3d printer bed wont heat? Check your wires! HOW TO FIX!

Now, before we get to the video, if you're new to the channel, I wanted to let you know that we try to stay up to date on all things 3D printing, from filament and printer reviews to in-depth slicer analysis, as well as a plethora of how-to videos. So, if you haven't already, make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so you can be notified every time we post a new video. Hey guys, TechNibbers here. I decided to jump on the bandwagon and print my own Mandalorian helmet. My Ender 3's not quite big enough to print one that'll fit my head, so I'm printing it in pieces. I got a couple nice pieces done yesterday, and then today I woke up and turned my Ender 3 on, and we were having some issues with the bed not wanting to heat. Now, I did a couple of tests. I hit it with a heat gun to make sure that it wasn't the thermistor. Because I was getting a room temperature reading, I was pretty sure that that wasn't the problem. When I hit it with the heat gun, it did raise the temperature, it was reading properly, and everything else. It just wouldn't raise it itself. So, that led me to believe that it was a power connection to the bed itself. Now, there is a chance that it is the connector down in here, the MOSFET that hooks it to the board. But, I actually found the problem already, and in order to show you what that problem is... Well, I guess I can show you. In order to fix that problem, we're going to have to remove the heated bed completely. And, take a look in here. You can see... Let me see here, I've got a light somewhere. There we go. Now, if you look, there is a wire that has come disconnected from the solder joint. And, that's because there's no extra slack in this. So, sometimes when it gets really, really hot, and you're running when you get to the end of your length here... It can pull that out of there. Now, it's not completely disconnected, but we are going to have to go in and re-solder it. And, in order to do that, we are going to first remove these four bed leveling screws, so we can take the bed plate itself off. Now that I've removed the four bed leveling screws, the bed will just pop right off. Obviously, be careful not to lose any of the springs. We're going to do a little dusting while we're in here, and then I will flip this over and show you how to solder it back on. Here's a slightly better view of what's going on here. This is the underside of my heated bed, and as you can see, this wire right here is the positive wire. It's supposed to be wired in right here, and it is not. My thermistor is wired up fine, no problem there. No yanking, pulling, anything like that. The Kapton tape is holding pretty well, not having any issues with that. So, I'm going to need to pull this wire back, strip it down just a little bit, re-solder the connection here, and then we will reinstall the bed. Alright, so I've exposed a little more wire. Could have done a better trim job on the sheath there, but since I have a nice pool of solder here already, I'm going to tin the end of this and then just hook it back in. Alright, as you can see, I clipped the thermistor wires out of the way. I didn't want to melt those with my soldering iron or melt the coating and solder them together, cause a short or anything. And then I re-soldered the positive connection. And then I also added a little bit of extra solder to the negative connection, cause it looked like it was starting to fray there a little bit as well. Could be a little bit cleaner solder job, but it'll do. And now we need to reassemble the print bed. Right, so now for the moment of truth before I finish cleaning up my bed. And obviously it will need re-leveling because I took out all the screws. We are going to make sure that our thermistor is heating. Now don't mind this piece of tape, that's to mark the minimum height for a layer change on a model I'm printing. Because I haven't decided exactly where to change the filament yet, so that's just kind of a little placeholder for me. We're going to go ahead and hit print from. No, we don't want to do that, cause I need to level the bed first. We're going to hit prepare. Control, I don't know what I'm doing. Temperature. Bed. We'll set it to 40 because it wouldn't go that high before. Now we go back to our main screen here and we'll see if it starts to heat. You can see it's set at 40 and it's already creeping up. 25, 26, 27, 28, 29. Alright, so we have our bed all ready to go. Now real quick while I'm in here, I am going to crank this temperature up a little bit more. The model I'm printing is going to be doing 65 on the bed because I'm using some PETG. And I'll go ahead and heat it up to that temperature. The reason I'm doing that before leveling it is because it does warp as the heat changes. So I noticed that when I leveled it for 50 degrees and then increased the bed temperature that it warped out of position and it caused some layer separation. So I need to heat it to the temperature I'm going to be printing at, level it out, and we'll get another print going. But all in all, pretty quick and simple fix and we're back up and running. As always, this channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to support the channel on Patreon, head over to www.patreon.com. Alright guys, that's going to be the end of this video. As always, thank you. I'll put a video up right here that you can check out for more of our stuff. And if you're still here and you haven't already, why don't you click right here and subscribe to the channel.