It’s impossible to get the bed perfect on makerbot style printer. If you level to edges typically the extruder will touch in center. I believe there must be a slightl bow in guide rails on all flash forge creators and other similar printers. So best practice level the plate using your build area. Don’t level to outer extremes of plate. What I do. I print a skirt about 25mm away from part with 2 to 5 layers wide. When this is printing you adjust bed in 1/4 turn inc. Adjusting height. To get the print to stick. Adjust bed until filament struggles to come out cause it’s to close. Then adjust until filament just barely comes out. This will really presses the filament into bed. Also you can design a rectangle roughly 5 x 8 and print to see if extrusion is consistent around entire bed Been using simply 3d for a while never had any issues. I print a lot at .25mm height and run at 40 or 50 for nice resut. I use a .004 feeler gauge as paper thickness varies. Also let your tip preheat for a while and drain or remove filament before checking gap with paper as tip must be clean to check gap. Tip. Get a glass bed once you get your prints to stick it’s nice to remove them on a table outside the printer.
My FF C Pro is getting long in tooth now but I would strongly suggest a glass plate for bed. I have 3 of them. If you can get the thicker glass plates not window glass. Use glue stick to help with ABS. I print with bed at 100 deg. Make sure you have printer fully inclosed (Top cover) this will keep the interior more constant.
If you still have edges and middle differences after installing glass, your rails may be bent. The best you can do then is print on raft and allow the raft to level out the print surface.
To release print, remove the print on glass and place in freezer, in 10 - 15 minutes the print will pop off 
My FF is still my ABS goto printer even after 3 years use
Garth
I have the 2016 model.
Thanks for the instructions. I have a question. I heard that you need to be careful when leveling a build plate if it’s glass because you could crack the glass/damage the nozzle. Could you tell me about that if this is a thing I should be weary of? Thanks again.
I assume you have to out it into the freezer because the glass plate plus glue adheres much stronger than another plate would?
Once your machine gets about 1000 hours into it, The bed will settle into place and you wont have to adjust it every week.
Loose the blue pad.
Get some dollar store glass, (picture frames) and butterfly clips, 8x10 are easier to find and consider them disposable. Cheap glass will break on large abs parts as it cools. Throw them in the freezer when the part is done. While your part is cooling the freezer, you can throw on a new piece of glass and start right away. That the benefit of cheap glass. (reduced labor)
PLA… with purple Auqa net hair spray. bed 60, temp 230
ABS … Green PETG tape, sanded, drip acetone onto the tape and rub a piece of abs on it for the slurry. 110 bed , 230 temp
Your first layer should be “smashed” … The leveling card that comes with the machine is too thick.
Here are my perfected profiles for S3D and a Creator Pro… http://palmerize.com/3dprint/flash-forge-profiles.rar 35
If you have issues using the above profiles, then its either bed adjustment, mechanical issue, or surface prep to the glass. These profiles are not setup for small parts. If the parts are under 1" be sure to run at least 3 or 4 of them to keep it from melting. Multiple parts will reduce the amount of heat it absorbs.
Flash Forge should do themselves a favor and only send PLA with the machine. ABS is not a material to cut your teeth on.
We have around 20 ffcp printers at the moment and they are running constantly with barely any issues. We only ever received 1 with a slightly warped bed but the raft does help a lot with levelling so I’d try that first and with the correct settings and reduced gap between nozzle and bed.
Im trying to keep this simple to start with, I remember the early days of people making suggestions and everyone was different but just remember to only change one thing at a time.
on another note, we use a glass bed for abs with 3dlac spray occasionally and the glass just heavily cleaned with acetone for pla or use the blue bed either for either material.
If you suspect the blue blue bed may be contaminated you would be wise to swap it with one of the spares you get in the kit. The surface is very good and often too good as prints are often hard to remove which is why we use glass.
if you do decide to use glass, for your own safety you don’t want window glass or photo frame glass etc as it’s not resistant to temperatures you’ll be using. Borosilicate glass is perfect and there’s a shop that sells the kit with 3dlac spray. If it’s not sticking to the blue bed, it’s not going to stick to glass. The blue bed is definitely easier and you’ll need to print clips to hold the glass as bulldog clips get in the way of big builds.
lets just keep it simple and change 1 thing at a time.
to cut a long story short,pla on the blue bed is a good place to start and only move to abs after some practice as it can be a pain
hope that helps
I was going to get a Stargoods 3D printer Kit that someone here suggested. Do you think this is something that is incorrect? After listening to the suggestions and tinkering with the machine I’m pretty sure my core issue is adhesion to the bed. Almost every single print the initial trace layer peels right off the bed or gets pulled up slightly. This is probably over 80% of the time.
I don’t know that brand personally but as long as it comes with borosilicate glass
youll be ok. I’d recommend hair spray for abs or 3dlac spray which is very good and saves money on wasted prints.
First later bonding is rarely an issue on the FF blue beds, but contamination of the bed is very common and then people blame the bed itself but we do run the blue bed a lot and it’s never had an issue.
Id definitely go to glass at some point as it’s easier to keep the printer rolling and if you just put the glass in a cold work top, even abs comes free in minutes, you hear a little click and the print is then free, it’s very time saving as the blue beds can be a nightmare to get prints off.
if it were me, I’d start with printer settings and nozzle to bed gap, use some good quality filament as the cheap ones never work properly for long and then look at a glass bed. Always use a raft until you’ve had a bit of practice and also concentrate on pla to start with as it’s much easier and gives nice results even when you got a setting a bit off.
