I was printing some ABS on my modified Anycubic I3 Mega overnight, when I awoke to this horror of a destroyed glass print bed…
Now the question remains, how to actually fix this? One part is still firmly attached to the Bed and I fear this may destroy the Bed even more.
And I obviously need a new Print bed, but I can’t find the exact replacement, so should I even get a replacement Ultrabase? I saw that there are magnetic PEI beds available, but I am unsure if it is worth the 80-100€ for this.
Edit: Since the glass is glued to the 1.5mm aluminium heater PCB (and I already had to resolder the broken off wires once) I was looking at complete replacements at first, which why the price is relatively high
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PEI bed are 20€, not 100€.
Just buy a compatible one on amazon or elsewhere.
You just need to have the bed size somewhat correct, and the magnetic base have a sticky surface that will adhere on whatever is below your glass bed (usually some metal structure to hold the glass)Well I don’t have any way to mount the PEI bed? This is a glas bed with the heater glued to it, and the mounting screws are integrated into the heater. So I would need to find a way to either seperate the glass from the heating PCB or somhow mount the new bed on top of the exisiting one.
Unless there are cheaper compatbile option I did not find. It is quite hard to find something for this specific printer
That’s what they are saying. Buy a PEI plate with a magnetic backing, remove the rest of the abs from your glass build plate and stick the magnetic pad on it. Then the pei goes on top.
I did this as an upgrade to my own printer.
Cheap: Buy magnetic pei on aliexpress, glue on intact backside, continue using.Or do the same but also buy New glass to have a flat surface.
You might consider a aluminum heat bed with a regular piece of glass on top. Look up heat beds on reprap and see how the diy community does it. They are cheap and easily replaced. I just print on the aluminum with painters tape. Sorry that it fractured like that, it happens. So having the glass glued down is not a good plan.
Yea, I can see that now, It is how it came from the factory.
I could try to seperate the Glass from the aluminum heat bed, though I fear I might bend it in the process. It looks like the MK3 ALU-Heatbed Dual Power frm the reprap Wiki, except it’s 220x220mm.
If I can get the glass off without damaging the Heatbed I could also attach a magnetic PEI Plate to that, not sure if that thin alu plate is a good backing in that case.
I did exactly that to my i3 Mega to attach the magnetic plate directly to the heat plate. I indeed bend the whole thing in the process, fortunately though I was able to fix it (Z-Probe reports a maximum difference of 0.37 now). Don’t recommend though.
The industrial-grade glue they used is an absolute nightmare. If you choose to go that route definitely get yourself a proper heatgun as well as acetone, a spatula and some safety mask (for the acetone fumes). If you got an oven for tinkering perhaps heating the whole thing up to weaken the glue.
Leaving the glass plate where it is and putting something new on top definitely is way easier. Not sure I’d do this a second time myself (probably not).
I might be “lucky” in the sense that the glass appears to already separate at the corners.
Does the magnetic plate warp much under high heat loads? Since I print a lot with PET(G) and sometimes ABS I thought this might be a problem.
If I leave the glass on I might not get to the Maximum temperature, but I ordered some moderately priced magnetic kit already, so I’ll just clip this on top and Test first.
The magnetic plate indeed warps, not due to heat though but the material on it warping. I saw that on both the i3 Mega as well as a Prusa MK4S with PETG and ABS. Printing big solid objects close to a corner would cause the corner to be lifted up, as the warping of the object is often times stronger than the magnetic plates. Probably gives you an idea of how much force a glass plate has to withstand, especially with badly warping materials like ABS. You can counter this issue with some strong clamps. Doesn’t happen on most prints anyway, only on really large and solid ones. The magnetic adhesion in the center is strong enough for anything.
I just removed the Glass plate, not really a big job in my case.
Almost all of the glue stayed on the Glass and the remaining glue was very easy to clean with Acetone.
