Tom, I can't tell you how Linus Tech Tips makes graphs. However, I can tell you that you're on the right path with knocking things over during the video shoot. ;)
I dont mean to be so offtopic but does any of you know of a method to get back into an Instagram account? I somehow forgot my login password. I would love any help you can give me!
@Milan Alfonso Thanks so much for your reply. I got to the site thru google and Im trying it out atm. Looks like it's gonna take quite some time so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
I did not realize before this video that warping is comparable to layer height. I should re-calibrate my printer while it is completely heated. Thank you, Thomas!
The heated bed warping is a great example on why using a raft for printing is better for accurate prints in the z axis. A raft of roughly 5 or more layers can greatly help take out the inaccuracies in your print from bed height differences. You sacrifice a pretty smooth part surface for a more accurate print.
Would be great to see how your Mendel and delta heated beds perform with those tests. Thicker aluminium might lead to better results with fan blowing on it. Your heater for the delta has way more power than the prusa i3’s power supply, so it would be interesting to see how that affects it. Also would be great to see how insulation under the heated bed affects the performance. It would also be great to see how different cooling fan designs affect the temperature of the bed when printing a part. Or how about using flir camera to show temperature differentials within an ABS part and how that leads to curling and layer splits. So many things to do, so little time! Great video, really enjoyed them. Can’t wait to see some more!
I don't know if this is how those nice charts are made, but I know, that excel can make some actually impressive looking charts when choosing the right theme. PS. Pro tip, in excel instead of screenshotting the chart, just select and press ctrl+c, then go into ms paint and paste by pressing ctrl+v, then save it.
All of this (as well as the previous part) have led me to try a 0.5mm aluminium sheet on top of a 5mm aluminium plate. The aluminium sheet (with 0.2mm PEI on top) will then act similar as a removable spring steel sheet (of course much less flex possible before permanently bending it) and will be held by a couple of clamps. I'll see how this combination works out.
Great video. One point about fan recovery. I think the bed should be able to keep up if you are cooling the bed near where the thermistor is reading the temp. I think the reason the UM3 takes a while to recover is that (at least on the UM2, I just had apart) the thermistor is way in the back near the power connectors. Some printers I know have thermistor near the center.
I have a thermal camera, it is super uniform. In my case I have a keenovo 750w heater underneath so the results may be useless though. CR-10s with keenovo under an aluminium sheet (stock solution) and ultrabase on top.
Important work. Thanks for that info. The warping during the temp adjust is probably the reason for poor adhesion of prints that sometimes is hard to explain.
Awesome work thank you. But you should account for the differences in bed size to scale the magnitude of the warping deflection. Also the location of the bed temperature sensor is important.
Nice. That's why when I manually level the bed, I wait 5 minutes after it "reaches" temp. This is the type of video that really helps people understand printers a little more. Good job. I've done similar measurements with the Zonestar (steel frame ver.) I use. It has almost 5 km of filament printed through it. Only had to replace the nozzle twice because of burnt wood filament. Oops.
Tom, you need to incorporate your country into your videos every now and again, I used to live there. It is a really beautiful place. Great scientific video btw, it had to be a bit annoying to re-shoot this video, I have experienced similar situations on my channel. soooo much time in editing!
Some apps like "Thermal Camera+ for FLIR One" allows one to set a fixed range inside the app, very useful if you are looking for very subtle changes in temperature, and don't want to be blinded by radiators. Admittedly I have only used it on there older models of camera and don't know if it works on the new ones.
I hate to say this, but there is something about the Prusa PC print bed that you aren't taking into account. There are actually two PEI layers between the heater element and the print surface (one on either side of the steel sheet). And the middle PEI layer is only in point contact with the heater (because of the rough texture of the powder coated surface). It would be informative to see the difference between the (difficult to obtain) powder coated PEI sheet that you used and the smooth PEI sheets (sticker based) that currently come with the machines. Even more interesting (though would again get to a non-common surface) would be to get a bare steel sheet and only put the smooth PEI surface on one side, then run the test with the bare metal surface against the soldermask of the heated bed. (Removing one layer of insulation out of the stackup.)
Would love to see some similar types of comparisons with: bare bed (already performed in this video), bed with aluminium coated mylar radiant shield underneath, bed with closed-cell adhesive-backed neoprene applied to entire underside. Does the heat shields improve things or do they increase emissivity more than they improve heat insulation ? Do they reduce fan temperature drop ? …speed recovery time on removal ? I don't think anyone has done this type of empirical bed testing: you're blazing trails here and the world is better for it. Thanks Tom ! ♥️
After your first video, I decided to fit an aluminium plate to my Sigmax and add the Filafarm switch plate system. Apart from a huge amount of time wrestling with levelling, due to the weight, the printer is now printing like a boss. My failing prints were due to lousy bed temps, so thank you for that and this video.
