Easily Removing Prints from Detachable Glass Beds with Ice
Hello, all.
I've been using this trick with my MakerGear M2 for a while and haven't seen any reference to it online yet, so I thought I'd share and see if anyone else has tried it. I'm not sure how common a feature this is, but my M2 has an 8x10 sheet of glass that's held on top of the print bed with four clips. When the print is complete, you can take the glass off with the print still attached for ease of removal. This is where the trick comes in. At first I was printing on blue tape and peeling it off to remove prints, but this was time consuming and didn't feel very professional. Now before printing, I remove the glass plate and hose it down with AquaNet or ABS slurry depending on which filament I'm using. When it's done, I can often pluck it right off the glass. Sometimes, however, larger prints will remain obstinately stuck to the bed. When this happens, I flip the glass and rub an ice cube on the other side. The rapid temperature change causes the plastic and glass to deform at different rates, which causes the part to pop itself right off the bed, or at the very least become significantly easier to remove. There may be some other physics involving adhesion through vacuum caused by temperature difference, but I'm not really qualified to explain further. The process makes a lot of loud cracking noises which I assume are caused by the plastic popping off the bed; I have yet to see any damage on the glass from my technique. Even if the glass pane does eventually shatter, I can get another one cut very cheaply at the hardware store, and this technique has saved me more than that amount in prints that would have been ruined by my attempts to remove them. So, am I the only one who's tried this? Surely not.
