MakerGear Forum

Do I need to set my bed heat higher, or just give it more time to heat up?

daveb wrote:Do I need to set my bed heat higher, or just give it more time to heat up?

Same temp, it will just take a little longer for it to come up to heat. That being said once it gets there it will be more uniformly heated and will hold that temp against environmental changes a lot better than glass.

I'm finding that the actual bed temp is about 4 deg lower than set temp. (had it set to 64 to get to read 60 on the IR gun after having it sit for an hour). With the stock Kapton on glass set up, I read between 59 - 61 on the gun depending on where on the surface I point it when temp is set to 60 with S3D. Tried reading with blue tape stuck onto the PEI; reading was almost the same on area on or off the tape. I also found that when S3D first reports the temp is at set point, the reading on the gun is actually 8-9 deg lower. The gun reading then slowly ramps up until it stabilizes at set temp - 4. Despite this delta, the temperature on the PEI surface is much more uniform than was with Kapton on glass (< 0.5 variation).

I cut a mic6 bed today, I decided to get some thermal images of the old glass/PEI bed as well as the new aluminum/PEI bed. Here's the picture of the glass/PEI bed stabilized at 60c, You can see how uneven the heat is. The dark splotch in the middle of the white-hot area (slightly left) is where a chunk of glass chipped out of the back side of the build plate using hairspray. I wouldn't have expected it to have much of an effect, but apparently it does.



cheers,
c

And here is a picture of the mic6 bed with PEI installed. Notice how much more uniform the temps are and this is with only 2 clips instead of 3 (I need more large binder clips). I thought that the aluminum bed might not need the clips since it's so heavy compared to the thinner glass bed, but they make a big difference for heat transfer. Also, this time I used a single 12x12" sheet of the 3M 468 adhesive. When I did the original glass/PEI bed, the big adhesive sheets were not available so I used (8) strips of 1" wide 468 tape. The 1" tape was MUCH more difficult to apply and despite very careful efforts left a bed surface that had a slight waviness that was detectable with finger tips (I never measured it). It didn't seem to affect prints however.



cheers,
c

Vandal968 wrote:And here is a picture of the mic6 bed with PEI installed.

Excellent demonstration! Thank you.

Are you still offering MIC 6 plates with PEI?

Is there a big improvement over the glass with PEI?

Thanks

are anymore mic6 plates available?

I am also interested in a mic6 with PEI...

I'm down to scraps, but I have a couple. Email me directly at the email in my signature, and I'll get you hooked up.