Experience of getting material to stick to the print bed

I Just have a few moments while finishing a print and I thought I would share my experience of sticking prints to the glass print bed.

I never had much luck with very clean glass or a layer of Kaptan but..

I can now reasonably confidently print PLA onto a bed with a thin "wipe" of PVA solution (perhaps a 1 pva to 5 water), but using a quick spray of L'Oreal Elnett Satin (ingredient vinyl neodecanoate coplymer) gives me almost complete confidence.

For ABS, I now use a slurry of ABS in Acetone. Using my many failed ABS prints as the sacrifice into the Acetone (about 1 ABS to 25-30 Acetone by volume)

But it was my recent attempt to print nylon that gave me something that seems to work brilliantly, perhaps too much!
A mix of Acetone and liquid UHU all purpose adhesive. (about 1 UHU to 20 Acetone).
This seemed to work for sticking my Nylon prints.

I then tried it on ABS. Rock solid. perhaps too much. It is a little tricky to remove the print if it has a large base.
Perhaps I should try a weaker solution!

Does anyone else have expereince of sticking Nylon?

Tim

There are about as many ideas on how to get things to stick, as there are people with 3D printers, and most people (me included) have ideas based on very subjective personal experience.

For both PLA and ABS, I've had pretty good results with glue stick on glass. For PLA though (which is what I print 90% of the time), I mostly use blue painters tape, as it is for me the most reliable method and has a relatively large "margin of error" in terms of precision in z homing and bed levelling.

Have done a little bit of nylon and some PETT, and those too worked well with the same blue tape (both required a bit lower z height to stick well), but I didn't really have much luck with those filaments on anything else.

I have some PLA filaments (the original that came with the machine, and filaments from Galactic Warehouse) that I can print direct on glass, washed in soapy water and primed with distilled vinegar between prints. For the others that don't adhere sufficiently well to plain glass, I coat the glass with solvent pipe cement diluted in acetone - which is probably rather similar to your UHU/acetone mix. I mean to try diluted PVA some day.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/12/2014 04:29PM by dc42.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

I have very good experience with printing PLA on 'hot' (56°C) Kapton tape. I give the tape a wipe with glasses wipes that are trenched in IPA. Works a treat.

me too, 60c bed and 200mm wide Kapton tape and I wipe it before each print with 96% rubbing alcohol. So far its the one thing that has caused me no issues or headaches yet.

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Socrates ~ The Amsterdamman
slic3r-1.2.9

Don't now if this helps or not. But when i finished my printer and got my glass. I could not get anything to stick to it. i cleaned and cleaned. After a couple of months of heating and cleaning, salting the class with PLA, using caption tap for PLA and ABS. Using blue painters tape. I finely came to the conclusion that temperature windows on ABS and PLA for both the Hot end and the build plate have very tight windows. The actual temp we have or think we have in our printers can vary, wall it is very repetitive as fare as reaching and maintain a constant temperature. The temp we set or think we are setting can very a couple of degrees to the actual temperature. This means you will get a lot of different recommendations. There are some out side factors that come into play as well like, ambient temperature and humidity. Pu-ting thoughts too aside, i think also no two glass manufacturers are equal. and they do use some kind of Lubricate on there rollers wall rolling out the class to a Specific thickness. I would say Heat and cool the glass a lot cleaning with like Windex (Window Cleaner) in between heating. Then when you think you have finely purged all the lubricants and gasses out of the glass. Start running some temperature test with PLA, till you get a test print to finish without coming loos or worping.

Another temperature recommendation:
PLA

• ...Build plate 65c
• ...Hot end 195
• ...ambient temp 70f - 95f

Sorry, haven't done any ABS for a While, and i need to change my nozzle to run a Test

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gdwinslow
Pu-ting thoughts too aside, i think also no two glass manufacturers are equal. and they do use some kind of Lubricate on there rollers wall rolling out the class to a Specific thickness. I would say Heat and cool the glass a lot cleaning with like Windex (Window Cleaner) in between heating.

I'm sorry, but that theory is simply not true. Just about all flat glass made today is float glass, which poured out over a bath of molten metal and the thickness is controlled by "stretching" it across that surface (the "Pilkington process"). There are no rollers pressing on the glass surface to flatten it out. There might still be some stuff on the glass from being handled, but if it is ever going to come off with window cleaner it will do so first time you clean it. Repeating after heating has nothing to do with it. If there is something on the glass that doesn't come off, use a better solvent.
Also, glass is made with very high purity, and and at such high temperatures (usually around 1200°C coming out of the furnace and 600 °C during floating) that anything that will ever come out of the glass from heating will have done so already. If something would still be "trapped" in the glass, it will definitely not be coming out after being heated to just 100°C or so.

Other than that, you're right. There is a tight window in both bed and nozzle temperature between "too hot" and "too cold" for something to stick, and that depends on a lot of factors to varying degrees (surface, plastic type, print speed, layer thickness, cooling fans, ambient air temperature and humidity). The measured value can also differ from the actual value for a lot of reasons, especially between printers (such as differences in thermistors, how they are mounted and how well they are calibrated). Anyone elses temperature values can only really be used as a guideline (but usually enough to get something decent), you still have to do some testing to find the sweet spot. However, we imperfect humans are highly susceptible to confirmation bias, and very often attribute the end result to a change in something that has nothing to do with it.

Z height on first layer is super critical for best bed adhesion as well. I started with a crushed first layer and now I'm at 0.30 over the bed on the first layer and have no issues with sticking on simple Kapton taped cleaned before each print with 96% rubbing alcohol. I use a single piece of the 200mm Kapton tape, and Reprap still uses it to make the kits. If your really worried about contamination from the glass, the tape is a barrier. Maybe the filament is part of the problem, have you tried other brands? Still happy with [www.3dprima.com] reasonable price and after 3kg I have no complaints.

Maybe it is simply what you clean and prepare the bed with. I tried to clean the bed once with nail polish remover but it had a slippery quality that prevented the parts from sticking to the bed. I then used a light bleach solution after the nail polish and it worked (was very late and no stores were open). Using the 96% alcohol since with no issues.

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Socrates ~ The Amsterdamman
slic3r-1.2.9

Quote
Amsterdamman
Maybe it is simply what you clean and prepare the bed with. I tried to clean the bed once with nail polish remover but it had a slippery quality that prevented the parts from sticking to the bed. I then used a light bleach solution after the nail polish and it worked (was very late and no stores were open). Using the 96% alcohol since with no issues.

Most nail polish removers are a mixture of acetone and oil - the oil is to prevent drying the skin but makes it unsuitable for cleaning the bed. It is also ridiculously expensive. Buy from a fibreglass supplier and it's a heck of a lot cheaper - here's a supplier for acetone at £4 per litre ... [www.mbfg.co.uk]

Dave