My eye and “feel” for leveling the print bed using the paper method is lousy. Misspent youth I suppose… Anyway it seemed to me that since the extruder goes in and out so easily that would be a good way to mount a dial indicator. I modified the STL file for the extruder holder to attach an indicator. See http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:551366 if interested.
Tuns out it wasn’t too awful, about 0.1 mm high in one corner. Now it is within about ±0.02 mm over the whole bed. I’m printing a part that has been kicking my butt for far too long, and it is looking to be the best piece I’ve printed so far. About another three hours to go but well past the point where a corner would start to lift.
BTW, as a relatively new TAZ 4.1 owner, thank you to everyone who posts here–most questions I come up with have already been covered in detail.
The piece from Amazon looks the same. I got mine from MicroMark: http://www.micromark.com/precision-digital-indicator,10564.html. Have no illusions–it is a cheap indicator–but plenty good enough for 3D printing, I think. I use a mechanical one for my little mill.
I confess I’ve gotten weary of taking the extruder off and on. Now I’m looking at the holes where the second fan can be placed and thinking about how convenient that could be…8v)
I use a cheap harbor freight indicator. I did have to modify the part a little to fit the thicker attachment on my indicator. I should post it up as a modification of your thingiverse part…
Huh. I would have thought that would be a standard size. Bad assumption on my part, based on that I have two completely different ones that have identical mounting hardware. Live and learn…!
I did this, it works great. I don’t disconnect the extruder cables, I just hang it from the top of the TAX frame with a piece of wire bent into an S hook. This makes it really quick to swap in the dial indicator then switch back to the extruder when done leveling. I just cut the cable tie holding the extruder cables to the X axis mount, the fit is tight enough without the cable tie and also speeds up the whole process. Great idea thanks for sharing.
With the extruder disconnected / removed from the TAZ, I was still able to move x, y, z through the lcd and by selecting disable motors I could move the x and y axis by hand.