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.
I received a replacement bed about 1 month ago. It was slightly worse than my current bed. Both are concave on the X axis.
To anyone reading this, the beds are not flat because itâs bendable plates.
If you want flat, get glass.
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 isnât 100% correct. If the bed (not bendable) is âflatâ, you can put a flexible sheet on it and it will be âflatâ 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 isnât 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)
âFlatâ: We will always have some deviation (heat expansion etc.). But in our context 0.05mm â 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 âflatâ for my technical prints.
@Lostferret Thank you for your FCE input.
About the goodplate challenges: Did you or others open a github issue for this? in the end itâs 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. Youâre not attaching the plate to a static surface. The magnetism is under the foamy surface.
This entire query is nonsense Iâm 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, theyâre 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 Iâm new to 3D printing â 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 Iâm concerned about the longterm viability of the bed given anecdotes of the warpage increasing over time due to thermal stress.
Iâve seen some people mention tolerances of 0.6mm â 1.1mm (thatâd 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?
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I had an big gap, round about an mm. After support ticket i get an new bed, the new bed is perfectly flat, no gap anywhere.
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 itâs defects and therefore needs to be very flat.
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@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 canât even print on 2/3 of my printbed because otherwise it wanât stick or even worse because of the big difference. And we already canât 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 Iâm 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 didnât 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 itâs not specifically designed and advsertised as a protoyping machine. Still if you want flat, go with a piece of glass. Theyâve not misled anyone from what Iâve 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 âanyone thinking of buying this!â
Yeah, itâs such a weird flex. And the thought that William thinks itâll take open sourcing the printer to buy a piece of borosilicate glass is bizarre.
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Yes of course, I am a botâŚâŚ 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 canât 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 wonât stick â 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 â but they wonât 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. Doesnât matter if you print a prototype or figurines. Bambu hides the âspecsâ what in their opinion is in spec, they donât let you see any bed mesh and you canât 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 isnât we canât have the bedmesh nor fix anything in the FW. Itâs logical that they wonât open source it and this is not what Iâm 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.
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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 Iâm 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.
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0.87mm sounds very bad. Interesting that the bed-leveling handled it well.
Even for decorative parts 0.87mm is way to much if you need a flat bottom
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I installed my âGoodplateâ 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
â â â â ! I wish I saw this before I ordered my printer.
Whatâs the quickest way to diagnose if your bed is warped? The ruler trick after a few heat and cooling cycles?
@BobR Besides the measuring (ruler âtrickâ):
One first step could be (all 3 steps need to be done) the following for an indication.
- Bed tramming
- Auto bed leveling
- Then use the touchscreen or bambu studio to move the printhead on the x/y axis (manually).
Keep a close look at the Z-axis lead-screw or the bed: Does the Z-axis move? If yes = it is compensating for the bed-leveling. This doesnât mean that it is warped, just an indication that bed-leveling is doing its job (It will do its job for example when the bed is not trammed correctly or if the bed is not very flat).
After this, you have probably to measure it if you want to know more details about it, because bambulab gives us no way to access the bedmesh data (thank you bambulabâŚ).
After this: the best would be to use an X1C 1.level test print to use as much as you can from your printbed. Then you can check if in general the printer is able to use it. And of course during the print you can keep an eye on the Z-movement (like the manual version). Hint: the z-hop is fast, the âcorrectionâ movement is âslowâ (in comparison)