Question for BuildTak FlexPlate System users.

fcwilt

Hi,

I recently installed the BuildTak FlexPlate System on one of my printers and it seems to work very well.

In the past I have used a glass plate on top of the heated metal bed. On the glass plate I adhered one of the build surface products that are supplied as sheets with an adhesive layer.

The purpose of the glass plate was to allow swapping build surfaces by swapping the glass plate with a different build surface.

Given that the BuildTak system is already "two parts" - the bottom piece with the magnets and the removable flex piece with the build surface I'm thinking the glass piece is redundant.

Thoughts please.

Thanks.

Frederick

chas2706

HI,
Yes it is redundant but only if you have a good flat bed. I removed my glass and discarded it. Soon found out that I now have to rely on mesh bed compensation because I lost some bed flatness!

fcwilt

@chas2706 said in Question for BuildTak FlexPlate System users.:

HI,
Yes it is redundant but only if you have a good flat bed. I removed my glass and discarded it. Soon found out that I now have to rely on mesh bed compensation because I lost some bed flatness!

So the glass plate was flatter than the metal bed?

I suppose I can remove the glass and create a height map of just the metal bed to see how flat it is.

Thanks for the feedback.

Phaedrux

@fcwilt said in Question for BuildTak FlexPlate System users.:

I suppose I can remove the glass and create a height map of just the metal bed to see how flat it is.

That's what I would do. And if it's flat enough I'd ditch the glass to remove the thermal barrier it provides.

chas2706

@fcwilt said in Question for BuildTak FlexPlate System users.:

So the glass plate was flatter than the metal bed?

For me yes, I was unfortunate to purchase an ender3 pro with a warped bed!

A Former User

@fcwilt said in Question for BuildTak FlexPlate System users.:

So the glass plate was flatter than the metal bed?

most flat glass today is float glass so its down to the curvature of the earth in flatness basically, which is flat enough for a print surface.

you could use a scraping approach to paint the glass and let the paint rub off on the high spots of the metal, sand the metal high spots down and repeat until uniform distribution of paint/high spots and it should be reasonably flat. i used an cheapo surface plate but you can see the transformation here as the warped bed had a surface coating when i started https://ibb.co/album/Vw6QsK