Tobold's Blog
Sunday, June 17, 2018
 
Warp speed

If you consult various sites with guides and videos on 3D printing, you will see a lot of advice on how to prevent warping: The first layers of your print curling up at the edges because of lack of adhesion, ruining your print. I have been 3D printing for over a year now, and today is the first time this actually happened to me. My XYZ printer came with squares of masking tape that self-adhered to the glass build plate and always provided perfect adhesion of my prints. The new Zortrax printer has a build plate with lots of little holes in it; the first layer enters little spikes into those holes and my main problem was that adhesion was too good.

Then this week the software gets an update to "improve adhesion", and I'm running into serious problems: The rafts stick so strongly to the build plate that I need a lot of force to remove it from the build plate, damaging the printed parts in the process. I need to decrease adhesion! In view of the bed being heated to 65°C, I can't exactly grease that build plate. So I apply a layer of candle wax by rubbing a candle over the hot build plate. The result is my first ever print with warping.

So now I know how to get too much adhesion, and I know how to get too little adhesion. Just a matter of finding the sweet spot in the middle.

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