Love my Taz Mini but I have discovered that prints with a large amount of surface area contact with the build plate, especially in ABS, are a right pain in the ass to remove, even with the provided tools.
Any tricks or tips you more experienced guys can share?
Make sure your bed is heated to 55-60C for a good 10+ minutes (assuming it cooled down after printing). Lulzbot recommends that the bed and part be heated to those temperatures to make parts easier to remove. It’s still difficult, but it does improve things a bit.
Sometimes printing with a brim also helps me have something thin to get my knife under. Not perfect but sometimes it helps. I’ve also sometimes designed in notches at the part/bed interface for the sole purpose of giving myself somewhere to pry with my knife. I can fill in the notched area with ABS slurry afterwards.
All have improved things for me, but nothing where the parts just fall off the bed after printing.
-Jim
If they are sticking so tightly that you fear you will break the glass, you can add a little positive Z offset in your slicing software. That will start the print a little higher off the bed resulting in less squish and less stick.
0.05 mm Z offset is where I would start.
I definitely agree with nopick here. After adjusting my z-offset, parts have been sticking just fine with no print failures and coming off very easily.
Good to know! I may add it to my bag of tricks! I’ll try it tonight. Has anyone tried it with tall parts (5-6") and still sticks well? That’s where the issues would be.
-Jim
I haven’t tried it with very tall parts, nothing more than 3.5" or so. I have tried it with very small parts and that seemed to work okay.
If you have the first layer set up correctly, the part will be very difficult to remove when the bed is at printing temps, but will pop off nicely when cooled down a bit. For PLA, the best temps I have found are 60 for printing and 50 for part removal. This is the great thing about PEI.
thanks!
I will give these things a shot and see how it works out.