I looked closer today. The support underneath is magnetic, so steel and has formed bends so decently stiff. The 3 adjustment clips do have play all 360 deg. Take the screwknobs and push them around to see. So what is restraining the plastic bed is friction from those spring knobs. Which is probably why they want to make sure you don’t tighten them to much (load x friction factor = friction load). So it appears they at least thought about all this.
That gives me hope that new plastic beds will be good enough. I’d prefer a aluminum bed that’s annealed and skim cut, but that’s a project for later.
I can’t count on two hands and feet the number of time’s I’ve working with companies that accept out of spec parts or don’t spec them tight enough to find out later there’s an issue. So this isn’t out of the ordinary at all. Can’t check everything and by the time you find out you have a problem there’s a lot in hands to deal with.
They sent a new bed and I got a tracking number today. However, I got a discouraging message when I asked if the new bed went through the new QA process they mentioned: "Due to the manufacturing process of the heatbed, it is impossible to have a perfectly flat bed. We have Auto Bed Leveling in place to compensate for the uneven bed surface.
The heatbed component has its own testing procedure, and the printer has also been subjected to strict printing tests before leaving the factory.
We understand that a perfectly flat bed is what everyone desires, and we are working on the supply chain, manufacturing process, QA, and logistics to improve the flatness of the bed and provide better flatness results.
Best regards,
Bambu Lab Customer Support"
Also, I went today and got a sheet of glass manually cut by a local shop, set it up with adhesive magnetic tape and I started using that since whambam is a complete sh*tshow with PETG.
Even if during calibration the MicroLidar acts up, during normal Call Flow calibration everything worked fine and the print came out good vs a quick unrefined print I did with Orca Slicer without too much manual calibration.
I’m starting to strongly believe a glass bed is the holy grail lol.
Wish more people on here had this kind of manufacturing experience. There’s been a handful of us trying to get people to realize the realities of design and engineering are what we’ve been waiting for, not some deep plot by BL to sweep it under the table. {Sigh} LOL
I wouldn’t worry to much, that’s standard corporate speak
This problem’s been around for quite a while while they got design changes, parts, sub-contractors, shipping, production line changes, QC procedures changed, on and on. In the last couple weeks we’ve finally seen movement on their part.
They want your printer working as much as you do, they just grew very fast and got caught in a design issue that killed the thousands of beds they had lined up.
They have the new beds and they’re beginning to ship but they’ll never admit anything, I suspect it’s cultural …
Let us know when you get your bed. I’ve been holding off until it stabilized, but I suspect they have the cat firmly by the tail now (a stupid phrase any cat owner will tell you is not exactly a safe position, LOL!)
Got mine X1CC at the end of Feb too. While it’s not that bad when cold, like 0.3mm dip. However when hot, it’s like 1.5mm and screws up my wide functional prints.
1.5 mm is quite a bit. Even 0,3 mm is not really a small dip for a CNCed part.
I guess the theory that the plastic constrains of the metal bed is what causes the quite unusual high bending of the material.
I just received my X1C earlier this week and out of curiosity did some bed flatness measurements today. I thought some of you might be interested in the results. I used this $25 indicator: Amazon
mounted with this: mount
I made 25 measurements with 50mm spacing so I covered 200mm x 200mm. I measured twice: once with cold bed and once with heated bed, both times without a plate.
At the moment, the cold plate has significant drops at the rear corners but it’s good elsewhere. When heated, it levels up pretty good.
I’ve been printing functional parts for almost 2 years almost exclusively with ABS so I’m not worried about the cold bed measurements at this time. If I ever suspect warping in the future, I’ll have these numbers as a reference.
Nice work! I am curious as to why you only measured 200x200 when the build plate is 256x256?
are you only planning on using 200x200 of it or do you think testing 200x200 of it is good enough?
Got my replacement Heatbed yesterday, definetly straighter than the previous one but still warped. No comparison to the Heatbed i got on my old Prusa MK3S+. Did a test print and the borders are still getting scratched by the nozzle because of the warp. fml looks like it is what it is.
Thanks for sharing the update. That is extremely disappointing news. I haven’t received my shipping notification yet, but if this is what BL considers to be “within spec” and we all get replacements that are still warped far worse than what you get from a low-priced Ender clone, then I need to start looking at other solutions. Some, like the glass plate and aluminum milled options discussed above, seem very promising, but definitely have pros and cons. I’m also preparing to just return my P1P and find something else. What’s preventing me from doing so, at least for now, is the printer’s speed. It won’t be enough if I keep getting crappy prints.
I got my new heatbed yesterday and today did some measurements. Its off less then 0.05mm, I can still see a very slight light gap, but I do not have any feeler gauge that is thinner then 0.05 to get an exact measurement. But I call this perfectly acceptable (if it stays that way).