The Core One needs a very stable surface
So far very impressed with the core one. The speed is incredible. But I have it sitting in the same spot that my soon to sold MK3S sat. The old printer was very stable sitting on a cement paver, which sits on heavy duty metal cabinet. But the core one is very top heavy and with a lot of rapid moves it really rocks the cabinet. I need to find something that will be stable yet not to industrial looking. Gotta keep the wife happy. Any suggestions?
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
What if you used some type of strap to strap the top to the vertical members of a rack?
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
I created a thread a while back for the XL. There are some ideas that would work well for the Core One.
Mini+MK3S+XL 5 Tool
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
I think it would surprise a lot of people the extent to which I've worked on trying to solve this issue.
My old printer was on a 24x48x72 muscle rack rated at 800 lb per shelf. I had no vibration issues but then again compared to newer machines the mk3s+ is a slow printer.
Worried that a combination of much higher speeds and the differences in core xy would result in a high center of gravity at high speeds negatively impacting print quality or even worse make the shelf rock in an unsafe amount I went a bit overboard.
I bolted leveling feet to the bottom of the shelf vertical supports, replaced the particle board shelving material with purebond baltic birch 3/4inch plywood. The high number of layers of baltic birch makes for a much better dampening material.
In between the metal lip the wood sits on and the wood I've got strips of sorbathane On top of the first shelf are six 24x48 porcelain tiles that weigh 38 pounds each. This large amount of weight brings the center of gravity low.
Second shelf is mainly printer storage
Third shelf is the same plywood and sorbathane strips, but in the center has a 110 pound 450x450x80 granite surface plate. Overkill most likely but I'm sort of a nut for things being level and I hate the look and feel of concrete pavers. Under the surface plate are 4 sorbathane hemispheres sized to compress 25 percent to provide the maximum vibration isolation performance for the product. 3 are in a bessle point stable triangle to ensure the plate stays flat and level and the 4th is half under one side for stability as well as to obtain the compression percentage I wanted.
Then we have the 51 pound core one.
Top shelf has dryboxes with filament.
You'd think with all this the vibration issues would go away. Nope, at high speed the shelf wobbles quite a bit. I measured this by taping a laser to the top of the printer and pointing it at a metric ruler taped to the wall and videotaped the amount the laser moves in different directions.
Using the laser data and a whole lot of chat gpt I decided the shelving unit needed X bracing to counteract the wobble and stiffen it a bit.
Off to metals depot to get 2 12 foot sections of 1/4 inch thick 1.5 inch wide cold finished steel flat bar and 3 12 foot sections of 1/8 inch thick 1 inch wide
I cut these to put an X on the back of the 1/4 inch, an X on left and right sides of the 1/8 inch, a 48 inch 1/8 horizontal bar, a 48 inch 1/4 bar, and one 24 inch 1/8 and 1/4 bar on both the left and right sides
I pre stressed the shelving unit and bolted the bars in a specific order to counter the forces in the directions I designed for and now the shelf is quite a bit stiffer
Did not want to bolt to the wall as it would negate some of my isolation methods as well as add a resonance from the wall.
The shelf with the printer was leveled with a machinists level to an accuracy of 100 millionths of an inch per 12 inches
So essentially what we have is a shelving unit with a lot of weight on it for dampening and viscoelastic sorbathane for vibration isolation and a Rick and Morty amount of leveling
Hopefully they come out with a firmware update to address some of these vibration issues so other people don't need to spend days researching and 700 dollars to get NASA level printer shelving lol but here we are
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
My solution and is still not enough: 2 20 kg pavers per printer, one beneath, one on top. And, obviously that doesn't stop vibration. It just has the benefit that the neighbouring printer doesn't get influenced while printing (not saying it likes the pre print start sequence, see separate thread).
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
I wouldn't agree with that - I have mine sat on a fairly flimsy wooden crate to give it some extra height - that is set onto a floating tiled floor.
The printer can wobble a couple of CM's when its doing some fast movements - and has flung anything on top of it onto the floor.
My print quality though is absolutely fine. The biggest difference I find in print quality comes form the slicer profiles than printer movement.
I spent a long time trying to get my Prusa Mini to stop vibrating the whole house - you have to research Vibration Damping vs Isolation - it's a well research engineering problem with plenty of solutions. My mini solution was 3d Printed feet that allowed the printer to wobble - I think I'm right in saying that I was changing the frequency of the vibrations from small to large - large vibrations didn't propagate thought the house.
So I think just pure weight and substance isn't always the right way forward - the machine vibrates - you need to change the frequency of that energy and possibly absorb it. getting that right for your particular setup is a science in its own right!
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Is it possible to screw the bottom of the frame down to the table? I don't have a Core One, but I made little screw down feet for my MK3S / MK4, and that made the printer very stable (of course it's not the same weight up high as Core One). I live on a sailboat, so having the printer secure is obviously important, and has an added affect of quieting things down.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
My printer arrived yesterday, following this thread a bit I put it on my woodworking bench that weighs several 100kg with tools and is bolted to the wall. I only had time to get the printer initial setup done and do a couple of test prints but it was easy to see that the printer was producing vibrations to the bench on some moves, especially on infill. I suspect no reasonable amount of weight will prevent this, and I need to re-consider where I place this. I am beginning to suspect that allowing the printer to move is better than trying to bolt it down. Maybe squash ball feet next, I need to raise the printer a bit anyway to print directly from a dryer.
