It seems like over the last couple months/half year there’s been this new fixation with printing a huge perfect single layer of plastic all cross the entire bed of one’s printer. I see lots of folks asking about calibration issues when they are trying to do this. It seems like it’s sorta become a standard of sorts.
I just ask why?
It seems to use a huge amount of plastic and honestly I don’t think it probably effects real world results that much.
I feel like the 3d printing community has a lot of shilling going on for companies and the information you get might not be entirely reliable. Look into the issues with this FLSUN S1 if you want to know what I mean.
But anyway, I have never had an impulse or see the need to print a single layer across the entire build surface of my printer. because I feel like that’s a huge waste and doesn’t actually matter when it comes to real world results.
Am I missing something? I kinda wonder if this kinda test is being pushed by the folks selling us filament, to sell us more filament. Is there a good reason to actually do this?
Please enlighten me!
It comes from a lot of things
A giant one layer sheet is obviously a torture test. But it is also an exercise to properly understand what your print bed ACTUALLY is. Printing across your entire bed can be a bit of a mess due to printers/firmware that reserve space for printing a test line or wiping the nozzle and so forth.
Whether it is worth a full 256^2 mm of filament is a different question
Also… there is the question of how big of a part people actually need and if you aren’t better off printing that in multiple segments regardless.
And… it also isn’t necessarily a good test of this in the first place. Because the “auto leveling” process already compensates for stuff like this and actually getting a fully intact sheet to come off the plate and be comparable isn’t easy on even a perfectly flat bed, let alone one where the contours were compensated for (to whatever degree). Which makes it VERY hard to tell if you truly had a perfectly flat sheet or if there was distortion because your lower left screw is too tight.
But the first layer obsession kind of goes back to the early days of printing when there WAS no “auto leveling”. Already alluded to it, but at a VERY high level, “auto leveling” creates a virtual mesh of the printbed and adjusts the nozzle height (z-axis) in real time. For any “kind of level” printbed, that is more than good enough since the variance for a single “part” is going to be negligible unless you are doing almost the entire printbed anyway.
But, in general, it is good practice to ACTUALLY level your bed and compute a proper z-offset. Which, again, goes back to the early days and The Paper Trick. Which, like most things FDM, was a closely kept secret because it was a great way to identify the newbies and be gatekeeping pricks to them. The importance of getting super precise (while understanding little to nothing about precision…) is a lot less important, but it is still a good way to show off that you are “a real printer” by doing it yourself to the most exacting level possible and then posting to the 'gram about it.
And speaking of the 'gram, the last part is just that everyone wants to be an influencer. Someone like Angus or Michael will do it as part of a printer review because they are showing off how good an advertised feature is or demonstrating fundamental build quality issues. But people don’t pay attention and just decide they are also a cool ass youtuber 3d printing expert and want to do it themselves.
I think there is definitely value in doing a full bed print IF you need to. But as a “normal” calibration test?