For the nice looking charts question: I think LMG designs them in programs like Illustrator and probably together with after effects for interactive ones. At least that's how I would do it, just spent some time on making a nice template, use the chart tools and insert data.
My dial indicators have a tungsten tip. Super hard as to not wear and thermally stable. A regular indicator tip will not show any significant deflection in this test, possibly 0.003mm within 100°C. They are usually stainless or a tool steel, also stable materials for general measuring. Where a heat insulator should be used, in any 3D printer, is under the bed as a blanket to increase the efficiency of the hot plate. With as much heat soaking into the bed and not the ambient air you can regain the heat lost from that tiny fan test in no time. Remember, the plastic you just printed is more surface area for a breeze to cool the bed down. Besides, as long as you don't use glass you don't really need the bed on after 5mm or so. Try it for yourself, you'll see. Add M107 after you find the first Z5. Let me know how it turns out. As for bed warping, that is how material science works. You fasten a plate simply by the corners and you will get this kind of middle-of-the-bed flex. Up or down. Using thicker aluminum plate(I have 5mm) will help prevent some of the flex but not all. Having a thermally stable material such as [CENSOR] is what I'm waiting to test. :-)
For the Prusa I would think that any bed warp before the bed leveling routine is not of interest. But now I know why the machine waits until the bed have reached set temperature before doing that. It would have been timesaving to do it while heating up.
Could you do some "benchymarking" with a perspective of reviewing power consumption? Take a 1 FFF printer. print a benchy, test different materials, An enclosure, an extruder sock, different bed types, glass/Aluminium/Steel. Maybe looking at the efficiency of the PSU.See which uses the most in KWh and if there are any simple things that can be done to improve it.
Since you already got FLIR camera maybe testing cooling method for controller board/driver. Which is better, heatsink on top vs bottom of driver? Also testing on fan cooling on top vs bottom on integrated driver board like Duet Wifi.
Great work very interesting, I happen to own an Ender 3 the heatbed and frame are the only stock parts left. Would love to see how the E3D High Temperature Heated Beds "mordor bed" or other high wattage heat-beds compare.
Does anyone have good recommendations for high temp thermistors for the nozzle heater block that can go beyond 300 C? Thanks for your great work, Tom... i've learned a lot about 3d printing from your channel, and still at times rewatch some of your old videos for refreshing my memory. xD I suppose i should get rid of my glass top plate... i kinda added it because my aluminum bed was a bit to thin and might have gotten bent when i made it, i followed your recommendation and got a 600w 240v ac silicon mat and for my 20x20 bed and it just works wonder wonderful. will heat up to 150 C in like a minutes or two.... not really sure if it heats consistently, but with all that power, i don't think it has much choice, and the glass plate did seem to solve my bed warping issues, but i may try and make a 2nd layer of thicc aluminum removable top plate, because why wouldn't i want it removable. and then i don't have to solve the issue with moving the mat from one piece of alu to the new one xD also built an enclosure for my 3d printer, my recent problems is that my thermistor in the nozzle block becomes wildly inaccurate above 260 C. and my extruder doesn't really wanted to grip well, so i will be switching to a dobit "bondtech" chinese clone extruder which looks kinda nice.
I had massive leveling problems with my Lulzbot Taz 5 until I discovered I had to level at full temperature. Not sure if the temp of the hotend matters, but definitely the bed.
Oh the humanity! Quick, somebody notify D.I.P.S. (Dial Indicator Protection Services) Great video as usual, Tom. Curious if you have any plans to do any future bed testing with your Mendel testing rig i.e. the variety of flexible/magnetic removable plate platforms? And thanks for the graphs.
What i take it from this great video is, if prusa heated bed will be from aluminium (with magnet and externeal heating elements) with some more advanced thermo isolation on bottom and with better placed thermocouple or maybe more then one thermocouple like center, edge and corner. Then we will have a ideal heated bed.
Awesome investigation. Does this confirm that if you have a troublesome bed that potentially warps, the quickest fix is simply glass with/without a PEI sheet on top?
Glass will warp upward if the underlying bed also warps upward. If it underlying bed goes down then there will be an air gap in the middle and the bed will not reach the temperature that the sensor is reading. Adding more layers to a heat bed will throw a wrench in the thermal properties of your printer.
Thank you for experimenting and sharing all of this information! It would be interesting to see histograms showing the heat distribution of the different heated beds, to help quantify the gradients and general inconsistencies. Providing the standard deviation as error bars to the mean measurements you made would shed some light on this too. The FLI software might be able to provide these over a user-defined region of interest, but if not we can produce these ourselves using the raw images. Regarding plots, ever since I started making plots in python with the matplotlib package I've never felt the need to use anything else. MATLAB and other high level programming languages work well too.
