Improvements on the heated bed

Hi Everyone,

I had a few ideas for improving the heated bed in my printer and I thought I'd share them and see what other people think. I have an orca and the aluminium bed is slightly warped at the moment and its about 0.2mm lower on two opposite corners. I added a glass plate to it using silicon adhesive and its pretty flat now but not perfect. I had two ideas

1. Use a precision ground piece of aluminium instead of stock aluminium plate. I'm specifically looking at ecocast aluminium from here [www.aluminiumwarehouse.co.uk]. Does anyone have experience of this type of aluminium and know if it would be flat enough for a heated bed?

2. Use the glass out of a clip together picture frame as the heated bed. If I make a new bed thats exactly the same dimensions as the back of the clip frame I can reuse the clips as they're very low profile. The glass in clip frames is very thin so won't be too much of a thermal barrier. You can buy a 200x250 frame for ~£1.50 so very cheap and should fit quite happily in my orca.

Has anyone tried either method before?

Regards
Pete

pete-theobald Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I had a few ideas for improving the heated bed in
> my printer and I thought I'd share them and see
> what other people think. I have an orca and the
> aluminium bed is slightly warped at the moment and
> its about 0.2mm lower on two opposite corners. I
> added a glass plate to it using silicon adhesive
> and its pretty flat now but not perfect. I had two
> ideas

Are you 100% sure that the bed warping is the problem? I'm just asking because I had the same problem with the same printer and a real cause was that the Y rails were not parallel and the bed was rotating a little bit while going back and forth. That causes a situation like you describe, you can level two diagonal corners correctly but can't get the last two on the same level no matter what. When I used a small spirit level and tweaked the Z-Y rod assembly until the Y carriage ran totally straight I got the bed perfectly leveled too.