What is faulty here?

[Bob26]

Hello Y'all.

I'm new to 3D Printing, but i have a good general Knowledge of technical stuff.

So I bought a used Anycube i3 Mega. I printed some stuff, it's working okeish. The first layer is always a pain in the ass. So i tried a first layer test.


This is the result. My bed is leveled, although the nozzle is a bit too close, in general. But that doesn't justify the stripes here. I printed 2 times, without any adjustments. Btw, my slicer didn't print one square at the time, it's alternating between squares.


What does this tell me?

[VidJunky]

I'm not familiar with your printer so I have a few questions first.

How do you know your bed is level? I ask because in the picture with a fuller looking pattern the boxes that make up the upper right hand corner look thin. Then in the picture where the pattern is less complete it's missing one of the arms and where it washes out it is obviously thin. It looks like that corner of the build plate is high. Maybe not by a lot but by enough to affect the print.

What is your build plate made of? I have a Prusa that has a metal build plate that magnetically adheres to the printer base and all of that is flat and true. On my Creality printer I have a glass build plate, which while it makes my prints look decent on the face down side it was a bit tricky to get level. This was my first glass build plate so I expected it to be all perfect and flat and easy to print on but what I found is that the glass is wavy and ironically bowl shaped. To get the glass bed level I had to build up the low spots using tape to raise the bed incrementally until I had achieved something close to level across the whole bed. I think my middle where it was bowl shaped took 8 to 10 layers of tape to become actually flat and level. I only had one build plate for this printer so I put the tape directly on the base and I just put the build plate on the same every time.

There are probably a few things you can do to get around this. First would be to print this pattern again and use "live update" or "live adjustment" to get your gap correct. In both of the printers I have I'm able to adjust height while the machine is running. This offset, for me anyway, remains after I've set it even when printing something new. I may have to go and adjust it again but that is usually months in between.

The other thing you could try would be to print a raft. While rafts can use a considerable amount of filament the raft will print a level bed for your print to be printed on. You would have to print a raft for each print, it needs to be added in the slicing process, but I started using rafts on the Creality printer I talked about until I dug in and found better leveling.

Let us know how things turned out and shot us the answers to my questions for better advice.