Adhesion problems and warping
I own a Hephestos 2 for over a year now and although I was pretty happy with it I very much wanted to upgrade the 3D printer with a heated bed. The reason for that was not so much the desire to use other material like ABS but I was hoping for better adhesion. Adhesion problems in the past led to warping and misprints. To counter this I used BuildTak en Pritt. This helped most of the time but it also led to a new problem. It was very hard to remove the model from the printbed. With the help of a vise to clamp the printbed and a special knife I was able to do it but it was far from ideal (to say the least).
A heated bed is the obvious solution to this problem. Warping is mainly caused by uneven cooling and therefore shrinking of the different areas of the print. The printbed counters this effect by keeping the whole printbed warm and thus warming the print evenly over it’s surface.
The heated bed
First of all I admit that the heated bed is not cheap. It’s about 160 euro. I believe that the Anet A8 with heated bed can be bought for less that $250. The quality of the Hephestos 2 is IMHO way better than the Anet A8 but still.
The heatedbed comes with a small controllerboard, a few cables, a power supply and of course the bed itself. Assembling the heated bed is easy although I encountered a few problems that on hindsight had nothing to do with the heated bed (the controllerboard of the Hephestos was malfunctioning).
After assembly I upgraded the software of the printer to the latest firmware version (currently 2.5). After some initial problems, I didn’t set up Cura correctly to warm the heated bed, I started printing.
As I hoped the adhesion problems are gone. I print straight on the glass plate only use some Pritt but without the BuildTak. No more hassle with and a knife. Once the temperature of the heated bed has decreasing it’s easy to remove the model. Until now I only used PLA at 200 degrees Celcius and 60 degrees for the Printbed which works fine.
Conclusion
Yes the heated bed of the Hephestos 2 is expensive and yes I had some problems setting it up correctly but it was all worth it. Finally the adhesion problems are gone and until now I haven’t noticed any warping. I haven’t had a failed print with the heated bed yet (seriously). My advice to BQ would be to include the heated bed as a standard in every Hephestos (without increasing the price).
If their is a gripe it’s a small one. Since the heated bed comes with it’s own power supply, two AC power sockets are needed for the Hephestos.
I want to thank BQStore.nl for all the help that they gave me and swiftly providing me with a new controllerboard.
Thanks for reading!