Difficult Bed Leveling Issue Finally Resolved
Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2019 12:33 pm
I have been chasing my tail for several weeks now trying to get the bed leveled on my i3 Pro X, Wasted many meters of filament and have been real close to tossing the whole lot in the bin.
It started at a filament roll change and I started having issues with under extruding and silly me first thought it was the bed out of level when in fact it was too low a hot end temp. Now my problems begin with not being able to get back to the nice level heated bed.
Long story short, first I discovered that the Y axis rails were bent, so I bought some new rod and bearings but still had issues. From the start the Front Right has always been the lowest with the Back Left being the next lowest point. I now discover that the holes in the Acrylic for the Y axis rods are over size and the rods can move up and down so I shimmed them out to suit the low / high heights I'd been experiencing.
I now start to get close to getting a nice level bed but from one day to the next it goes out of wack. Along this journey I discovered the original springs on the bed were going soft so I replaced with what I could buy locally. I then discovered that it is these springs that is causing my changing bed level issue. The end of the spring isn't tapered so each end of the spring has a dip where there would normally be a tapered end to the spring. A photo helps explain this.
The red arrow shows the dip and sharp end I'm talking about. This isn't a problem on the lower side against the acrylic base as there is a nice wide flat surface but the under side of the bed heater has rounded corners and the bolt hole is very close tothe edge which in fact the spring was able to drop off and when that happens it changes the level dramatically.
The solution was to make a seating washer for the top of the spring and BINGO we are level again!. I installed a 3DTouch in this journey and now I've got all these issues sorted after manual level then calibration I watch to see how much the bed is out and there is barely any movement!!
and here is what the spring seating cap looks like installed
It started at a filament roll change and I started having issues with under extruding and silly me first thought it was the bed out of level when in fact it was too low a hot end temp. Now my problems begin with not being able to get back to the nice level heated bed.
Long story short, first I discovered that the Y axis rails were bent, so I bought some new rod and bearings but still had issues. From the start the Front Right has always been the lowest with the Back Left being the next lowest point. I now discover that the holes in the Acrylic for the Y axis rods are over size and the rods can move up and down so I shimmed them out to suit the low / high heights I'd been experiencing.
I now start to get close to getting a nice level bed but from one day to the next it goes out of wack. Along this journey I discovered the original springs on the bed were going soft so I replaced with what I could buy locally. I then discovered that it is these springs that is causing my changing bed level issue. The end of the spring isn't tapered so each end of the spring has a dip where there would normally be a tapered end to the spring. A photo helps explain this.
- spring.jpg (103.89 KiB) Viewed 23885 times
The red arrow shows the dip and sharp end I'm talking about. This isn't a problem on the lower side against the acrylic base as there is a nice wide flat surface but the under side of the bed heater has rounded corners and the bolt hole is very close tothe edge which in fact the spring was able to drop off and when that happens it changes the level dramatically.
The solution was to make a seating washer for the top of the spring and BINGO we are level again!. I installed a 3DTouch in this journey and now I've got all these issues sorted after manual level then calibration I watch to see how much the bed is out and there is barely any movement!!
and here is what the spring seating cap looks like installed
- spring_cap_installed.jpg (45.94 KiB) Viewed 23885 times
