New Glass Bed

This soliforum post led to a simple idea for clipping on a glass bed without using up any printable surface or leaving the nozzle in harms way to ram a binder clip.

Here is try 1 with small binder clips, 60 grit sandpaper wrapped around the clip's lower lip for better gripping power of the glass and the aluminum bed, and a 6 5/8 inch by 6 inch glass bed:

 

Unfortunately, there is a slight problem: The handle on the binder clip sticks out enough on the left to run into the X stepper as it moves past (DOH!).

Let's cool it down and try rotating it 90 degrees...

Experimenting with shoving the glass seemed to indicate that having both clips directly opposite each other grabbed better (I was avoiding the rear leveling screw, but since I'm outside the bed, maybe it wouldn't have run into it anyway).

It survived printing a one layer bed level test:

That probably tells me something like the bed is too low up front, but it needs more checking. The important thing is that the glass didn't move. The sandpaper seems to work wonders. It was quite easy to slide the plate back and forth without the sandpaper.

I've moved the clips to the center, and that works fine without hitting anything, and I've been working on getting the bed level and the z-stop adjusted again and fooling around with more bed level test prints. It looks good, but it seemed to sort of "run dry" on filament in one place when it moved from printing the front right cube to the middle cube (the longest motion I think it made from one cube to another):

(You can click on the image above to download the full highres version for a closer look.)

Anyway, back on the bed itself, the binder clips work great while printing, but (I assume due to expansion and contraction), they are loose again after the print is finished, and the bed slides around when trying to remove the printed object.

I may want to go back to my original design with the springy rod:

It occurs to me that the pieces could be made out of wood, which would be a lot simpler to do than metal, and should work fine for the heat ranges I'm dealing with on the print bed.

I do have an old set of TV rabbit ears that seem to have a nice springy feel in the thinnest end segments. Perhaps they can find a use in the digital TV world after all.

And more confirmation that the clips eventually come loose. After printing my bed level test a few times to see if I got the same defect each time (I don't - sometimes it prints with no problems), I tried to print a "real" part (the nickle calibration test) and the bed does occasionally shift around. I definitely need more than just the clips I started with above.

Go back to my main Solidoodle page.