Mendel90 printing bed

Unfortunately I broke my Mendel90 the glass plate.
This is something I cannot 3D print

Why using glass?
The Ultimaker uses a aluminum printing bed which conducts the heat muchbetter than glass ofcourse.
I'm able the lasercut a 0,5mm stainless steel/ aluminum printing bed with four mounting holes.
Please advise what would be the best? Buy a new borosilicat printing bed or using metal?!
Most of all I print ABS on the blue tape.

Thank you in advance.

Glass is used because it is perfectly flat, PLA sticks to it and it is cheap.

The only way to guarantee aluminium is flat is to buy tooling plate 6mm thick, which is expensive. That works well with glass on top of it but the result is very heavy for a moving bed machine.

I haven't heard of printing ABS on blue tape. That is normally only recommended for PLA.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

My glass plate is not frosted
I use ABS juice and the blue tape with great results: no warping at all (4mm brim)
The Stainless steel is flat enough because it is stacked on the heating element also (supported by screws)
Another benefit of glass is that removing kapton, glue or other sticky stuff will be easier than removing it from a metal surface I guess.
I will lasercut a 0,5mm and 1mm tickness (keep the weight in mind) bed just to for a test to see what the heating time will do.
I don't have a FLIR camera that would be nice to see the difference with glass.

Any other suggestions or design considerations for the metal bed?

Oh, I see with a brim. I have never tried those as I don't like post processing.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I see. So are you using kapton tape or PET?
Do you print the firstlayer with extra volume for good adhesion?
I found the MK3 ALU-Heatbed, seems to me like a good improvement.

I use PET and set the bed to 130C. No I don't do anything special for the first layer. However, I mainly print Mendel90 parts and they are designed to be easy to print, lots of rounded corners, etc. If I wanted a sharp corner on a large ABS part I would probably need to resort to a brim.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]