Solved Choice of glass/bed R1+

Hi all,

A loong time ago the original glass bed on my R1+ got chipped away in some parts. At the time I tried to search for possible solutions, and ended up buying a regular glass cut to size for like 4€ and clamped it on top of the original one. This has served my well for quite some time, mostly printing miniatures and and some larger objects with good flag bases.

Recently however I've been trying to print some objects which appear to be more difficult, in what concerns bed adhesion. In particular I'm having trouble printing tall and thin support structures or thin objects altogether (for example small flexi-animals) since some parts of them tend to snap out of the glass. After spending some time playing with several other parameters (eg: print temperature, fiddling with the z-offset to get it "just right") I decided to try and remove the regular glass and print directly on the original print bed. It worked like a charm on the first attempt.

So my question is, is this to be expected? Does the original glass (borosilicate I believe) have better adhesion properties than regular glass? If so, is it possible to buy a sheet of this glass type just like we can with regular glass, or can we only get it from specialty providers?

Any other tips/help is of course welcome.

Thanks in advance

 

@mark tomlinson thank you for your quick reply and suggestion.
I'm really struggling to understand why I seem to have more several adhesion problems with the regular glass when compared to the original bed. I suppose it could be

1. The glass being more uneven. I find this explanation unlikely, because I tend to print relatively small objects
2. The glass being cooler or with a worse temperature distribution. Given that I'm clamping the glass on top of the original, and that the thermal sensors are on the original one I suppose that when the original bed is at 60º the top one is probably much cooler, and might even never achieve that temperature.

Do you think it's any of the above, or something else entirely?

 

I am working with PLA only for now. I always set the bed to 60º and use hair spray as well.
I am aware of 1) and 2), but I thought the auto-level calibration of the R1+ should take care of 1)?

 

So the heated bed might actually be hindering bed adhesion? I was unaware of that :O What would be the recommended temperature for PLA?

I must say I am surprised to hear this. I watched the first video attentively and it seems to me he said the software should compensate for a non-level bed, as long as the rod's alignment is not terrible. Is that not the case?

 

hum... ok. I'm pretty my rod is quite level, but I do have some dips (due to chipped off glass) on some of the sample points. Perhaps that is ruining the calibration. Using the regular glass bed on top of the original one fixes that I guess

So just to wrap up, you also recommend that I lower the bed temperature for PLA? what would you recommend?

 

@mark tomlinson alright I'll try reducing temperature a bit once I get other things more stable, thank you much for all the help!

Just one final question (sorry! ). Some time ago I had some issues with auto-level (it happened the thing shown in the video where one of the switches did not return to close position during calibration and so z-axis get going up). I fixed it by following one of your suggestions: tightening the clamp around the switch so that it was more pressed against the axis. Just to confirm: is there such a things as an "over-tightened clamp"? Like, does the right-side clamp need to have the same tightness as the left side one, or as long as they make the switches return to closed position then they're good to go?

 

Ok, auto-leveling seems to be working fine once I put the other glass on top of the original one. Clearly the dents on the probe points were screwing the calibration.
Thanks for the help