/Anders
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
I suspect no reasonable amount of weight will prevent this [...]
I am beginning to suspect that allowing the printer to move is better than trying to bolt it down.
Agree -- you can't avoid vibrations of the supporting table or bench entirely. They will just be reduced in proportion to the mass of the support structure. Newton's 2nd and 3rd laws apply. 🙂
Allowing "some" movement of the printer as a whole may indeed be better, since it will reduce the internal forces which act to distort the printer frame (and hence induce printing artefacts). But there's always a risk of creating resonances of the printer + elastic support structure, which could even amplify internal vibration amplitudes if the internal frame structure has similar resonance frequencies. One may need to experiment with the softness of the suspension, and probably with some added mass (concrete slab or such) above the elastic supports to lower the center of gravity of the suspended mass.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
This is interesting if you haven't seen it already ->
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
So essentially absorbing the vibrations is better than trying to "tame" it by force. There's inexpensive rubber dampening pads or even whole dampening stands for machines and appliances (eg fridge/washing machine).
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Adding mass to a 3D printer shelf doesn’t eliminate vibrations entirely, but that’s not the point. The real goal is to change how the system responds to those vibrations — specifically, to reduce the amplitude of resonance and dampen harmful oscillations that affect print quality. More mass lowers the system’s natural frequency, making it less responsive to the typical high-frequency vibrations generated by the printer’s stepper motors and fast movements.
Think of it like a tuning fork: if you made that fork out of lead instead of steel, it would still vibrate, but it wouldn’t ring nearly as loudly or for as long because the heavier material resists rapid motion. Similarly, adding weight to the shelf or platform absorbs energy from the vibration, prevents the system from amplifying certain frequencies, and stabilizes the printing surface. You’re not trying to stop all movement — you’re preventing small vibrations from stacking up and turning into layer shifts or ghosting.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Adding mass to a 3D printer shelf doesn’t eliminate vibrations entirely, but that’s not the point. The real goal is to change how the system responds to those vibrations — specifically, to reduce the amplitude of resonance and dampen harmful oscillations that affect print quality. More mass lowers the system’s natural frequency, making it less responsive to the typical high-frequency vibrations generated by the printer’s stepper motors and fast movements.
Think of it like a tuning fork: if you made that fork out of lead instead of steel, it would still vibrate, but it wouldn’t ring nearly as loudly or for as long because the heavier material resists rapid motion. Similarly, adding weight to the shelf or platform absorbs energy from the vibration, prevents the system from amplifying certain frequencies, and stabilizes the printing surface. You’re not trying to stop all movement — you’re preventing small vibrations from stacking up and turning into layer shifts or ghosting.
All true. But to improve print quality, you ultimately need to reduce the relative vibrations between the print head and the bed. So you would need to add mass and dampening to the printers frame and other non-moving or slow-moving structures, not to the shelf.
The impact of externally supporting the whole printer in different ways (more or less mass, softer or harder suspension, more or less dampening) is much harder to estimate, I think. It will depend on the stiffness and resonance frequencies of the printer's internal structures, and may affect their relative displacements in different ways. More dampening is probably always good, but not if it comes at the expense of too much stiffness.
Add input shaping to the equation, which in its current implementation however only measures and optimizes for oscillations of the print head (not the bed), and things get messy... I think there's no way around experimenting. And I would not be surprised if the optimum conditions for minimizing acoustic noise, ringing, and VFAs are all different, so one needs to find a compromise.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Totally agree.
My approach so far has been a mix of leveraging ChatGPT to challenge assumptions and applying the scientific method to collect real data. Years of working within Lean Six Sigma frameworks taught me that chasing improvements without measurement leads nowhere — and that data only matters if it’s gathered accurately and repeatably.
To that end, between changes to my setup, I’ve been running a consistent set of tests. I print four specific pieces: one focused on ghosting and ringing, another on vertical fine artifacts (VFAs), a third targeting Z banding, and — of course — the Bonkers Benchy, designed to push the machine hard with aggressive movements and finish in about eight minutes. It’s great for exaggerating wobble and vibration issues at speed.
On top of that, I’ve rigged a laser level to the printer and aimed it at a metric ruler taped to the wall. During the same layer and percentage of completion on two specific prints — one designed to test side-to-side motion and the other diagonal — I record the laser’s movement in millimeters to measure physical deflection. I also supplement this with a paid vibration analysis app that uses my phone’s accelerometer to log vibration levels throughout the print.
With this data, I compare both the amount of machine movement and the resulting print quality. What’s interesting — and honestly right in line with what you said — is that the relationship isn’t always linear. Less physical motion doesn’t automatically mean better results. In some cases, reducing movement can actually worsen print quality, depending on the specific part of the print and how the system reacts.
