Level bed test prints - 2.5

Alright guys, TechNibbers here. So up until now we've been using the paper method alone to level our bed. I actually have a couple other methods that I do use quite often, but I'm going to show you in this video the next step, I guess you would say. This will give you a slightly more accurate level. As you can see, my adhesion is pretty good. We're going to be going through starting one of these over here in just a second, and basically what you do is you're going to rub your fingers on it right after it prints to make sure that it's adhered properly. Now everything here seems to be going down pretty well. I do have a little bit of globbing in this corner here, so that's telling me that this corner was just slightly too far away from the bed and it let out a little too much. So I did tighten that down a little bit, and the thing with this is it's printing several layers. You really only need to get through the first layer to make sure that it's sticking and adhering because I have nice even lines all the way around. But I have let it go on to the second layer just because I'm recording this video here. As I said, we're going to jump over to the computer here and we'll get ready to print this, and then we will print another one. So far, so good. It's looking pretty level, so I'm actually going to go and mess with my screws here and we'll take this bed out of level, and then we will get it back to this stage here. I do need to do a little bit of cleaning on my PEI mat, so when I come back, that should be nice and fresh for you. Stay tuned, guys. Some simple one-layer thin discs that I pulled into Kira, and we're going to print one at both of the front two corners, and the reason for that is because I have purposely unleveled this bed and I have one side too close and one side too far away, and that way we can kind of examine the difference, and you can see that I'm actually making an adjustment to my bed when we go through the leveling process. So let's give this a print right now. Now, like I said, I've intentionally unleveled this bed. One side is too high, one side is too low. I cannot in good conscience recommend doing this. The only reason I am doing it is to show you the difference between the before and after of this leveling process. I know for a fact that this PEI is strong enough to withstand the nozzle temperature held up against it basically indefinitely without marring the mat. Those magnetic mats, I have put some holes in those, and I do have other build surfaces, so if you see any scratching, pitting, scarring, anything like that, don't repeat this part of the process yourself because you could actually damage your bed, and I actually have other surfaces laying around to test and to use. So that's not going to be a problem for me. If I mar this up a little bit, I'll just grab another mat. I don't want anybody to damage their machine attempting this. Your machine is probably already out of level, and in that case, you shouldn't panic if you do see a little bit of scraping and dragging because we're going to eliminate that right now. You just want to make sure that you don't run it like that continuously and cause any damage to either the nozzle or the bed itself. And as we're looking here, look at this, see I got, it's pretty thick there, there's a little bit of globbing, that means I'm a little too far away from the bed. And then if you look at the back here, you can hear the extruder clicking, it's not putting any plastic down. This is a good indication that I am too close to the bed. So now that you can see the clear difference, over-extrusion from being too far away from the bed, it's not getting flattened out, and under-extrusion from, well it didn't extrude anything because it's too close to the bed and there's pressure, it can't force it out. So we'll let it start the circles here, and I'm expecting this to be kind of blocky, it should be just a little bit on the chunky or thick side. It seems to be going down alright, you see that mass in the middle of the dot there is a little bit of over-extrusion and that's happening because I'm not close enough to the bed, I'm not getting enough of a squish. It's going to finish this first round here and we will examine it a little closer while it attempts to print the back. Nothing should actually come out in the back, as I said it's way too close to do anything. But we will take a look at this one and then we will let it wrap up whatever it tries to do back there and we will move on to the next step. We are going to be using the paper method to get this as close as we possibly can. There is a video available on just the paper method itself in my 3D Printing 101 playlist and the Ender Beginner playlist. Okay, if I can get some focus here. You can see this scar here where it ran back through it because it was putting down too much plastic. You can see some over-extrusion there. All in all this doesn't look too bad. Most of the time you are going to see some slight lines. If you do a really good job of leveling you can get it perfectly flat. I've seen only very few people and most of them using auto-bed leveling that can get a perfectly smooth mesh. But this actually isn't too bad. I could run with that and print it but I do still want to move it a little further away from the bed and I'm going to have to level it. Back here it is starting to put down a little plastic but it's not going to do much. Like I said that ends way too close to the bed so we are going to go ahead and cancel this print now. We will paper level everything and then we will run our leveling print to level it out even more. Alright, so as you can see we were way out of whack there. I'm going to go ahead and auto-home so I can go ahead and do my initial leveling adjustments with the paper here. So what we do is we auto-home