I was going to ask if a double boiler type of heated bed would be good as it would really allow even distribution, but apparently water's heat transfer is pretty low. So what about a copper bed? It's apparently higher than aluminum and even gold, and while the price is nearly four times, it's no gold or silver.
Wouldn't the best construction be the heat source sandwiched between two identical sheets of aluminum? The stresses in the two layers should cancel out if they have stiff enough connections to each other.
I was about to ask exactly the same question. Thanks. So with the sandwich idea, which would be better? 1. Slipping the thermistor in between the sheets or 2. Embedding it in the upper sheet so it's closer to the top surface?
Similar to what I expected: the base under the print surface should be thicker aluminium do distribute heat and have a mass. Actually I don't even understand why Prusa is using FR4 PCB instead of aluminium-based one. Thicker bed is bad however for moving-Y-bed printers, and also slows down startup on low power heaters, but definitely good idea for high powered silicone heater. One thing which I am most concerned about: the mounting method could have effect of warping not just during heat-up stage but all the time while heated up, because the bed expands laterally too, and if the mounting screws can not move in the holes of the (much colder) carrier plate the assembly could warp.
Wow good job, just what I am thinking about, I didn’t complain though. Thanks for showing with the dial. I will try the sideways expansion. Didn’t thought of that until I saw those Vorons & Rats bed sitting on rollers 😊. Thank you so much 💕
Been procrastinating on breaking out the 20yr old $30k Inframetrics (now FLIR) thermal camera to watch the bed & parts. Just need a recording device w/ an s-video input. Amazing what you learn on the job w/ a thermal camera. The things that reflect & block IR that you wouldn't think about. Hollywood lies so much in this arena.
@thomas: you told about the fast increasing temperature of ender 3 and that the temp exceed... Did you think about that your fan is at the point of the thermistor? And second: what do you think is the result of this cooling in a printer with/without housing... Because of printing ABS? Can you repeat the measurements with temporary housing?
Why can't I combine a removable flex bed with a heated aluminum base? You could use magnet paper or magnets fitted on the underside of the aluminum.... Right?
yeh, I can confirm the aluminum beds, I have a micron (probably +/- 10 micron, but values average between 3 points and samples never go outside that or it reports an error) accurate z and probe when hot and cold (max number duet allows, use the map with a leadscrew adjustment for prints), other than where the traces are, points do not move at all between the two. (now my aluminum plate is still bent light crazy across the diagonal corners and you should use a glass bed but it doesn't warp, allowing for mid temp changes and accurate adaptive 1st layers)
Hey Tom what are your thoughts on Aluminum bed with silicone heater mat and a spring steel sheet with PEI coating which sits on top of the aluminum bed and is held magnetically?
I have the Tmc5161 on my bench, and it is a whole different animal, but about no current firmware supports the best features stealthchop2 and stallguard2 are very good and freely configurable.
As I mostly print with a bed between 85 and 100 (HIPS, ABS, NYLON) a test at those temps would have been interesting - but great job and good info. BTW I up the bed to 85-90 on PLA as it anneals while you print - at least if the print is about 2 in (50mm) or less tall and the print time is 2 hours plus - and you leave it enclosed and sitting on the bed until the bed reaches room temp (made a video on that on my channel)
Hi Tom. Awesome job. How much would the bed movement, change the temps? Checking the mesh-bed leveling, prusa checks 9 locations. Grabbing the #’s, thru Octopi, I get 49. I would like to know if we can change or add the locations?
I think you should have included e3d's new high temp beds in this, their mounting method according to them prevents warping when heating up. Great video though
So basically Ender 3 comes out as a champion out of this video. Weird because I have a lot of problems with bed warping on my ender 3, fake buildtak completly coming off when trying to print ABS(100*C) and it's impossible to have it leveled across entire surface, for each print I always just look at the brim/skirt and adjust the bed so it's leveled just in the spot that I'm currently using.
Interesting ... best heated bed? Aluminum plates seem to work well. Thus, I can see how well water based cooling/heating channels could allow for rapid energy bursts (cooling/heating) ... Food for thought ...
Linustechtips has charts? Well that's news to me. I thought it was all about waiting for Linus Sebastian to drop yet another expensive product on the floor, and then betting on whether he broke it or not.
I am curious what are the warping differences between CAST aluminum and EXTRUDED aluminum. When I built my custom 3d printer a few years ago, I was advised to buy cast AL because when it heats up there is less internal stress and less chance of warping. How many of the commercially sold printers are using cast? Are any using extruded?
