, without gcode tweaking:
)Let it dry, and you are good for a few prints. I don’t have any issues, but if I skip any of the steps, I’m starting to have problems.
Adhesion on Bambu PEI is a joke. Worthless. Hope we get a real fix
Are you referring to the original black dual sided textured pei plate or the new gold version? I have one of the older black plates and have had no issues with it. It was my go to plate before getting the wham bam and lightyear plates.
If it is the original black one, I too have had no issues that weren’t my fault. The vast majority of my 600+ hours of print time are on just one side of the original and I’ve only washed it maybe 10 times? Never added adhesion promoters of any kind. I’m still holding off on using the second side but at this rate, I may never need it.
I switched to High Temp Smooth plate. Night and Day difference.
In addition to what others have mentioned above, I’ve found increasing the first layer heated bed temperature and/or the first layer filament extrusion temperature also seems to help improve adhesion to the Bambu Labs textured PEI sheet, especially if it’s a tall object with limited area contacting the sheet. Along the same lines: turning off the cooling fan while printing the first layer. Also, not all filament brands stick equally well, so you may have to dial in a new brand, even if it’s of the same type. For that reason, it’s best to stick with one brand if you can.
I had the first layer adhesions with Polymaker PLA PRO, which I love, when using the textured build plate. I didn’t try raising the temperature. I never thought to bring it up that high for PLA, but found that it would stick with a glue stick. No thanks!
What I wound up doing, is purchasing the Wham Bam PEX plate. Wham Bam recommends 70C for PLA PRO, but I found 60 works just fine. Not only does this plate work great for PLA, but TPU prints awesome on it too. For TPU, it sticks well to the build plate, then pulls off easy when plate is cool. Be sure to set bed temp. to 60C though as per the filament matrix on their website. I haven’t tried printing PETG with this plate, but glue is required as a release agent.