In my previous post I explained how I acquired an Ender 3 v1, v2, and v3 over the course of a week after not owning any 3d printers, well, it's been a couple more weeks and I got a couple more printers. I spent several days trying to troubleshoot the Nebula pad that came on my v3, finally got it unbricked only to have it stick in a sort of boot loop so I gave up, I was going to just buy a screen for $40 but I got a whole nother machine for $70 which is good because I ended up replacing the screen and main board and now I have the rest for parts (the first one has several mods so fixing it rather than using it for parts made sense to me).
I fixed the v2 that I got out of the dump by adjusting the bed and replacing the stepper on the x axis and then gave that one and the v1 to my oldest daughter.
Deciding that I need to unlock the wonders of multi color printing I bought a FlashForge AD5X for $160 that had a bunch of filament caught in the bowden tubes and extruder. After fixing that I gave it a wash and tried printing a benchy but I can't get it to stick. I'm going to play with some settings tonight and see if I can get this one printing as consistently as the Ender 3 v3. I saw glue mentioned a couple of times, would a glue stick do or does it need to be something special?
Also, what type of grease do you all recommend for your machines?
For adhesion, I prefer to apply a layer of Kapton/polyamide tape to my print bed. You can get it online in big square sheets — while using the typical 1" or 2" wide rolls one stripe at a time to cover the bed is technically possible, and I did it in the early days, it's also a monumental pain in the ass and I advise against it if your budget can stretch to an additional two or three dollars to get the square stuff.
Forget glue stick. It's messy, it produces an uneven thickness, the tubes dry out at inopportune moments, and it's damn near impossible apply both evenly and also in an area that will actually correctly cover the entire footprint of your part. Instead, use cheap hair spray. Aqua Net seems to work best for me. The stuff in the pink cans; the absolute cheapest variety.
Note that on a Kapton surface your adhesion agent is also a release agent for certain materials, most especially Nylon and to a lesser extent PETG. Having that barrier in between your actual Kapton surface and your part will prevent it from molecularly bonding to your plate like the goddamned sword in the stone, forcing you to say several choice cuss words and re-tape your plate (as well as spend an entertaining afternoon scraping or sanding bits of Kapton tape off of the bottom of your print). Kapton and Nylon are both polyamides.
PLA, TPU, ABS/ASA, and polycarbonate can be printed directly onto bare Kapton depending on your level of audacity and/or bravery, especially in the case of the latter two. ABS is infamous for warping and the corners may lift off your bed without adhesive, or indeed even with adhesive... Even if the initial layer stuck to the plate perfectly well.
Note that you will have to raise your Z offset slightly if you apply tape to your bed. I.e., ideally by the thickness of the tape. You might find that you also want to raise your nozzle about 0.015-0.02mm if you've applied a layer of whatever adhesive, and lower it back down after you clean it off. Yes, the infinitesimally thin layer of hair spray will impact your first layer height provided your machine is accurate enough that its first layer offset is not a crapshoot on a per-print basis to begin with.
I replaced the PEI coated sheets on my Prusa printers with G10 (garolite) on spring steel sheets. I sanded it a bit and it's working pretty reliably for the PLA, PETG and TPU I have been printing.
Thank you, I haven't done the kapton tape yet but hairspray did the trick for my first couple of prints.