It is usually sheet aluminum. I guess that could be called extruded, though it is rolled to the desired thickness. Pouring your own cast AL bed would be great. Add ribbing on the underside and use a custom heating element.
ah chart goodness. I am sure that LTT etc charts are microsoft excel, or you can make a 1:1 copy in excel at least. A bit bit bigger font on the charts would be good (i am on a 40 inch 4k screen and need to squint a little) and personally i would get rid of the numbers for data points. On the grounds that your rid is not accurate to the nearest micron so graph is good enough to tell what is going on.
Very instructive. Definitely, an aluminum base as heat spreader is a "must have". As for "PCB" heaters, well ... as you pointed out, a silicon mat does a better job. I guess your perfect heated bed also gets power from mains. ;)
Try ALCA5 aluminum plate, referred to as Aluminum Cast Tool & Jig Plate. ALCA5 is what OEM's are using. Contact Alro Steel, Howard Precision Metals or Yarde Metals.
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me with why my heated bed makes a high pitched whistling sound every time it turns off (red light goes out) if so that would be great its the only think making noise!
these are amazing videos. this channel is tops. i have one small request: upload in HD at 30fps & not 4k. its too taxing on devices that cant handle 60fps & not really needed. and even on my tank of a desktop youtube's downscaling makes it look worse. filmed in 4k and downscaled to HD looks much better too because of the higher information content is used to antialias the pixels. i can appreciate fine details of shots of prints though. i guess thats a consideration. but dropping the FPS will be a huge benefit
I didn't check the lambda of copper compared to aluminium... Well... Wäre es nicht mal interessant ne kupferplatte zu verwenden? Oder ne combi aus dickeren Alu und nem dünnen Kupferblech? Ich wette man würde damit den thermischen Verzug so gut wie komplett eleminieren, sofern die Schichten halten✌️
Does the Flir support RAW data? Most androids support you to capture "RAW data" Would that make any difference as far as plugging it into their software? Or would that be nominal differences?
Charts FTW!
Tom, I can't tell you how Linus Tech Tips makes graphs. However, I can tell you that you're on the right path with knocking things over during the video shoot. ;)
LTT makes there graphs using Power Point Presentation or u can at least get the same or simalar results.
I dont mean to be so offtopic but does any of you know of a method to get back into an Instagram account?
I somehow forgot my login password. I would love any help you can give me!
@Milan Alfonso Thanks so much for your reply. I got to the site thru google and Im trying it out atm.
Looks like it's gonna take quite some time so I will reply here later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
You spoil us, Thomas. Thanks for always making such great videos. You've made it much easier for me to get into the 3D printing scene.
I did not realize before this video that warping is comparable to layer height. I should re-calibrate my printer while it is completely heated.
Thank you, Thomas!
And this is the most important lesson, we got from todays video!
The heated bed warping is a great example on why using a raft for printing is better for accurate prints in the z axis. A raft of roughly 5 or more layers can greatly help take out the inaccuracies in your print from bed height differences. You sacrifice a pretty smooth part surface for a more accurate print.
Use larger fonts on the graphs. Hard to read both on small (phone) and large (TV/chromecast) screens.
Would be great to see how your Mendel and delta heated beds perform with those tests. Thicker aluminium might lead to better results with fan blowing on it. Your heater for the delta has way more power than the prusa i3’s power supply, so it would be interesting to see how that affects it.
Also would be great to see how insulation under the heated bed affects the performance.
It would also be great to see how different cooling fan designs affect the temperature of the bed when printing a part.
Or how about using flir camera to show temperature differentials within an ABS part and how that leads to curling and layer splits. So many things to do, so little time!
Great video, really enjoyed them. Can’t wait to see some more!
This is one of the reasons i use a sheet of thermal material in between my glass and heated bed. It mitigates this very well
What sorta thermal material do you use?
@@revhappyrs2k You can buy large thermal pads, the ones normally used for CPU/computer chip heatsinks, and place it in between the bed and the glass.
Any chance you could add a data point for your DIY milled bed plus silicone heater?
What is the thickness of the DIY milled bed ????
I don't know if this is how those nice charts are made, but I know, that excel can make some actually impressive looking charts when choosing the right theme.
PS. Pro tip, in excel instead of screenshotting the chart, just select and press ctrl+c, then go into ms paint and paste by pressing ctrl+v, then save it.
All of this (as well as the previous part) have led me to try a 0.5mm aluminium sheet on top of a 5mm aluminium plate. The aluminium sheet (with 0.2mm PEI on top) will then act similar as a removable spring steel sheet (of course much less flex possible before permanently bending it) and will be held by a couple of clamps. I'll see how this combination works out.
Great video. One point about fan recovery. I think the bed should be able to keep up if you are cooling the bed near where the thermistor is reading the temp. I think the reason the UM3 takes a while to recover is that (at least on the UM2, I just had apart) the thermistor is way in the back near the power connectors. Some printers I know have thermistor near the center.
For a future follow up video, it would interesting to see the results of the anycubic ultra base.
