Hi all I've some problems with a PLA filament and a smaller object I want to print (about 20 x 10mm). The filament does not really stick to the bed and at layer 20 or so, the object does slide away and the print cannot be used (of course). The filament says: Hotend: 180-210° Bed: 20-60° I've read, that the bed should be hotter when the material does not stick to the bed, therefore I tried with 195° hotend and the bed between 60° and 80°. I also tried to have 80° at the first 5 layers and after that 60°. Still the same issues. Any ideas what I could try in such a case? The filament is a Swiss brand, this is it. I tried others from the same brand and did not have this issue.
Maybe a silly question, but did you use the Uhu stick ore some other adhesive? Usually PLA won't stick to bare glass.
Now its official, that I'm a complete noob in regards of 3D-Printing. No, I did not use Uhu stick or something else. But honestly, the example PLA and two other PLAs I printed sticked very tight on the glass and it wasn't easy to remove it from the glass after printing. So, it looks like PLA is not equal to PLA. Thanks for the hint, though, I'll have a look where I find this Bird-Thing.
If you have some PVA wood glue, then a mix of that with water, about 5:1 or even 8:1 i.e. 5 or 8 parts of water to one of PVA, lightly wiped over the bed with a piece of kitchen roll will also improve adhesion. The bed can be cleaned with ethyl alcohol (methylated spirit) to remove the coating if necessary.
Looking at the picture you'll want to reduce your Z offset a bit to get closer to the bed on the first layer. Smaller is harder for FDM printers
I had a little (well OK a lot) of trouble trying to print a large patch of small footprint items. In the end I decided to use a raft. Getting them off the raft is a slight pain, and did cause a little damage to the print surface (white marks where the tearing occurred). I decided to try applying a little heat to those marks and that really removed the white bits, leaving perfect-looking prints. In the end I was able to print a batch of 20 with 100% success. The other part, which the small footprint screws into, was just enough to give a pretty decent success rate without a footprint, yielding 19/20 successes. I never did pluck up the courage to go for a full bed of those yet (which would be 150 items).
Thank you @mike01hu , this tip was gold, as it looks so far. I will of course order some more convenient stuff, but this was the perfect easter rescue.
@Tetrikus, could you clarify which part of the tip you followed? Did you mix at 5:1 or 8:1? Also how small is the footprint? What are the dimensions on the base layer?
I mixed about 8:1, but not very exact. The base layer of this mentioned object was about 3cm2, but I also had the issue when printing objects with much more surface (about 40cm2). As an emergency plan it was just great.
I tend to use about 5:1 but it's not critical. I just keep a bottle made up for shake, squirt and wipe.
I think the items I was printing had a circular base with diameter 6mm. I might give diluted PVA a try to see if that is better than UHU, which I presume is, overall, a similar compound.
