Here’s a rundown of three different buildplate alternatives for flat plates:
Goodplate
Weight: ~675g
Thickness: 4mm
Price: ~$75 (including shipping)
Ease of use: Difficult
Comments: I can’t really recommend people get this plate. Most people using a goodplate have issues with it throwing force sensor errors or throwing homing errors. Installation involves either using brackets that are shipped (mine did not fit the bed) or using silicone glue to hold it down. I used silicone and it was easy to remove later, so this is not a “permanent” solution. You can always take it off and your hotplate will be just fine. The best part is that you can use Bambu or other buildsheets on top of this.
Lightyear G10 plate
Weight: ~365g
Thickness: 2mm
Price: ~$60 (including shipping)
Ease of use: Easy-Medium
Comments: I love the lightyear plate. Installation is easy, it’s low enough I don’t get homing errors and light enough I don’t get force sensor errors. What I don’t like is that I can’t swap out the buildsheet surface, so I’m stuck printing on G10. Now, this works for most materials but something that is “good” for many is often not the best for a single thing: see “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. If you find yourself content with a single bottom texture (glossy) and often dabble in many materials, this is probably the plate for you! If you have demanding projects or materials or want different bottom textures, then you might need those specialized buildsheets.
The FCE Plate. (Flat Cheap and Easy)
Weight: ~365g
Thickness: 2mm
Price: ~$20 for 1, $30 for 2 (including shipping)
Ease of use: Easy-Medium
Comments: I took everything I didn’t like about the goodplate and fixed it. Here’s my version of a DIY plate. I call it the FCE Plate (Flat, cheap, easy). Buy two things off amazon, then spend about 15 minutes assembling. You need thin magnetic adhesive sheets (I bought these) and a cheap 10x10 glass picture frame (I got this). The adhesive sheets come with enough for 2 plates, so you could always buy another picture frame if you have 2 machines. The glass comes right out of the picture frame without any prying, effort, or risk of breakage. You then use 4 of the magnetic sheets around the edges (see image below) and cut a fifth to the correct size to use in the middle. Overlap is fine, just trim it with a razor blade or box cutter. Or find your own arrangement, you just dont want large gaps. Once it’s all good, take a look for any large bubbles and just make a small slash in them to pop them. Small bubbles are fine. This process took me about 10-15 minutes. The glass is a bit smaller than the heatbed, but because it’s thinner than the goodplate, it actually gently adheres to the heatbed. I’m able to nicely lift the buildsheets off and the glass stays behind. However, if I pull forward on a buildsheet the FCE plate will slide forward as well. Because of this, I would recommend a dot of silicone glue in the corners and one in the middle just for safety. The benefit of this is that it’s wicked cheap and you get to use all the Bambu or other Buildsheets. The downside is that you’re left without the little bumpers to align your buildsheets. Hopefully someone can come up with some buildsheet alignment extenders and that’ll be all sorted. I’ve done a few prints on this and it’s been solid! No huge footprint prints yet though, so I can’t say of the magnetism will be strong enough to counteract the contraction of something like a large, square, PETG thing.
Good morning
has anyone recently received a new heating bed and is this level? My heating bed replaced about 3 months ago is basically level, but the edge is higher, so the magnet sticker is raised all around.
I got another offer of the exchange, but would like to wait with it, so that I get a flawless print bed. Perhaps it is now so far that the suppliers deliver flawless goods.
My print bed is already flat. Only the edge of plastic surrounding the metal plate is higher than the plate. Therefore, it looks as if the plate bends down in the middle.
Therefore, I am still waiting for revised print beds where the plastic edge is not higher than the metal plate.
@kungpaoshizi In this context it isn’t 100% correct. If the bed (not bendable) is “flat”, you can put a flexible sheet on it and it will be “flat” too. Of course only if the printplate has an even surface and the thickness is everywhere the same (or the textured PEI is distributed even).
The problem: if the bed isn’t flat, your flexplate will take the shape of the uneven bed. If you have a oval bed, the printplate will take this shape (because of the magnet holding it down)
“Flat”: We will always have some deviation (heat expansion etc.). But in our context 0.05mm – 0.1mm deviation (from the highest to the lowest point) may still be considered flat. Depedning on your use-case it may be a bit more or less. The problem is that we have much more deviation over the whole printbed.
Example: on my Prusa mini I managed (with some mods) to get a max of 0.05 deviation over the hole printbed (measured with the printplate on top). I consider this “flat” for my technical prints.
About the goodplate challenges: Did you or others open a github issue for this? in the end it’s just firmware. If enough people vote for such a feature request to adjust homing etc. for glass plates, bambulab will maybe fix it. This would make it in general easier to use borosilicate glass or other solution that go in the same direction.
I should soon receive my goodplate. If I have such issues I will contact support and see were it is going. In the end it should be in the interest of bambulab to help the community to get simple and cheap solutions for a flat bed (if bambulab is unable to provide such by default)
Btw. if somebody consider buying an X1C: my new printer (mid-July) has a warped bed too.
Is there anyway to measure the bed, leveraging the z leveling probing? This is something really easy to do with Octoprint and Prusa for instance. I am very concerned by this issue. I was about to buy the X1C, but to me this is a showstopper, even more if deviation is increasing over time.
