There’s a feature I want in every FFF 3D print slicing tool, and so should you.
What is that feature? Well, let’s first talk about the problem.
I was contacted by a friend who operates a Creality Bedslinger 3D printer. He’s been running this machine for over a year, printing all manner of items for home and office.
He asked me how best to clean the print plate because it’s starting to have issues sticking. I provided the usual advice: wash in really hot water with plain dish soap to remove finger oils; then blast it with hot water to ensure all soap is removed from the crevices of the textured plate. No IPA required, usually.
But then he mentioned that the centre of the plate seemed to be wearing out, and that can also cause bed adhesion problems.
The standard magnetically attached, PEI-coated, spring steel plates have that problem: each time a print is peeled off the plate, a tiny amount of PEI comes off with it. The problem is worsened if you are scraping prints off the plate with a tool.
But why does it wear out in the middle of the plate? There’s a very simple answer:
The damned slicing software ALWAYS puts the object in the middle of the plate, and almost no one bothers to move it elsewhere. It’s no wonder the middle of the plate tends to wear out first.
I’ve seen this happen so often that it has become my personal habit to always shift the incoming object to a random spot on the print plate before slicing.
Why isn’t that a standard feature of every slicer? It would be trivial to set up. It would look like this:
If that were implemented in all the standard slicing software, this problem would almost disappear.
Many apologies to the print plate manufacturers, sorry!
