Much better! As you can see near perfect.
Before I go into any detail, let me please thank each and every person who commented on my last post. Reddit was my social media of choice way back when I first got this printer, and I recall having an issue then… And the advice on reddit was, nonexistent. within a few minutes of my post yesterday I had several thought out answers. And to my surprise, not one of them were simply “go buy x printer”.
So once again thank you for being such a good community!
Now regarding the print… The bed was cleaned with 99% IPA, I hadn’t realized just how superficial a lot of the marks on the print bed were! Came up a treat with alcohol!
I modelled a print to basically stretch across almost the entire width of the print bed, so that I could do a few iterative tests quickly. Simply cleaning the bed definitely increase the adhesion.
Next I bumped up the temperature of both the print head and bed. 220, and 85 dropping to 75 after 10 or so layers. Now this seemed a fraction higher than I would be happy with, but you can’t argue with results? And I did use a few different methods to double check the temperatures involved and they were relatively close.
More is a proof of concept at this point, i made a relatively dilute PVA solution and wiped it across the surface… Definitely overkill but by this point the print was adhering perfectly.
But I’d like to share with everyone here, a revelation. Using only cutting edge techniques, that is, my eyes… I read the label on the side of the spool which quite clearly said PETG. Which might explain a little bit of my difficulty 😂
Thanks again to everyone in the community.
I keep a box of the alcohol prep wipes near my printer. Give it a good wipe down before every print, does wonders. Sometimes when that fails, I clean the plate with dawn and water and dry it off really good. Then give it another once over with the alcohol
if you do a lot of PETG and PLA, you should probably make sure that you have different printing plates or surfaces. Because they won’t play well together in the long term.
I prefer micro fiber cloth and rubbing alcohol. There’s an stl where you cut the micro fiber into strips and attach it to thee face of a “scrubber”. Gives you a handle ti hold and a flat surface to put against the print plate.
Truthfully it was so long ago I can’t even recall why I got the PETG to begin with.
For my purposes PLA has always worked fine. The only other filament I’ve really been interested in is tpu, but I think I want to end up getting something dedicated for that type of work… If I convince myself it’s worth it.
Also, good shout on the wipes!