Under the bed is a flexible foamy surface. You’re not attaching the plate to a static surface. The magnetism is under the foamy surface.
This entire query is nonsense I’m afraid. If someone wants a flat surface, they will need to engage glass.
But if someone is prototyping on the machine and wanting flatter than glass, they’re using the wrong machine/tools to do so.
I measured the hotbed of my X1C that was delivered today @ 60C with a Starrett rule and a feeler gauge and found a maximum horizontal clearance of 0.25mm. I found some other areas with a variance between 0.10mm and 0.23mm.
Material engineering is a bit out of my wheelhouse, and I’m new to 3D printing – is anyone aware as to whether or not this is an acceptable tolerance? I planned to use this machine to print some prototype pieces out of ABS/ASA and I’m concerned about the longterm viability of the bed given anecdotes of the warpage increasing over time due to thermal stress.
I’ve seen some people mention tolerances of 0.6mm – 1.1mm (that’d certainly have me returning the printer); does anyone know offhand if this level of tolerance might cause me to run into an issue down the line?
For the people makingvthere own plate using picture frame glass, depending on the glass, it will most likely be warped also. Use mirror because mirror shows all of it’s defects and therefore needs to be very flat.
@kungpaoshizi Thank you for the input with the foam - I have to check this (if it is like this, it would be a main engineering flaw of this printer).
This machine is advertised as a fast-prototyping machine. Flatter then glass: no this is not the goal. The goal is to have a maximum of 0.1mm deviation over the whole bed to get decent prints (better would be <0.05mm)
At the moment I can’t even print on 2/3 of my printbed because otherwise it wan’t stick or even worse because of the big difference. And we already can’t use the whole printbed even if everything is flat (without modification) - here is already a discrepancy between marketing and what we get.
FYI if anybody considers buying this printer: At the moment I’m at the point that I tell all my friends that ask about the X1C NOT to buy this printer, because it is a big Beta-Test from a company that didn’t even know anything about 3D-printing 3 years ago (just check the interview with the CEO). The worst thing: Most of it would be an easy fix (if open sourced). But because it is all closed source, you depend on this company. Therefore wait until Bambulab can deliver what they promised.
You might consider it a flaw if it’s not specifically designed and advsertised as a protoyping machine. Still if you want flat, go with a piece of glass. They’ve not misled anyone from what I’ve seen. Kinda poor sportsmanship to expect that degree of flatness from a prototyping machine that has a bendable plate
And you just look like a bot doing the whole “anyone thinking of buying this!”
Yeah, it’s such a weird flex. And the thought that William thinks it’ll take open sourcing the printer to buy a piece of borosilicate glass is bizarre.
Yes of course, I am a bot…… or maybe just a very frustrated customer
Max. 0.1mm deviation is nothing out of this world. If you have such a large build plate you can’t have too much deviation. And yes, this is possible with flexible build plates. As I wrote earlier I have less then 0.05 on my prusa mini on top of the flexible buildplate- others have less then 0.1mm for their Voron printers. Maybe even 0.2mm would work here with auto-bed leveling, but this is not the point of the discussion.
The issue (and point) is, that the beds from bambulab are sometimes way to warped that a bigger print won’t stick – because not even auto-bed leveling can correct it. And as far as it goes, it must be many warped bed that they even had to write a PR statement. Yes, they put a statement about how they will handle it, but it is 100% PR not more: Otherwise, they would define a specification what warped is and what not. See my case: first they tell me that everything is in specs – but they won’t tell me what the specs are. After more information and videos etc. they send me a replacement.
Therefore: Unusable if your bed is warped too much. If your printer is not capable of using the whole bed area because of this warping it is surely something else than what was promise. Doesn’t matter if you print a prototype or figurines. Bambu hides the “specs” what in their opinion is in spec, they don’t let you see any bed mesh and you can’t change anything in the FW if you get errors because you are using special solutions (like the goodplate).
I said if it was an opensource printer, the fix would be very easy (because we could change FW etc. for the problems that others had with the goodplate). Because it isn’t we can’t have the bedmesh nor fix anything in the FW. It’s logical that they won’t open source it and this is not what I’m asking for.
And yes: I have many friends that are unsure if they should buy a X1C and at the moment I tell them that with the issues I had I would still wait until it is fixed.
My original bed had a pretty bad warp, 0.87mm lower in the center compared to the edges. I used it for five months while waiting to see reports that flat replacements were being delivered. The new one is an acceptable 0.07 mm lower in the center, but I may have just been lucky, since I’m still seeing new reports of curved beds on new printers.
The warp never caused an adhesion problem, even with large models using nearly all the plate, because the auto bed leveling did a great job keeping the nozzle equidistant from the plate. The problem was that the bottoms of all the prints came out with a curve that matched the bed. Straight thin parts were bent unless they could be oriented mostly on the y-axis, large boxes rocked on their bottoms.
I installed my “Goodplate” with some silicon pro 4 (-50 to +180C). It works perfectly. The bed tramming was very easy to do and because it was glued I can now use any printplate I want on the magnetic side (without any clamps)
Now I have a perfect first layer and can use the printer as intended
