My printer drilled through my hotbed. Can you help?
My printer drilled through my hotbed. Can you help?
I got my Kywoo Slim printer last week, and it's done well for its price of £200, although it was slightly bad at detail as it would drag the filament along with it, rather than the filament adhering properly to the build plate.
Today I tried to fix that issue by increasing the nozzle temperature from 200° to 210°, which is in the recommended range for PLA filament (190 to 220). My hotbed temperature has stayed constant at 60°. Quite to my surprise, instead of printing normally or even at all, my nozzle instead dove down straight into my build plate, through the hotbed underneath it, and started melting the plastic and vibrating, drilling through the hotbed.
I stopped it printing immediately and inspected the damage. There was a hemispherical dip in my build plate, with a hole all the way through it in the center. In the hotbed directly underneath it, there was an indentation probably about 1mm deep in the exact size and shape of the nozzle.
Can you help me understand why changing the nozzle temperature would have caused it to do this, or if my printer is safe to use now? Also, can I fix it, and if so how?
Edit: terms
Your issues are not related.
Either you changed some other setting, you mistakenly unplugged the limit switch or some other mechanical problem was created. Your Z "0" position is off for some reason which made the printer think it needed to continue to go down. A picture would always be helpful in seeing exactly what happened, but if the divot is only 1 mm, I wouldn't even worry about it. Just shift your prints so they don't print in that area whenever possible. If it really bothers you, you can replace the bed plate on most printers.
Also, it's called a "print bed" or just plain "bed". I've never heard the term "hot base" before.
You sure? I have an alternate theory, that increasing the temperature just so was enough to open a dimensional beacon to one of the planes of Dante's inferno and drawing an evil spirit to posess the system, resulting in said behavior...
Your ideas are intriguing to me, amd I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Sorry for my terms. I am fairly new to 3d printing, so I often get them wrong. I'm glad to hear you don't think it's a problem, and I only thought the issues were related as they happened consecutively. Thanks for your assistance!
Edit: the confusion with terms is because I was having trouble differentiating between the thing that heats up, and the thing on top of that that I print on.
To be clear...I DO think this is a problem, but I do not think it is connected to the other issue.
Your nozzle should never touch the bed.
Look at your limit switches. Did one break or disconnect. Use the slicer to move your nozzle close to the bed. Like really close. Amd then see what the coordinate it THINKS it is at. The distance should match the physical distance you can measure with a ruler or calipers. If the nozzle is like 10 mm above the surface, but the software think it is 30 mm above the surface then clearly you have a zeroing problem (usually a limit switch issue). If you hit Home, the printer is going to continue to drive thag nozzle down until it smashes into your bed again... what prevents that is the limit switch.
The vibrating that you saw was probably the X or Y axis trying to move, but the head was locked in place by the hole it was now sitting it. As you've just witnessed, the stepper motors have quite a lot of power and will normally drag the head right through any obstruction (even if it's your 27-hour print job that was nearly complete). This is why you see a lot of pictures with deep scratches in print beds.
A build plate commonly sits on top of the hotbed, but people frequently just call the whole thing the bed.