and then disable steppers. Basically what you want to do is get the nozzle right over that wheel there and that's going to give you the most accurate. So when I pull on this it should pull pretty loosely. Yeah, I'm not getting any resistance. That's because it's too far away. So we are going to tighten it up. To tighten it up you are going to turn the screw slightly to the left and now I am pretty snug in there so I'm happy with that. We will move on to the next corner and we already know this corner is too close. The second I got back there I didn't even get all the way back and it bit into the paper so I'm going to turn the screw counter-clockwise which will bring the bed closer to the screw. Moving the bed further away from the nozzle and right about in there is pretty good. Tighten it down just a touch. And we need to take our paper and go over to the next corner and this corner is not too bad. I'm actually going to leave that like that and we will run to the front corner and this one is a little loose so I need to go clockwise. A little more, a little too much and there we go. Now I'm also, you want to do a diagonal jump most of the time because that will give you a more accurate reading. So let me see if I can do this one-handed here. And I know that this was my corner that was the most out of whack so now that I've adjusted some of the other ones I'm going to go back and make sure this one is still good and we are sliding a little too freely now so instead of being too tight it is slightly too loose so I'm going to tighten it up a little bit. And it doesn't hurt after leveling them all out to come over and check the middle of the bed. Now this one is going to require minor adjustments from all four corners and I'm not moving so I'm going to go ahead and bring them all, we're talking a minute fraction here, a little bit closer and they need to come about the same amount so there we go. So now that we've got our paper leveling method done we're going to go ahead and run our actual leveling test print. I got to give a shout out to Chuck Hellebeck from Chapier, this is the model he uses to level his bed and it is a very accurate and worthwhile process. So he's telling me I got a 40 minute print, that's because there's several layers and I'm only going to do the first one. I do want to go in here and remove my skirt because basically this is all skirting at the moment and I don't need any adhesion. So I'm going to hit the slice button, actually since it's going to take a second to slice I'm going to go in here and hit preheat so we're getting a little bit closer there and it is sliced so I'm printing via USB. I'm going to do a little video on the pros and cons of having your Ender 3 hooked directly to your computer. I did notice some issues that it caused but I've had mostly good luck with it. I do tend to use Octoprint quite a bit and I have no problem with plugging this in and just using an SD card that works probably the best without introducing any other points of outside failure to the process. So we're going to hit print via USB, should be pretty close to temperature here and I'll show you exactly how to run this process and level your bed out. I need to clean this off before I can run another one but if I were to remove the mat right now it would kind of defeat the purpose of what we're doing because it never ends up exactly how it was and also when prying this off you want to be careful not to apply too much downward pressure to the plate or cause it to shift or move at all so I'm just being real gentle peeling off these scraps. I am going to have to go around and get these pieces that didn't quite adhere and then we will kick it on again. Looks like we're good to go so should just go right to printing. Does have to heat back up and we'll check out how the second time goes down. Alright our second run is already having better results here. I've gotten far enough away without letting it peel up. This one does need another little minor adjustment but the back is looking good. It went down the first time no problem so let's watch it start the next one here. That's looking pretty good. It's not coming off. I'm going to let this print finish up. We will show you when it's completed and take another look. Here we have our finished copy of the print. It is one layer all the way around and it is fairly even. It's looking pretty good so now what we're going to do is we're going to throw a test model on here and we're going to print the first layer to make sure we don't have any peeling defects warping anything like that but from this point we should be really level and ready to go. Alright so as you can see here's that little blob I was talking about. That's where the head stopped. I did tug at it a little bit. That's why it's peeling off but if we look over here this is well within acceptable. It's very nice. Went down mostly even. Now I will tell you this is a $12 kilo of filament so it doesn't melt the most even and that's why you see a couple of little thin spots like this. And you can tell it's the filament because it's not a thin spot in a location. It would be rounder or shaped like the divot in that case. This is just a flow issue where it was flowing slightly less right there but all in all our first layer is looking pretty nice. The bottom is super smooth. Everything is all leveled out and there you have it guys. And as always guys I am Technivorous. Thanks for watching this video. Don't forget to hit the like button. You can subscribe right here by clicking on the icon and I put a couple videos up in the corner. One of them is going to be my latest video, my latest upload and the other one is going to be what YouTube recommends for you so feel free to check those out. Don't forget to hit that bell for notifications down below and we'll see you guys next time.