3D printing game changer!

DavidR8

DavidR8

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I bought a magnetic bed and upgraded bed springs for my Ender 3v2 to solve a couple of problems; 1) prints were very difficult to remove and 2) the bed was not trammed from one print to the next on account of having to pull the glass bed to remove the print.
Used it today for two prints and I'm very impressed.
 
What's a magnetic bed?
 
Reddinr said:
What's a magnetic bed?
Click to expand...

A magnetic bed is a sheet of spring steel with a coating on it to promote adhesion. The magnetic part is that a sheet of magnetic material (the stuff on fridge magnets) is put on the aluminum bed of the printer with adhesive. Then the spring steel plate is laid on top.
Because the spring steel is flexible you just bend it to loosen the print as compared to prying it off with a putty knife. When you hava a print with a large surface are sometimes it's near impossible to get them off a glass bed.
 
I upgraded my Flashforge Creator to a magnetic PEI bed years ago. It was, indeed, a game changer!

My newly built Voron 2.4 has a West 3D magnetic PEI bed. It is very good as well. I use it for PLA, PETG, TPU and ABS with excellent results.

I add a shot of hair spray to help PETG and TPU release from the bed. Without it, that stuff sticks super tight.
 
My Prusa has a magnetic PEI coated sheet. Works pretty well, most of the time. Doesn't work so great if the filament is soggy - I got super over adhesion. Like I still can't remove the thin PETG film fully in the center of the plate. Learned my lesson on trusting new filament. But for normal and dryish PLA and PETG it works great, the prints come off fairly easily.
 
DavidR8 said:
I bought a magnetic bed and upgraded bed springs for my Ender 3v2 to solve a couple of problems; 1) prints were very difficult to remove and 2) the bed was not trammed from one print to the next on account of having to pull the glass bed to remove the print.
Used it today for two prints and I'm very impressed.
Click to expand...

How are you getting along with Alibre Atom?
 
DavidR8 said:
I really like it. It's definitely more intuitive for me than F360.
Click to expand...

I initially went with Atom when I switched from Inventor.

I found it to have similar workflows, but early on, I got pretty frustrated with it's lack of all the -easy buttons-, for lack of a better term, that Inventor had.

Atom pretty much forces you to think outside the box. It MAKES you learn the basic stuff, like constraints and good sketch practices. It also makes you think about and learn how to transition 2d sketches into 3d shapes, because it doesn't have the little cheat buttons like "move face", "remove face" etc.

After about a year of learning Atom, I realized how much I actually didn't know, back when I was using inventor.

When I upgraded from Atom to Design Expert, (which is very similar to Inventor and SOLIDWORKS), I realized that Atom had made me a much better CAD operator.


Atom was probably the best CAD training tool I've ever used. That includes the two semesters of drafting and 3D modeling in college.



And, Alibre's practice of applying the price you paid for Atom towards an upgrade to Design Pro or Design Expert, gives a pretty strong upgrade incentive to their users.
 
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