C’mon, I can’t be alone: After printing with nearly a dozen of printers, I never missed the option of automatic bed leveling. I adjust the bed manually once, to make it level and then hardly ever touch it again.
Good for you!
Or even better, having a metal frame square enough to never need leveling in the first place. Fiddle with the z endstop for some 10 minutes, and done.
@Rene_Jurack You can do that (I do it on my Mendel90) but auto-levelling/tramming is a convenience that most users expect now.
@Josef_Prusa has taken things one step further and also compensates for mis-aligned X and Y axes.
A perfect build and time spent on meticulous calibration could obviate these functionalities but if it comes as part of the design then why not use it?
@Neil_Darlow Maybe thats the reason. It is the experience with my own builds and I always try to build them perfectly.
I will add the following. I took my Steel Prusa to Maker Faire last weekend in a duffel bag. it came out square and printed without needing any calibration. I had only leveled the bed when I built it/ changed out the cheap extruder for an E3D.
Absolutely, I use a dial indicator to level mine, takes a few minutes. Only have to do that when the bed has been worked on, replaced a bearing or heat bed or such. I haven’t had to touch it for over 6 months and the prints come out spot on. It’s a He3D i3 clone btw.
@Rene_Jurack You’re not alone there. That is one reason I like to build my own printers. I want to get as close to mechanically precise as possible. Once leveled I rarely have to touch or adjust the bed. Typically only when I change out nozzles for different levels of detail. In my opinion assembled precision allows all the corrective Firmware functions to work that much better… if you want to use it. I have never needed to.
On my latest round I have now printed eight (8) 30 - 40 hour prints (same tape) covering nearly the entire 10 x 10 bed and it is just as level as it was when I started the project. My print precisions fall within 0.1mm.
Same here. I did try auto leveling (twice) but i always ended up removing it. There is no need for it if you know your machine well enough.
That’s fine if your printer isn’t used by an entire hackerspace worth of people. Or if you’re an experienced printer user. Not everyone who uses a 3D printer fits those criteria.
My last printer was a DIY ultimaker original and the wooden Z platform wasn’t very rigid, so i had to adjust the 3 point leveling almost every print. My leveling process was to have the skirt go 3 loops and i adjusted the height by watching the extrusion line. I still prefered that to any auto leveling and it worked perfectly.
I could live without it but I would rather have my slab of aluminum hard bolted down to the bearings in comparison to having springs. Like @ThantiK said lots of people using machines makes it more difficult to keep level. One of the many reasons why I’m loving our Lulzbot Mini’s.
Seems so that this really depends on the frame. Acrylic or wood parts move and force you to level regularly. Metal frame most probably will allow you not to need often to level. But that also depends as I had a printer with metal frame which needed to be fixed to a plate in order to be able to level only once.
Mine’s an acrylic frame and it’s perfectly stable. I’ve marked out the corners of the machine on the table and just make sure it’s positioned in the same place each time. The table itself isn’t even level, but the bed remains square relative to the rest of the machine, in manufacturing it’s called repeatability. I’m a fitter/Machinist by trade with many years of CNC experience, and though I haven’t worked in that field for many years, the techniques used remain fresh in my mind, do the same job in exactly the same setup and it becomes repeatable and predictable.
The prusa i3 mk2 is the first machine I have had with auto leveling and it is the first machine (of 5) that I have had that just seems to work every single time. What I have seen on the others are trouble adapting to surfaces that a not level (i.e. They have a high spot in the middle or something) I don’t think auto level is something that is used all to often, but mapping out the nuances of your machine that first time can very difficult. I’d be all for a machine that was built with high enough quality parts or in such a way that level and squaring only needed to happen once but in my experience the only way to get it absolutely perfect is through some software intervention.
Ever heard of putting a sheet of glass over the heater plate, much flatter and truer than printing on the bed directly.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I leveled my bed - I do know that it was more than a year ago. In the time since, on four separate occasions, I’ve put it in the front seat of my truck, put the seat belt through the frame, and driven 70 miles round trip for library demonstrations. I print on 2.5 mm window glass directly on the heatbed pcb and the leveling springs are adjusted down to be almost coil to coil solid. I’ve never considered fooling around with auto leveling - never seen the need.
My experience was that heat was not even after adding glass, I’ll definitely take a look at the cast aluminum.
Cast plates and such are very expensive, I live on a very limited income and have to budget just to get what I have. I’ve had no trouble printing on glass, and actually would still use it even if I could afford a cast plate. I’d prefer it because it also offers protection to the heatbed, much rather sacrifice a sheet of glass than something much more expensive, not that I’ve had to so far. As for the thermal properties, I have absolutely no problem with that, my temperature gun sees very little difference across the bed, don’t know if that’s because I live in the tropics and the relatively high ambient temperature has a bearing or not.
Price of parts is paramount in many of my decisions, saw a discussion the other day about RAMPS boards, someone replied get a Smoothie or Rambo instead, I priced those boards and the cheapest I could find one in Oz was about $75, ten times the cost of a RAMPS board. They also mentioned the Arduino/RAMPS combo was only 8 bits while the Smoothie was 32 bit, so what, the Arduino/RAMPS setup is well up to running a 3D printer without hardly breaking a sweat, the choice is clear to me. Now if it was a milling machine or even a laser engraver where axis speeds are greater and calculations therefore needed to happen at a greater rate, then fine, but for a FDM 3D printer, nay.
A well designed and assembled should seldom need adjustments. I think that auto bed levelling is for cost savings. You can design and build a printer with cheaper parts, it could sag or settle, bolts loosen or panels warp and it’ll still print fine.