Bed leveling issues (Rostock max v3)

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Jayjay
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Joined: Mon May 29, 2017 4:15 pm

Bed leveling issues (Rostock max v3)

Post by Jayjay »

I have had this Rostock max v3 for a few years now and as far as I know, it always had a bit of an issue in this sense. However, I feel as if it has been getting worse. Even after running the calibration routine three times with a clean nozzle on the clean glass plate, it seems as if the printer places the nozzle closer to the bed when on the right side and further away from the bed on the left side. I have attached two pictures of a single-layer print. Test 1 was done right after running the self leveling and test 2 was done after flipping the glass plate over, without running the self leveling again. In test 1, the nozzle is closer to the bed than it should be on the right side and on test 2 it is higher than it should be on the left side. What is puzzling is that it is hard to identify a faulty tower since this effect is seen for the most part as if the bed was split in half.

This issue was always somewhat present, but it got worse after installing a Fablam sheet on the bed (I used this to get better adhesion for ABS parts). During the first few self leveling runs with the Fablam sheets, the printer head would crash into the bed until the part cooling fans touched the bed as well. This happened once or twice and has not happened since, despite using the self leveling a few more times. I suspected that the nozzle was getting too close to the bed because the Fablam would "cushion" it hitting the bed, thus throwing the accelerometer off. However, as seen in the attached images, this seems to not be the case (these were done on a clean, bare glass plate).

I have suspected the belts of being loose and so have tried to tension it by moving the motors up. This ended up causing excessive amounts of ribbing on the first few prints and then stabilized over time (maybe the motor was slowly moving to a more "comfortable" position). Note that I still experience some amount of ribbing in my prints. I have also tried to level the printer itself to no avail.

I have not modified the internals of my v3 but I did have to replace the main board once because of a latched heated bed MOSFET (I have added acrylic panels around the printer to contain the heat, but I do not think this could affect much). I am running the default firmware and have been slicing all of my prints with simplify3d for a few years now. I have been printing many parts in PLA and a few in ABS.

One last thing to consider is that, for the greater part of the printer's life, I had mounted the bed supports (the black blocks that screw together with the blue tabs) slightly wrong. The two blocks on the left and the right were mounted on the "short" side, causing the bed to be slightly raised compared to normal. However, I have solved this issue before printing the test parts shown in the attached pictures.

I tried to give as much information as possible to try and see what this issue is. Any help is welcome. I will visit this page often in the next few days.

Test 1: https://i.imgur.com/i7U6wuN.jpg
Test 2: https://i.imgur.com/i7U6wuN.jpg

(edit: embedding the images or creating clickable links seems to not work very well, sorry)
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