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I've had a magnetic sheet on my Ender 3 for some time. It came with a Creality 3D flexible bed. I've since got a couple of PEI coated steel plates and use it with that.

I noticed it had a lot of crud embedded in it, so since each of the coated steel beds came with a magnetic pad, I have a choice of pads to apply.

Since there seems little variation in the magnetism once the plate is fully over the pad. would I be better going for the lightest at around 120 g, or the heavier ones (at around 240 g) which do have a slightly stronger pull?

I'm intending to use a couple of ADXL345's to tune the resonance after I've reinstalled the bed.

0scar
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StarNamer
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1 Answers1

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If you want/intend to print fast (high acceleration), adding mass to the moving bed is a big problem. It both decreases the resonant frequencies of the system (making it harder for input shaping to suppress them without introducing significant errors into the toolpath) and increases the force needed to accelerate the bed (making it easier to skip steps). So, all other things equal, you want to pick the lighter magnetic plate.

With that said, if you really want performance, the lightest plate is no plate. Myself and at least several other people I know doing high performance printing on bedslingers have dropped (or skipped adopting) the magnetic plates and gone to clip-on plates or no plates at all. I'm running my Ender 3 with "blue tape"/"painter's tape" directly on the aluminum bed (no separate buildplate) and others are using various surface treatments (variants on the old "ABS slurry", hairspray, etc. concepts) to print directly on aluminum. This saves a lot of mass, but can be less convenient for popping prints off.

R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
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  • I hadn't thought of going that path. I have some "picture clips" I used to use with a glass plate and they weigh 1.4g each! I'm not sure I'm ready to go to no plate yet as I've never used tape. – StarNamer Jun 26 '23 at 09:59
  • @StarNamer: I got started using tape by using it on top of my buildtak-clone plate surface, as a way to avoid damaging the surface with lots of small test prints with materials that were hard on it. Then, once I found out I liked it, I decided to go without the plate. It got me a much flatter bed surface too, although this can go either way - if your aluminum isn't warped, it's flatter, but if it is warped, printing directly on it gives up the ability to shim out imperfections with shims between the bed and the plate. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Jun 26 '23 at 16:18