RE: Adjusting Z-Offset - Bed Leveling

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Ermmm... I need to understand what is Z-offset first. Not criticizing, but how a bad offset will affect the final product?

improper bed leveling will lead to a myriad of undesirable effects during the printing

Like how? Will be nice to have a little bit more detail on the goods and bad examples.



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Hello @davidke20, thank you for the support and constructive criticism.

The easiest way to explain the Z-offset,
is there is a spacing between the nozzle and print bed,
and there is a Z axis limiter switch which cuts the power to the Z axis motor,
When the limiter switch is hit, the Z-offset parameter will cause the motor to raise back up to whichever axis point the Z-offset is set at. So for this particular bed leveling application, I'm running 0.05 mm as the offset, which raises the nozzle this increment after it hits the Z limiter switch.

The purpose is to make sure the PLA is not too compressed or far away from the bed.

The bad results from improper bed level and Z-offset will be:
Pancaking (squished up layers)
Nozzle scraping (during travel moves, as a result of nozzle being too close and literally digging into previously printed areas, this is dangerous to the nozzle and can cause catastrophic damage to the hot end and nozzle.)
Uneven layers and degraded print quality, which can get worse throughout the print as it build on an unlevel surface.
And probably some more things that I'm not thinking of offhand.

It's important to note that bed leveling is not the same as the Z-offset, but is synonymous with correctly setting the Z-offset, and defined is:
Bed leveling is maintaining equal distance on every point of the print bed, between the nozzle and bed, and is adjusted by springs.
Some machines utilize auto bed leveling, some are manual. (mine is manual.)

An entire post could probably be written on the negative effects of poor bed leveling and Z-offset.

I will touch further on this topic again in detail and maybe purposely reconstruct some awful results and take photos and/or videos.

Your feedback is appreciated, thank you!

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Ah... now it totally make sense. So, the print product is should lay on a surface that is align with the nozzle traveling area with a certain gap.

If the surface are not properly align with the nozzle, the gap are not consistence, there's a chance that the nozzle too far away, the print material become cold and doesn't stick well. Or the gap become too close and the nozzle scrape on the printed material.

Why Z-offset? That's just the gap between the bed and the nozzle. However, from what I understand, if the bed were not fixed position with the nozzle hoist(not sure if that's how you call that staging machine), the bed may just tip one side.

Great stuff. Never thought of all these since conventional inkjet printer has their nozzle z-offset with the paper via a fixed position roller drum.

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