finally getting to try a PEI print bed

[solarbird]

I haven’t wanted to try printing on a PEI print bed for a few reasons, the biggest of which being that these are coated steel and held magnetically to the print bed header layer, which means applying – with strong adhesive – a magnetic layer to said heater layer. And I know from other people doing this that this material does not want to come back off.

Also I like glass for flatness and added thermal stability, and I didn’t want to lose that. I mostly like my glass bed.

But then I realised something: I could buy a second glass bed. It could be the plain type with no coating, so dirt cheap. And then I could attach the magnetic layer to that. This means no permanent magnetic layer on my heating plate and even the ability to swap surfaces! 😀

I’m not quite ready to try it tonight because I want to get to some other things but it looks pretty good built out!

I’m cutting away the border with my custom jig so that the standard glass plate bed clips will have space to exist and hold down the glass layer. The magnetic layer will be held down with its adhesive, and the PEI plate will be held down with THE POWER OF MAGNETISM!

I’m really pleased by how clean it looks. I should make cutting jigs more often! It’s so neat and tidy.

It adds about 2mm to total height. I need to either figure out how to mark stop heights on the Z-stop or hopefully just verify that Z-offset in the firmware will let me adjust the bed height manually when I change out beds. (This adds 2mm to the bed height.) I found a Z-offset setting in the firmware but that only seems to be for homing the Z-axis, which is not what I need.

But maybe I’ll find something tomorrow. I hope so, anyway. ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.