Your 3D printer is all fired up, filament loaded and ready to go, you think you have it all under control and press print. Everything seems ok at first but you leave the room for 5 minutes only to come back to a mess of filament and a dislodged print. Your print is ruined, you have to start over and this time with the constant worry if the print will fail or not. Bed adhesion and getting those first layers to stick are critical to your success at printing. Everything starts with the first layer, the foundation if you will of your printing.
PEI print surface
PEI (polyetherimide) is a surface that makes your 3D prints stick better to the print platform. It makes the use of rafts (see below) redundant. It mostly comes in the form of a sheet that you attach on for instance a glass bed. PEI sheets are available on Amazon, Aliexpress et cetera.
BuildTak
I have been using BuildTak for a few months now and thus far it sticks extremely well, almost too well. After contacting support they recommended me to find ‘the sweet spot’. It is crucial that you discover the optimal nozzle height for your 3D printer and settings. Here are some tips:
- Start leveling at a safe nozzle height of about .25mm (or the thickness of a typical business card) and run a test print, paying close attention to the first layer. To find the sweet spot, it is always better to start with the nozzle height higher than what you might be used to with other solutions.
- Changing your nozzle temp, material used, print speed, et cetera may require re-discovery of the optimal nozzle height.
If after reading this post and you still have adhesive problems, BuildTak will fix it. Just explicitly follow their setup instructions with little to no first layer squish otherwise your print will become part of your printer. BuildTak sheets are available in different sizes on Amazon, Aliexpress et cetera.
Print bed additives (tape, glue stick and hairspray)
A lot of people are using a variety of things applied to their print bed to get better adhesion. We are seeing things like painters tape, hairspray, glue sticks etc applied to the bed in hopes the print will stick. I don’t use any of these as I feel it’s not consistent or reliable and typically just makes a mess to clean up.
I only use Kapton tape and sometimes a self made acetone/ABS mixture. Kapton tape has many uses in the lab. It’s functional between −269 to +400 °C, is used in space and also adheres very well under water among several other attributes.
To apply the tape you’ll need to remove the glass from the build plate and apply the tape underwater or with a spray bottle and water. Get a plastic tub big enough to accommodate the glass build plate, fill with water and cut some lengths of Kapton tape and apply under the water. Be sure that there are no bubbles under the tape before applying and carefully line up the lengths of tape against each other and press down.
It’s also recommended to use a plastic scraper to press the tape down against the glass to get a bubble free layer. Hold the scraper at a diagonal and run gently along the the length of the tape. If you mess up you can just peel off and try again with little worries.
Most times I only use the Kapton tape but for some ABS builds that have little surface contact with the build plate I use ABS juice. Unfortunately this ABS/acetone mix is highly flammable, noxious off-gases, corrosive and very sticky.
I built a ventilated, thermally regulated enclosure for ABS printing. So if your clumsy and don’t have a well ventilated area, maybe hold off on the ABS/acetone for now. If you still want to make the mix it’s just a matter of dissolving ABS plastic in acetone until it gets creamy, viola you have ABS juice.
Getting proper Squish and bed Calibration
Depending on your printer you will need to learn how to level the print bed for that particular printer first. Don’t cut corners on this, take the time to get each corner perfect and locked in.
Some people use a sheet a paper and many printer manufactures recommend it this way however I use a business card. The business card which is .35mm-.36mm in thickness should be of smooth finish and a non-inked surface facing up to make contact with the hot-end. Also a business card is far easier to handle and more rigid then a sliver of paper.
Now heat up your build plate and extruder hot-end to calibrate and fine tune the printer. Obviously differing materials contract and expand differently at different temperatures. You want to replicate your actual printing environment to get really accurate results.
Furthermore the business card needs to be of non-inked surface because the hot-end will melt and pull of the finish or ink of the card. After you finish levelling it’s time to test print and adjust your G-code or Z axis off-set accordingly to get good squish on the first layer. The first layer of plastic should be flattened in appearance but not so thin to become transparent.
