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No matter what kind of upbeat marketing is pushed at you, 3D Printing is a complicated process requiring patient calibration. So I don't like to pay top dollar for name brands and look for the best deals. I got my DaVinci printer for less than $100 from an obscure auction site. It was sold as a return and clearly had a reason for the return. My "turnkey" solution is a DaVinci 1.0 that required an upgrade to Repetier 0.92. The awesome Repetier firmware includes an auto bed leveling measuring process. The measurements give you an indication on how to adjust the screws to level your bed. The process consists of a few steps:
Herein I document the bed leveling experience, which divided into a number of stages:
Repeated trials of bed leveling would result in inconsistent measurements on the front left and front right plates. Although this issue is exacerbated by the cantilevered bed support design, the root cause was dirty contact plates. The more grime and grease on the plate, the more force the Z-probe required to confirm electrical contact. Displacement scales with the force, resulting in inconsistent measurements. The remedy was simply wiping the plates with rubbing alcohol infused paper towels. Acetone worked even better, resulting in zero streaks.
As it turns out, the connector hooking up the extruder heater would intermittently lose connection and abort the bed leveling process. (This was probably a very valid reason for the previous owner to return it to Amazon; I wish he would have included the filament cartridge too but I cannot complain about the price). The resolution was blunt but straight forward: remove the connector and solder the crimp connections together. I used heat shrink to insulate the wires from each other. The experience wasn't entirely fruitless; I went through the exercise of leveling the bed "cold". When I leveld the bed "hot" the offsets had significantly changed towards the front of the bed and required recalibration. The lesson here was that temperature coefficients do matter, especially when the change is approximately 100C.
Getting the right information was half the game and I found it in this thread. I was lucky enough to find it preemptively while searching for the optimal bed sticking material. For the record, Elmer's glue sticks seem to be OK so far. My solution to the shift glass bed issue was to use push epoxy putty into the gap between the glass plate and the containing plastic. According to the web site, it withstands up to 500F so it will be OK for the bed. After curing, I could not shift the glass sheet; mission accomplished.
The automated bed leveling process is easy to execute and generally pain free. However, the bed is cantilevered and does deflect with pressure on the unsupported side. I hypothesize that these deflections may actually skew the leveling measurements. In a later blog post I will use a dial gauge to possibly measure this deflection.