I have a thermal camera, it is super uniform. In my case I have a keenovo 750w heater underneath so the results may be useless though. CR-10s with keenovo under an aluminium sheet (stock solution) and ultrabase on top.
Rare powder coated sheet: **exists**
Tom: Let's spray it with paint.
If that's all you can take from it... grats! You made it at least part way through! Doing very well today!
NiceWhenEarned RudeMostlyElse
If that’s all you took from that comment, grats...
emissivity for a black body is ε = 1.0 which is actually preferable for heat transfer.
Important work. Thanks for that info. The warping during the temp adjust is probably the reason for poor adhesion of prints that sometimes is hard to explain.
Awesome work thank you. But you should account for the differences in bed size to scale the magnitude of the warping deflection.
Also the location of the bed temperature sensor is important.
Nice. That's why when I manually level the bed, I wait 5 minutes after it "reaches" temp. This is the type of video that really helps people understand printers a little more. Good job. I've done similar measurements with the Zonestar (steel frame ver.) I use. It has almost 5 km of filament printed through it. Only had to replace the nozzle twice because of burnt wood filament. Oops.
Tom, you need to incorporate your country into your videos every now and again, I used to live there. It is a really beautiful place. Great scientific video btw, it had to be a bit annoying to re-shoot this video, I have experienced similar situations on my channel. soooo much time in editing!
This is why I use my bed level sensor AFTER I heat up my bed to printing temp. Great video!
Some apps like "Thermal Camera+ for FLIR One" allows one to set a fixed range inside the app, very useful if you are looking for very subtle changes in temperature, and don't want to be blinded by radiators. Admittedly I have only used it on there older models of camera and don't know if it works on the new ones.
I hate to say this, but there is something about the Prusa PC print bed that you aren't taking into account. There are actually two PEI layers between the heater element and the print surface (one on either side of the steel sheet). And the middle PEI layer is only in point contact with the heater (because of the rough texture of the powder coated surface). It would be informative to see the difference between the (difficult to obtain) powder coated PEI sheet that you used and the smooth PEI sheets (sticker based) that currently come with the machines. Even more interesting (though would again get to a non-common surface) would be to get a bare steel sheet and only put the smooth PEI surface on one side, then run the test with the bare metal surface against the soldermask of the heated bed. (Removing one layer of insulation out of the stackup.)
Would love to see some similar types of comparisons with: bare bed (already performed in this video), bed with aluminium coated mylar radiant shield underneath, bed with closed-cell adhesive-backed neoprene applied to entire underside.
Does the heat shields improve things or do they increase emissivity more than they improve heat insulation ? Do they reduce fan temperature drop ? …speed recovery time on removal ?
I don't think anyone has done this type of empirical bed testing: you're blazing trails here and the world is better for it. Thanks Tom ! ♥️
After your first video, I decided to fit an aluminium plate to my Sigmax and add the Filafarm switch plate system. Apart from a huge amount of time wrestling with levelling, due to the weight, the printer is now printing like a boss. My failing prints were due to lousy bed temps, so thank you for that and this video.
For the nice looking charts question: I think LMG designs them in programs like Illustrator and probably together with after effects for interactive ones. At least that's how I would do it, just spent some time on making a nice template, use the chart tools and insert data.
still relevant after 4 years, thanks!
You should have placed a heat insulator between the bed and the measuring device. Great video!
ya, I wonder how much thermal expansion of the dial indicator stem impacted the results
My dial indicators have a tungsten tip. Super hard as to not wear and thermally stable. A regular indicator tip will not show any significant deflection in this test, possibly 0.003mm within 100°C. They are usually stainless or a tool steel, also stable materials for general measuring.
Where a heat insulator should be used, in any 3D printer, is under the bed as a blanket to increase the efficiency of the hot plate. With as much heat soaking into the bed and not the ambient air you can regain the heat lost from that tiny fan test in no time. Remember, the plastic you just printed is more surface area for a breeze to cool the bed down. Besides, as long as you don't use glass you don't really need the bed on after 5mm or so. Try it for yourself, you'll see. Add M107 after you find the first Z5. Let me know how it turns out.
As for bed warping, that is how material science works. You fasten a plate simply by the corners and you will get this kind of middle-of-the-bed flex. Up or down. Using thicker aluminum plate(I have 5mm) will help prevent some of the flex but not all. Having a thermally stable material such as [CENSOR] is what I'm waiting to test. :-)
Very informative, thanks Tom.
It would be interesting to see the warping caused while the fan is running. That would be a challenge measuring it!
I've been using ultrabase for over a year now. No fuss. Solid flat shiny bottoms.
A very thorough test! Great!
For the Prusa I would think that any bed warp before the bed leveling routine is not of interest. But now I know why the machine waits until the bed have reached set temperature before doing that. It would have been timesaving to do it while heating up.