That’s really where I see a lot of people oversimplify the problem. They watch one video, try dropping their printer onto a slab or foam, get a couple of good prints, and assume they’ve solved it — without considering how wildly different their machine, environment, or even their print scenarios might be.
The reality is, vibration control is far more complex — just as you pointed out. If solving it were simple, NASA wouldn’t spend years researching and inventing materials to manage it. It really does come down to understanding resonance, how energy transfers through materials, and the difference between amplification and transmission.
That’s where mass — when applied thoughtfully — plays a role. Not because it stops vibrations outright, but because it changes how the system responds. Increasing mass lowers the system’s natural frequency, making it harder for typical high-frequency vibrations from the printer to excite the structure. Combined with proper damping — materials designed to absorb rather than reflect energy — this helps reduce the amplitude of oscillations that actually reach the print.
Of course, none of this works in isolation. Frame stiffness, internal damping, input shaping, and — crucially — the print itself all factor in. And you’re absolutely right that vibration profiles shift from one print to the next — slow, heavy layers behave nothing like fast infill or fine detail work.
That’s also why I tend to think Prusa’s in-house accelerometer calibration — while genuinely impressive — has natural limits. It can’t produce the same result for someone printing on an IKEA Lack table versus someone on a granite slab or other high-mass setup. The stiffness, damping, and mass of the environment around the printer are fundamentally different. And because input shaping only measures the printer’s own frame response, it simply can’t adjust for those external factors — especially when each print drives different movement patterns.
At the end of the day, I think we’re aligned: there’s no universal fix, no one-size-fits-all solution that applies across machines, materials, and setups. Like tuning a race car’s suspension, vibration control is highly specific to the environment. You measure, test, and iterate until you find the balance that works for your machine, your space, and your prints. Anything else is just guessing.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
The input shaping mechanism (as implemented in hobbyist printers, whether Prusa, Bambu or others) has two fundamental limitations in my understanding:
- It only aims to optimize the printer's response to accelerations, by shaping the acceleration profile to avoid excessive system responses at resonant frequencies. It does not do anything against other sources of vibration, e.g. belt ripple or asymmetries in the motor windings. So it won't do anything to address these sources of VFA.
- The single accelerometer does not actually measure the relative displacement of the nozzle vs. the bed, but only one component at a time (namely the one actively driven). If e.g. an XY acceleration of the print head in a Core XY printer also induces a vibration in the bed, the input shaping calibration does not "see" this and cannot compensate for it.
Regarding limitation (1), hopefully phase stepping calibration will help to reduce some sources of vibration sources which occur at constant speeds.
To address (2), I believe that just adding another accelerometer and acquiring data in parallel would not be sufficient. The input shaper in the Klipper firmware can only compensate for one characteristic resonance frequency per axis in my understanding. Hence, if the print head and bed oscillate at different resonance frequencies in a given direction, input shaping cannot (fully) correct that.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Half the people in the prusa subreddit seem to think phase stepping is input shaping and then wanna argue lol
RE:
I agree with you: for me input shaping is responsible of improvment regarding ghosting and "waves" on corners (acceleration and deceleration phases), but phase steping will improve general vibration/resonance at different (but constant) speed.
I really hope it will improve buzzing resonance noises at specific speeds I experience on my printer. It drives me crazy!
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Are we struggling with vibrations or wobbly surface?
For vibrations I've installed squash ball feet via one of the plentiful existing printables models (on my MK4, don't know if something similar exists for the Core One). That makes an enormous difference in noise and vibration, and doesn't seem to affect print quality. Seriously, it did wonders for the MK4. Haven't seen a Core One in person so I don't know if something like that is needed for the Core One as well.
For wobbly tables: It took me a long while to figure out, but tables with walls on the sides / back / front is what makes a table stable. So technically a chest (a box basically) is very stable and not wobbly.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
Are we struggling with vibrations or wobbly surface?
It depends on the subject ahah, but bot but on this topic it's mostly about wobbling.
For vibration, from experience with every Prusa printers I had before, squash balls never solved those resonance noises. I had to replace every bearings to Misumi ones on all my mk3 printers to really get rid of those resonance noises at specific speeds.
RE: The Core One needs a very stable surface
For vibration, from experience with every Prusa printers I had before, squash balls never solved those resonance noises. I had to replace every bearings to Misumi ones on all my mk3 printers to really get rid of those resonance noises at specific speeds.
Oh really, the resonance of specific speeds is from the bearings? I always thought it had something to do with the motors. Interesting. I'm not an expert at it, but apparently it's possible to program the slicer / firmware to just avoid certain speeds that are known to cause resonance, I think I recall a Prusa blog post or video talking about it. If it's the bearings that's causing the issue, it should be quite simple to program since I assume most of the Prusa machines are using the same bearings.
I can't say that the resonance as certain speeds is a functional problem, but imo Prusa printers are more of a premium product than a budget one. And resonance / vibrations at certain speeds doesn't give a premium experience. So I would be happier if that problem was fixed!