Now we are printing reliably with some good quality filament and good bed adhesion. You should be able to print 30-40 hour prints with little worry provided you have enough filament on the spool of course.
Vincent says
Hi Steve,
I recently bought the Ultimaker 2. I am a novice where it comes to 3D printing so that said, I have been spending more time reading the trouble shooting pages than anything else. I have to say that although I am a novice I have made a couple of successful prints with no issues.
I went away for a weekend break and on returning back home decided to do more work on my printer to get a better understanding of materials, adhesion and fine tuning.
The problem now seems to be under-extrusion, I have run the printer for a few minutes and initially the filament extrudes at a constant flow, not deformed or riggily, riggily as it comes out I’m sure would suggest a head blockage but it seems there is no blockage. The troubleshooting says not to increase the standard extrusion speeds as this will not solve the problem. I have spent more time leveling the build platform to within a micron or two. My problem is that as soon as the actual print goes it starts perfectly and then seems to start under extruding and not closing off properly when ending a shape. This I understand is caused by the printer moving too fast to extrude enough. Also the filament starts to lay down little balls of filament instead of lines.
So before I pack up my printer and take it back to the store to resolve this issue which I’m sure will come with a nice bill that maybe you could give me some advise on fixing this issue that I am having.
Kind regards
Vincent Gobey
Steve Henshaw says
Hello Vincent
Sorry to hear you are having problems with your Ulimaker, it really is a good printer and should work really well. It could be a number of things but I’d like to take a look at a picture of what it is doing if you have the time. I’ll email you instead of going back and forth via this comment section and then you can post your results at the end. We will resolve this and get you back to printing.
Christopher Zuk says
Hello,
Today, the company ProCoPrint3D, is a manufacturer of adhesive for 3D printing.
We have three main products for ABS to print on a warm table, and PLA and other filaments to print on the table cold.
Tomasz says
I have been using kapton tape for all my prints since 3 years. No problems with adhesion. But my printing footprint is not high, only 150x150mm. And kapton is very cheap I.m still using the first spool. However there were some prints I had to add some pads to stick better. So maybe there is time to switch to buildtak at least while printing ABS.
Mario says
Please… Acetone corrosive??? Acetone is not an acid is a solvent! so… perhaps you mean that it dissolve and attack quite a range of plastics types.. (but It remains unreadable)
Tim says
Hi Steve,
I just read your comments and I think you are wrong about some sprays. I sell Glass Build Plate Wizard from ez3d.eu and it works great on hot or cold plates for most filaments and like pei sheets rafts are a thing of the past. If you want to try it let me know.
Tried it says
All of the advice ive been given to get the printer ive bought to get to work is –
Replace every single piece of it for something else.
Run it hotter.
Run it colder.
Run it quicker.
Run it slower.
Use adhesive.
DONT use adhesive.
It would be more honest if people would say – “Unless youre spending $10,000+ your only method is to press ‘start print’ and hope it works this time.”
Theyre literally nothing but very expensive novelties at the moment, occasionally good for education, but even then, its no good having a unit that students will be forced to run overnight, because theyll end up coming back to class the next day to find a ruined printer and a mass of wasted filament.
Dont bother.
Ricoh printer says
Bed adhesion is now totally changed off with 3D printing because of increase in its use in a room
Steve says
We have not tried Glass Build Plate Wizard but we did test pretty much everything else and found out only a few work, at all.
If printing anything else than PLA, don’t waste your time with blue tape / hairspray, ABS slush or gluestick :
Buildtak (and similar) sticks very well but wont unstick.
PEI behaves similarly to buildtak.
Both are a mess to replace, both requires Z fine tuning between each prints (because the sheet height changes when printing) and with both you risk to decalibrate the bed when unsticking the parts.
Since a couple of weeks we use DustNPrint for our production (mostly ABS) and we never recalibrated, z-fine adjust or changed sheets since.
It can be messy to apply but it does work very well, every time.
Good luck!