Printing onto a wood base
Suppose you wanted to print your name in PLA onto a wooden plaque. How do you convince the MK4 to use the top of the board. Will the automatic leveling work? Does the PLA stick tightly enough?
RE: Printing onto a wood base
not tried it but look at this YouTube video on Prusa 3D
RE: Printing onto a wood base
Looks interesting but wondering two things here:
1- do I need to tell the printer the approximate height of the substrate? During the z-calibration the Nextruder goes down rapidly to adout plate level and from there goes slowly seeking the plate. Letting it bang down full speed on a concrete tile does not strike as a good idea.
2- can I set the area to calibrate the z axis on? The automatic bed levelling takes a number of locations to test, but what if it chooses a location just outside my my brick-tile-masterpiece-in-the-making to do its bed levelling on?
RE: Printing onto a wood base
I was curios about the same thing, so decided to try it out with something small and simple. In order to not risk damaging the nozzle or something else, decided to try to put one of the cardboard boxes in top the bed. Had to turn off the bed heating in order to prevent the box from burning by setting bed temperature to zero during slicing.
Not sure if this was somehow detected automatically or it was just a coincidence, but the first thing after preheating, the printer (core one) decided to perform Home Calibration. I was double surprised to see how gently (for real) punctured the box with the nozzle and tried to continue further. After watching several attempts, decided to stop it (reset) and look for something less soft.
Found slightly harder photo album. The same thin happened.
Then i got a flashback, that during the loadcell calibration i managed to do it from 30th time - it turns out that i had to push harder (not just tap, supposedly lightly as in the assembly instructions), so it strikes me immediately - what if the surface has to be hard?
Well, I put the box again, the steel sheet on top of it and finally one A4 plain paper. This time, the Home Calibration with the extra bed height was successful and the printer printed on top of plain paper just fine.
The only thing I wonder about is - whenever we should manually perform Home Calibration or the printer somehow detects that it should automatically.
So I would definitely be trying to print on wood soon and will figure out that last part.
