PRINTING BED OFF-KILTER? BLU-TACK TO THE RESCUE!

For all their applications, 3D printers can be finicky machines. From extruder problems, misaligned or missing layers, to finding an overnight print turned into a tangled mess, and that’s all assuming your printer bed is perfectly leveled. [Ricardo de Azambuja’s] new linear delta printer was discouraging him. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t maintain the bed leveling calibration, so he had to improvise — Blu-Tack to the rescue.

It turns out [Azambuja]’s problem was so bad that the filament wouldn’t even attempt to stick to the printing bed. So, he looked to Printrun Pronterface and a combination of its homing feature and the piece-of-paper method to get a rough estimate of how much the bed needed to be adjusted — and a similar estimate of how big of a gob of Blu-Tack was needed.

Pressing the bed into place, he re-ran Pronterface to make sure he was on the level. [Azambuja] notes that you would have to redesign this for every print, but it was good enough to print off a trio of bed leveling gears he created so he doesn’t have to go through this headache again for some time.

Of course, lots of printers have auto-leveling capabilities that work to varying degrees, as well as homebrew solutions. — or even printers where an uneven bed is a facet of the design principle. So however you achieve your zero, delighted printing, hackers!