Warping Issues w/ Large Thin PAHT-CF Print on X1C - Help Needed

I have been struggling with warping when printing this functional part in PAHT-CF. I have also tried PA6-CF and got similar results. The hardware is X1C, 0.6mm Nozzle, Engineering Plate + Glue Stick. I’m also adding screenshots of the settings for reference.

I don’t think it’s a plate adhesion issue since the first layer remains bonded to the plate throughout. The plate edges do however slightly lift up from the bed at the widest part of the print, around 2mm or so.

Here’s what I tried so far:

  • Insulating the printer to be able to get the chamber to 60°C.
  • Pre-heating the chamber to 60° before printing.
  • Turning off AUX fan and Chamber fan during and post-print.
  • Letting the print slowly cool down for hours until it’s room temperature,
  • Slow down first layer to 25mm/s and the rest to 35mm/s
  • Drying to filament at 70°C for over 30hours
  • Gyroid Infill to reduce warp

Does anyone have recommendation on what to do next to fix this warping? Thank you in advance






Curious for input on this as I have similar issues when printing higher temp materials.

Have you tried bringing the nozzle temperature down to 260-270? It will decrease the temperature difference between the new layers and the bed so there is less of a temperature variation which should reduce warping when the new layers cools.

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Apart from what you have done and assuming that you have done manual and near perfect PA/Flow calibrations :

  • try to rotate on angle, not much space in your print but … .
  • Try to bump the bed to the max 110C
  • Reduce the fan speed to the minimum which does not affect your print it seems that you can do it bellow 20 or even completely off for the speeds and model you are using ( assuming aux and chamber are off )
  • Check your bed if flat and not curved after you preheat it to 100C and something straight you can use sheets of paper under to measure i had 0.6mm(fixed)
    Check your flow in the sliced model and try to make it the same(unified). not sure how to do it perfectly in OrcaSlicer/Bambu . But with speeds and line widths you can be make it close
  • Try using the same layer heights and same line widths and same speeds all around. This should be able to make the flow unified can be checked in the sliced model , e.g. a bit more unified cooling
    Bringing down the speed to 70mm/S helped for some of the models
  • as suggested reducing the Print temp helps , but for me that caused more problems as getting to a place with bad layer adhesion and in my tests was not a great improvement compare to the other things i tried. Best outcome for me was with unified flow, reduced fans, reduced speed, blanket and slowly reducing the bed temperature after the print
  • increasing or decreasing infill percentage is worth trying as well , medium success on some prints in my case with increasing

The first layer speed is not good enough as the problem happens from the top layers when not unified shrinkage(cooling or different flow) is happening. For some prints i was able to overcome the problem by reducing the print speed bellow 70mm/S and minimum or no fan, Also the chamber is releasing the temp unevenly so a i did a thermo blanket around

While it prints check if the build plate is not lifting , magnet is not strong enough sometimes if too much warp , some binder clips helps

Unfortunately no silver bullet here , similar problems on some prints for months some was able to resolve some changed the print

There are some threads to improve increase the wait time with heat Bed-on after the print is finnished you leave the bed on and slowly bringing it down ,as well as actively heated chamber . found that M191 with 110C and 5C decrease every 5-10 minutes helps on some prints.

Please advise how if you solved it and what worked for you i solved it for most models but time to time is still a problem , but have not tried the active chamber heating and the AUX( part fan) modifications

Thermo camera on the heat bed and on the model can help you to identify variations , i am borrowing one from time to time to see how bad it is . Also on the build plate i see more than 10C initially variations especially around the edges and even after soak time 4-5C variations and more

EDIT: changing the infill Gyroid and grid did not make for me much difference but changing the infill orientation did in some cases , which was similar result to rotate the object for some prints

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I print Carbon fibre nylon, and after a lot of testing I found the only solution is replace the thin sheets that bend too easily and replace them with 2.5mm thick steel plates custom cut for the printer bed. The surface is painted with grey primer paint, and I use Elmers Xtreme glue stick with 30C bed temperature and 295C nozzle. Believe it or not, I use the open air A1-MINI with prints that take the full bed and are 25-50mm in height. Still get about 0.2mm of warp at the corners of print that is almost the full size of the A1-MINI. This is still caused by the material contraction forces bending the 2.5mm thick steel plate! Next step is to go with thicker steel plate, but that is a massive amount of weight for a bed slinger, thought about using carbon fibre plates but steel with paint is unaffected by high print temperatures, dunno how well the epoxy in carbon fibre plates would work, also won’t stick to magnetic bed. Core XY would be ideal for this, but I don’t currently have a X1C. The filament is kept at 70C at all times while printing. Some manufacture nylon comes dried in beautiful aluminum bags. Any Nylon filament in plastic bags that is wet is dried for 3 days before printing in off the shelf filament driers that get to 65C.