Nice work! I feel sorry for your constantly knocked over dial indicator!
Could you do some "benchymarking" with a perspective of reviewing power consumption?
Take a 1 FFF printer. print a benchy, test different materials, An enclosure, an extruder sock, different bed types, glass/Aluminium/Steel. Maybe looking at the efficiency of the PSU.See which uses the most in KWh and if there are any simple things that can be done to improve it.
Since you already got FLIR camera maybe testing cooling method for controller board/driver. Which is better, heatsink on top vs bottom of driver? Also testing on fan cooling on top vs bottom on integrated driver board like Duet Wifi.
Great work very interesting, I happen to own an Ender 3 the heatbed and frame are the only stock parts left. Would love to see how the E3D High Temperature Heated Beds "mordor bed" or other high wattage heat-beds compare.
Does anyone have good recommendations for high temp thermistors for the nozzle heater block that can go beyond 300 C?
Thanks for your great work, Tom... i've learned a lot about 3d printing from your channel, and still at times rewatch some of your old videos for refreshing my memory. xD
I suppose i should get rid of my glass top plate... i kinda added it because my aluminum bed was a bit to thin and might have gotten bent when i made it, i followed your recommendation and got a 600w 240v ac silicon mat and for my 20x20 bed and it just works wonder wonderful.
will heat up to 150 C in like a minutes or two....
not really sure if it heats consistently, but with all that power, i don't think it has much choice, and the glass plate did seem to solve my bed warping issues, but i may try and make a 2nd layer of thicc aluminum removable top plate, because why wouldn't i want it removable.
and then i don't have to solve the issue with moving the mat from one piece of alu to the new one xD
also built an enclosure for my 3d printer, my recent problems is that my thermistor in the nozzle block becomes wildly inaccurate above 260 C.
and my extruder doesn't really wanted to grip well, so i will be switching to a dobit "bondtech" chinese clone extruder which looks kinda nice.
Thomas, do you ever print nylon or carbon fiber nylon on your PEI coated aluminum bed? How is the adhesion?
First
Second
Third
[citation needed]
Funny was only thinking earlier if a youtuber 1st 2nd and 3rd it.
Thomas Sanladerer not first, second, third, or fourth
I had massive leveling problems with my Lulzbot Taz 5 until I discovered I had to level at full temperature. Not sure if the temp of the hotend matters, but definitely the bed.
you should be able to clean most of it off with acetone. Just do it in several stops with drying inbetween and you should not damage your PEI...
Oh the humanity! Quick, somebody notify D.I.P.S. (Dial Indicator Protection Services)
Great video as usual, Tom. Curious if you have any plans to do any future bed testing with your Mendel testing rig i.e. the variety of flexible/magnetic removable plate platforms? And thanks for the graphs.
What i take it from this great video is, if prusa heated bed will be from aluminium (with magnet and externeal heating elements) with some more advanced thermo isolation on bottom and with better placed thermocouple or maybe more then one thermocouple like center, edge and corner. Then we will have a ideal heated bed.
Awesome investigation. Does this confirm that if you have a troublesome bed that potentially warps, the quickest fix is simply glass with/without a PEI sheet on top?
Glass will warp upward if the underlying bed also warps upward. If it underlying bed goes down then there will be an air gap in the middle and the bed will not reach the temperature that the sensor is reading. Adding more layers to a heat bed will throw a wrench in the thermal properties of your printer.
If only I had a graph to show you how much the graph-loving part of my brain enjoyed this video... 📈
Thank you for experimenting and sharing all of this information! It would be interesting to see histograms showing the heat distribution of the different heated beds, to help quantify the gradients and general inconsistencies. Providing the standard deviation as error bars to the mean measurements you made would shed some light on this too. The FLI software might be able to provide these over a user-defined region of interest, but if not we can produce these ourselves using the raw images. Regarding plots, ever since I started making plots in python with the matplotlib package I've never felt the need to use anything else. MATLAB and other high level programming languages work well too.
I'm still interested whether or not heat distribution on the Ender 3 could be improved with insulation from beneath.
The CR-10S does have underside insulation, makes me wonder if I should just slap a PEI sheet directly onto the aluminum bed.
Had the same question. Does insulation on the underside help?
@@GeorgeLeite it can't hurt.
I was going to ask if a double boiler type of heated bed would be good as it would really allow even distribution, but apparently water's heat transfer is pretty low.
So what about a copper bed? It's apparently higher than aluminum and even gold, and while the price is nearly four times, it's no gold or silver.
Wouldn't the best construction be the heat source sandwiched between two identical sheets of aluminum? The stresses in the two layers should cancel out if they have stiff enough connections to each other.
Yes! That's exactly how I fixed (or at least reduced) the warping issue on my old Mendel 90 that I showed.
