When I first got my 3D printer my boyfriend asked me a question that still makes me think to this day:
Couldn’t you just permanently glue your bed leveling screws after you’ve gotten a perfect manual leveling? If you really needed to adjust the Z height, like say if you swap out your nozzle and it’s not exactly the same as the old one, you could just add an adjustable Z endstop, or for beds with auto leveling, you wouldn’t even have to do anything else afterwards.
Auto leveling is great when properly implemented, but can only account for a limited range of variability. Given that over time all elements of the system suffer wear and tear of one sort or another – especially moving parts – and environmental and system temperature changes take both long and short term tolls, the ability to manually adjust when necessary remains important.
I’ve bent a bed trying to pop a part off. Loctite blue 242 is intended for uses where you don’t want a bolt to move during use, but you do want to be able to move it if you really have to: it greatly increases a screw’s resistance to being turned.
I would never glue mine down as I’m always screwing with them. Having dual z axis motors I have ran into issues where I accidentally made my x axis extrusion uneven and in order to dial things back in I have to adjust the bed again. Plus you could accidentally ruin your build surface and replacing it could require adjustment. I just don’t think it’s worth it.
these screws doesnt turn themself so what would you win by glueing them? However if your printer is very sturdy - not moved - in controled environement (same temp through the year), yes sure. Let’s put it that way if your printer has those screws it is not that sturdy and if you remove a finished part which sticks a bit better you probably have to recalibrate. (or if you print with different bed temp./materials. Or you have calibrated it for 0.2 layer and now you print 0.1 without raft - you may notice that it was a bad idea to glue them)
Good explanations. That makes a lot more sense.
Temperature differences for different filaments will also thermally move things around.
Highly recommend against Loctite 242 if your bolt is anything smaller than 5-6mm in diameter. If you’re using this on bed leveling screws, you need the Loctite 222. Pink/purple loctite. Otherwise it’ll hold so well that you’ll strip 3mm screws, set screws, etc.
Should not be necessary and certainly not recommended to glue the bed leveling bolts. Once I have my beds manually leveled (Really easy to do) I never have to touch them unless I change the nozzle to a different one. Good tight springs keep the bolts in place.
no need to go out and buy loctite…
“nail paint” (my english is slow today) will work just as well and are far more common in household then locktite.
A lot of what people are leveling out with the bed screws is actually gradual motion of wood and plastic parts around the printer. Old plywood-frame printers (rare these days) would expand and contract slightly with changes in humidity. Injection-molded plastic cantilever arms supporting print beds (like in the Replicator 2/2x and lots of clones) will flex as they heat up and cool down due to residual molding stresses. PLA parts and spectra/kevlar cables/belts all tend to creep under sustained high stresses.
Some printers DO have issues with leveling screws shifting over time. For example, there was a period where FlashForges came with leveling wingnuts that had too much thread clearance, and they tended to back off over time. It’s a fairly high vibration environment.
A well-built METAL printer only needs to be releveled maybe once per year to accomodate screw wear, and even that can be easily auto-calibrated out with a Z probe.
What I personally recommend is building a really strong and stable metal Z stage structure, and then placing a replaceable (and flat) build plate on top of it. That way you get the stability of a good Z stage (and can use lock nuts or whatever to hold it calibrated) but also have a removable print surface for stubborn prints and oddball filaments. You can design this so the TOP surface of the build plate registers off a fixed Z stage feature, or you can use a Z-probe that hits the actual bed surface, and you’ll almost never need to re-level.