PLA bed leveling trick (and a question)

I’ve been putting this mini through its paces this weekend. I haven’t had a single print failure yet! They’re all gorgeous and the new bed material is friggin fantastic. The bed leveling is really buggy for me though and I think I’ve figured out why.

As many have noted, if you’re using PLA, the bed leveling will begin to fail. I spent all weekend doing prints and found that the failure rate this weekend was about half. It would press waaaay too hard on the corners, pushing the entire bed down.

On close inspection this was due to just enough PLA oozing out of the tip to inhibit the condictive connection between the nozzle and the washer. If I pre-heated the nozzle and scrubbed it clean first with a brillo pad or some other more abrasive source, then babysat the process and made sure it was perfectly clean before the level, it worked fine.

While this does work, it is a pain in the ass. Is there a way to manually level the bed? Maybe I should just alter my config to not have the bed-leveling and only run the default occasionally to re-level? I rarely ever have to level my taz4.

What PLA are you using? We have specific wipe nozzle temps for each material. Also, did you flip the nozzle cleaner pad or try a new one? They get dirty, but typically not that fast.

I am having the same trouble with abs from the start. IT would seem to me if it was higher than 140 degrees, it may wipe better?

I’ve tried prototype supply (esun) and form futura. Same problem with both, failure rate is pretty high (smashes bed way down unless I manually scrub the thing).

I have noticed that I’m manually heating up to about 200c to scrub but the default cleaning is much lower. I wonder if that is the culprit as Kevin mentioned.

I changed my temps for wiping to 180, and 6 prints went well

The wipe temp is dependent on the material. We profiled our own, and should work just fine with it, but we’re note sure about other vendors’ filament. You should be able to do print after print after print in PLA, ABS, HIPS without intervention.

My bed level failure happened exactly as described. I was using Lulzbot PLA. It appears to drool enough material after wiping to cause a failure of bed leveling.

–Jim