I was about to ask exactly the same question. Thanks. So with the sandwich idea, which would be better? 1. Slipping the thermistor in between the sheets or 2. Embedding it in the upper sheet so it's closer to the top surface?
Similar to what I expected: the base under the print surface should be thicker aluminium do distribute heat and have a mass. Actually I don't even understand why Prusa is using FR4 PCB instead of aluminium-based one.
Thicker bed is bad however for moving-Y-bed printers, and also slows down startup on low power heaters, but definitely good idea for high powered silicone heater.
One thing which I am most concerned about: the mounting method could have effect of warping not just during heat-up stage but all the time while heated up, because the bed expands laterally too, and if the mounting screws can not move in the holes of the (much colder) carrier plate the assembly could warp.
This video is great :) More of these kind of deep dives would be appreciated
Wow good job, just what I am thinking about, I didn’t complain though. Thanks for showing with the dial. I will try the sideways expansion. Didn’t thought of that until I saw those Vorons & Rats bed sitting on rollers 😊.
Thank you so much 💕
Been procrastinating on breaking out the 20yr old $30k Inframetrics (now FLIR) thermal camera to watch the bed & parts. Just need a recording device w/ an s-video input. Amazing what you learn on the job w/ a thermal camera. The things that reflect & block IR that you wouldn't think about. Hollywood lies so much in this arena.
Obviously we need to add a flir camera to the dynamic motion planner to compensate for z depth. :-)
@thomas: you told about the fast increasing temperature of ender 3 and that the temp exceed... Did you think about that your fan is at the point of the thermistor?
And second: what do you think is the result of this cooling in a printer with/without housing... Because of printing ABS? Can you repeat the measurements with temporary housing?
Why can't I combine a removable flex bed with a heated aluminum base?
You could use magnet paper or magnets fitted on the underside of the aluminum....
Right?
what if you have a tent around the printer? can you retest with at least a cardboard box over the printer?
yeh, I can confirm the aluminum beds, I have a micron (probably +/- 10 micron, but values average between 3 points and samples never go outside that or it reports an error) accurate z and probe when hot and cold (max number duet allows, use the map with a leadscrew adjustment for prints), other than where the traces are, points do not move at all between the two.
(now my aluminum plate is still bent light crazy across the diagonal corners and you should use a glass bed but it doesn't warp, allowing for mid temp changes and accurate adaptive 1st layers)
Hey Tom what are your thoughts on Aluminum bed with silicone heater mat and a spring steel sheet with PEI coating which sits on top of the aluminum bed and is held magnetically?
That's also what I had in mind after watching this. Should be a good mix of performance and convenience 🙂
Hi tom Any chance on comparing tmc 2130 to the 5160 and the difference in stelthchop 2 to the first version of the stepper drivers?
I have the Tmc5161 on my bench, and it is a whole different animal, but about no current firmware supports the best features stealthchop2 and stallguard2 are very good and freely configurable.
As I mostly print with a bed between 85 and 100 (HIPS, ABS, NYLON) a test at those temps would have been interesting - but great job and good info. BTW I up the bed to 85-90 on PLA as it anneals while you print - at least if the print is about 2 in (50mm) or less tall and the print time is 2 hours plus - and you leave it enclosed and sitting on the bed until the bed reaches room temp (made a video on that on my channel)
Effect of multiple layers, like ie magnet pad and spring steel, or glass plate, on top of thicker aluminium with silicone heater underneath?
Can you do test with tape or glue as helps on beds? Know on this was just bed provided.
Since you have that FLIR any chance you can look at heat creep with different heat breaks etc..
The results from the prusa bed I found very interesting, especially how much time and money they spent on r&d.
Prusa clearly went for "robust and useable" rather than "technically superior".
Prusas are overrated, they are good but not as many say.
Hi Tom. Awesome job.
How much would the bed movement, change the temps?
Checking the mesh-bed leveling, prusa checks 9 locations. Grabbing the #’s, thru Octopi, I get 49. I would like to know if we can change or add the locations?
I think you should have included e3d's new high temp beds in this, their mounting method according to them prevents warping when heating up. Great video though
That looked like a lot of work. Thanks for doing this.
Hmm, Thomas, so maybe it's good idea to cover aluminum bed with gold chips and evaluate heat distribution with that coating.
I'd be curious to see how much a 1/4 inch think aluminum bed would warp
What if it would be more like floor heating, with tubing under the floor?
Nice job. Just hearing about the FLIR tools was useful.
Try testing the e3d heated bed
E3d has an heatbed? China is calling to copy it 😉
@@therealfox I just checked and haven't seen any copies of it on aliexpress
So basically Ender 3 comes out as a champion out of this video.