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There’s a proven solution for that. Bond it to a spring-steel build plate (perhaps an old Bambu Lab build plate you no longer use) and–hey, presto!–you now have a very stiff magnetic build plate. I and others have done it successfully with G10 garolite, and so I presume it would work just as well with carbon fiber board.

The key question, then, is which works better, G10 or carbon fiber? I’ve not tried carbon fiber, but maybe you know? At a bed temperature of 120C (available on the 110v X1C), I get good ABS adhesion to G10, yet automatic release when cooling down. G10 is widely available in a lot of different thicknesses and is generally cheaper than CF at any given thickness. Maybe CF is stiffer though, which might be a reason to try it. If that were the only factor deciding in CF’s favor, though, you could maybe just use a thicker G10, or, alternatively, use G11, which is stiffer than G10.

Because X1C does mesh leveling by nozzle-tapping, it’s the perfect platform for this type of build plate, whether GF or CF. AFAIK, your build plate can be however thick you want it, with increased weight as the trade-off (as you’ve already noted). Ignoring weight as a possible issue, it could probably be an inch thick and still not cause a collision, because the X1C homes down to the middle of the build plate from what looks like a generous starting altitude of around a couple inches or so. 2mm G10 is already pretty stiff. I’m guessing 6mm would be more than be stiff enough to resist whatever shrinkage forces ABS might throw at it, but even if that guess were proven wrong, I’m just sayin’ you’d still have plenty of headroom to go much thicker if you ever had a need to.

Anyhow, please do let me know though if you ever do try it with CF. :slightly_smiling_face:

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What do you use to bond the G10 to the steel?

@militech6

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perfect! I’m getting ready to experiment with different thicknesses of sheet metal (14, 12, and even 10 ga). the 12 ga I will bond to a 2mm thick sheet of the Garolite. The other two thicknesses I will just coat with primer as tbitz suggested to see how well they do. I printed a part that has a block (3.5" x 3.5" x .375") situated right at the corner of the build plate. I noticed the bottom of this square was very warped. I though it was lifting off the plate but I realized this morning after printing a second one that it was the entire plate that lifted at the corner. the print was still stuck to the plate. I’m using X1C with all the recommended settings for PAHT-CF. My enclosure gets to about 45C. I’m also wondering if placing some sort of clips around the edges would also do the trick. Just worried the nozzle might run into them.
Thanks again for the advice!

@militech6 IIRC, there may be some some very narrow clips you can download and print. Unfortunately, the purge lines are so close to the edge that there’s not much margin for error. I’m not sure whether collision detection on the X1C was ever implemented or, if so, whether it reacts quickly enough to avoid a bent heat break. If you go that route, you might want to turn the first layer speeds way down until you know for sure the nozzle and the lidar camera won’t be ramming the clips at speed.

You’re right. there are some bed clamps on Printables by Blind Maker. He made them for the X1 and P1. I’m giving this a try as well and then comparing the results.

Any update here? I too face warping / lifting when printing PAHT-CF :frowning:

I print PAHT-CF on an PETG raft with 80°C bed temp with minimal warping and the part is seperating really good from the raft after it cooled down

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There are solutions that help quite simply against warping:

  1. use a rigid print plate that cannot be deformed. I use a glass plate for this, which I have attached to a flexible print plate.

  2. If you blow on the component during printing, you will provoke uneven cooling of the material, which can cause the print to detach from the printing plate.

  3. use an adhesion promoter, Glue Stick works well for me, even on glass at high temperatures. This increases the likelihood that the printed object will adhere to the print plate.

  4. It can also help to print more slowly. The material simply has more time to cool down and warping becomes less likely. Where possible, this can be the most effective measure. With nylon, however, you would have to print from a dryer because it absorbs more and more moisture the longer the prints take.

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I printed a small set of bed clamps. I use 4. They don’t interfere with anything and they solve the problem for me.

That did the trick. Thank you!