It seems like over the last couple months/half year there’s been this new fixation with printing a huge perfect single layer of plastic all cross the entire bed of one’s printer. I see lots of folks asking about calibration issues when they are trying to do this. It seems like it’s sorta become a standard of sorts.
I just ask why?
It seems to use a huge amount of plastic and honestly I don’t think it probably effects real world results that much.
I feel like the 3d printing community has a lot of shilling going on for companies and the information you get might not be entirely reliable. Look into the issues with this FLSUN S1 if you want to know what I mean.
But anyway, I have never had an impulse or see the need to print a single layer across the entire build surface of my printer. because I feel like that’s a huge waste and doesn’t actually matter when it comes to real world results.
Am I missing something? I kinda wonder if this kinda test is being pushed by the folks selling us filament, to sell us more filament. Is there a good reason to actually do this?
Please enlighten me!
Prusa’s first layer calibration in the past would do a long line across the plate to give you time to adjust, I personally just use a piece of paper or feeler gauge (have a tap probe) to set my offset and then run with it. Auto levelling and meshing work extremely well in my experience, if you have something adjustable imo you’re best doing that offline anyhow, the nozzle to surface distance is what matters, you don’t need to push plastic to measure that, in fact I wouldn’t even attempt to do that until I was confident in my measured offsets, tool crashes suck and super close scraped on plastic sucks to remove from a surface.