Weird because I have a lot of problems with bed warping on my ender 3, fake buildtak completly coming off when trying to print ABS(100*C) and it's impossible to have it leveled across entire surface, for each print I always just look at the brim/skirt and adjust the bed so it's leveled just in the spot that I'm currently using.
Great video, but i have a question. Would it make any difference in these tests if you added insulation beneath the heat bed?
Thermal Dynamics will tell us YES.
How do nylon screws to support your aluminum plate affect cold spots at the corners?
Interesting ... best heated bed? Aluminum plates seem to work well. Thus, I can see how well water based cooling/heating channels could allow for rapid energy bursts (cooling/heating) ... Food for thought ...
Loving the garage!
Linustechtips has charts? Well that's news to me. I thought it was all about waiting for Linus Sebastian to drop yet another expensive product on the floor, and then betting on whether he broke it or not.
Thank you very much for all the effort you put into this, it shows and is much appreciated!
I am curious what are the warping differences between CAST aluminum and EXTRUDED aluminum.
When I built my custom 3d printer a few years ago, I was advised to buy cast AL because when it heats up there is less internal stress and less chance of warping.
How many of the commercially sold printers are using cast? Are any using extruded?
It is usually sheet aluminum. I guess that could be called extruded, though it is rolled to the desired thickness. Pouring your own cast AL bed would be great. Add ribbing on the underside and use a custom heating element.
ah chart goodness. I am sure that LTT etc charts are microsoft excel, or you can make a 1:1 copy in excel at least. A bit bit bigger font on the charts would be good (i am on a 40 inch 4k screen and need to squint a little) and personally i would get rid of the numbers for data points. On the grounds that your rid is not accurate to the nearest micron so graph is good enough to tell what is going on.
Very instructive.
Definitely, an aluminum base as heat spreader is a "must have".
As for "PCB" heaters, well ... as you pointed out, a silicon mat does a better job. I guess your perfect heated bed also gets power from mains. ;)
This makes me want to design my own bed. If I design my own heated bed, would you be willing to see where it fails??
Try ALCA5 aluminum plate, referred to as Aluminum Cast Tool & Jig Plate. ALCA5 is what OEM's are using. Contact Alro Steel, Howard Precision Metals or Yarde Metals.
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me with why my heated bed makes a high pitched whistling sound every time it turns off (red light goes out) if so that would be great its the only think making noise!
What about Copper?
Thanks for a comprehensive video Thomas.
i think its great that in this scientific tests video thomas is wearing the original series era starfleet science uniform.
Thomas, why didn't you upgrade your Prusa I3 MK3 to the Prusa I3 MK3S? The upgrade is pretty cheap...
LTT actually use PowerPoint to make their charts. They showed it in one of their videos (might have been a Floatplane exclusive)
Please enable auto captions? This one seems to have it disabled
This video has real captions enabled ;-)
@@MadeWithLayers Awesome, thanks! Tried again via web and shows up better/now than Mobile. Or I messed up. Either way all good now!
i find borosilicate glass tends to take just a bit longer to heat up, but then retains heat much better than aluminum
Well, yes. That is physics. Glass is an insulator after all... Aluminum is used for heat dissipation, hence it will cool down more quickly than glass.
What makes the ultimaker3 so much better than sigma, when they are both glass over pcb heater?
Ultimaker doesn't have that 2mm airgap between the heater and the glass
@@MadeWithLayers Oh, why is there a gap?! Or how did ultimaker get rid of the gap?
so if the bed was so thin that one side can't heat up more than the other side all this would be useless?
Do you have a video or anything on how you made your dial gauge holder? that looks nice.
You can get these cheap dial gauges as a set with the holder: go.toms3d.org/DialGauge
What about doing this on a print?
these are amazing videos. this channel is tops. i have one small request: upload in HD at 30fps & not 4k. its too taxing on devices that cant handle 60fps & not really needed. and even on my tank of a desktop youtube's downscaling makes it look worse. filmed in 4k and downscaled to HD looks much better too because of the higher information content is used to antialias the pixels. i can appreciate fine details of shots of prints though. i guess thats a consideration. but dropping the FPS will be a huge benefit
I didn't check the lambda of copper compared to aluminium... Well... Wäre es nicht mal interessant ne kupferplatte zu verwenden? Oder ne combi aus dickeren Alu und nem dünnen Kupferblech? Ich wette man würde damit den thermischen Verzug so gut wie komplett eleminieren, sofern die Schichten halten✌️
would probably warp like crazy
i love the naketano shirt your wearing. here in the states we never got it. but i finally found a hoodie online. to bad the company closed :(
I print without heated bed on using my MPSM v2 using ESUN PLA+ on glass.
Does the Flir support RAW data? Most androids support you to capture "RAW data"
Would that make any difference as far as plugging it into their software? Or would that be nominal differences?