Everyone will have their own opinions but sadly some people base their own experiences as the rule and as facts but in reality every printer is a bit different even the same models have variations. As long as you keep away from window or photo frame glass you’ll be in the right track. There’s been some good advice given so far and some not so good advice, but if you stick at it and go with the majority I’ll bet you’ll be printing fine in a few days, then your questions will change to other things but we all know it’s a learning curve and in my experience everyone is happy to help. After all we are all in this together and just want to improve 3D printing for everyone.
Best of luck, I’ll keep an eye on the thread in case I can help with anything
just to add, when you decide you want to print ninjaflex and other flexible filaments you want to have a peak at flexion extruders, they improve even abs and pla prints as the mk10 we run standard isn’t great!
It’s hard to guesstimate how much I trimmed the tubes on mine as I did it by sight without actually measuring. At the time, I was in a hurry and needed to get a print going, so I just guessed at it and figured that if I got it too short, I’d swap them for some PTFE tubing.
For the feeler gauge, you can grab one of those at your local car parts place. They come in several different ranges of thickness. Be sure to get one that goes down to the smaller 0.002" - 0.010" range, as you’ll want something around 0.005" (0.127mm) or so. Some don’t start until 0.008" or 0.010" or so, such as the valve and tappet gauges, so just be careful to check that and don’t assume it has all of the smaller sizes.
On the gluestick, you’ll want to put it on when the glass is still cold – or at least something below 40C. I’ve found that if you put it on with it hot or even still warm, the glue globs up and doesn’t do right. I found that out when doing back-to-back prints and trying to turn it around before it had cooled enough. It just doesn’t work.
I usually put a thin layer horizontal and a thin layer vertical. I also have got into the habit of always coating the entire glass – too many times I’ve tried to guesstimate where it will be printing only to miss a vital corner or edge of the print.
You can actually use the glue now on the “blue sticker”. It will really help adhesion for ABS, or so I found while experimenting with that while waiting for my glass to arrive. It won’t work as good as glass, but is better than trying to print without glue. As for sprays, like hairspray, to me that’s way too messy. Hairspray leaves a nasty residue all over everything. And that means you really need to take it out (outside even) each time to spray it, and that means releveling the bed every time. With the gluestick, you can clean it down (I use 70% isopropanol and thoroughly clean it between each print) and reapply glue and print without leveling the bed again. Unless you have to do a lot of prying on the print, it will stay level for dozens of prints.
Speaking of prying them loose, with ABS, the natural warping effect really helps that. When the bed cools below 50C or so, prints with a lot of contact surface will almost always just pop free on their own. What is a little counter intuitive is that the larger the contact area, the more glue you need (thicker glue layers). You would think that the large contact area would naturally have more bonding surface, but the warping tension of ABS counteracts that. Where you have to be careful is on prints with lots of small contact surfaces. For example, if you have a print where the majority of the contact area is supports. The typical grid support structure works really well to hold firmly to the glue as it has minimal warpage due to the smaller contact patches (i.e. the temperature differential is less). Yet, the supports can be printed with a moderate gap to the part to make them easy to break free and remove.
As you print more and more things, you’ll start to see what I mean by counter-intuitive with glue and ABS. The most extreme example was when I was printing a piece very similar to the right-end carriage piece of the FFCP that I was designing for another (non-FFCP) printer I am rebuilding. It has a very intricate shape and needed extreme supports no matter how you positioned it. But, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that the contact area was mostly support grids and applied a larger amount of glue like would be needed for a part of similar large size with that large of a contact area. The result was that I had to pull the glass bed off the printer, take it to my workbench, and whack the part with a rubber mallet to get it loose.
When you install the glass bed, you’ll still want to keep the aluminum plate. It will help transfer the heat from the heater PCB and help it to more evenly distribute. As for the “blue sticker”, you have a couple of options. You can rip it off completely or you can just put the glass on top of the sticker. If you remove the sticker, you should put a layer of kapton tape between the aluminum and the glass. That will also help with that temperature junction. If you leave the blue sticker, it will serve the same purpose.
On one of my printers (the one I got used), I completely removed the blue sticker because the previous owner had tried to replace it with a new sticker and did a horrible job with the new one. It wasn’t even and had giant air pockets in it – making it impossible to level and print on. So it had to come off. The other two printers, I just left the blue sticker on and attached the glass with custom printed clips to the top. Though if you leave the sticker on, you will need to account for it in the thickness of the Z-axis shim.
For the majority of print materials, the glass is the best print surface. But there are a few exotic filaments out there that actually works better with the blue sticker – like some of the clay sculpting filaments and some of the investment casting mold filaments. And maybe even NinjaFlex. So, leaving the blue sticker on gives you the option of easily switching to it in the future. I can’t tell any performance difference between the printer without the blue sticker and the ones with the sticker. The glass seems to heat about the same on both configurations.
Another adhesive you may want to try for ABS is “ABS juice”, made by dissolving some filament in acetone. It’s probably no messier than the gluestick. However, it will most likely leave a bit of residue on that side of the print as the acetone reacts with the plastic being printed and with the plastic that was dissolved to make the juice itself, where the gluestick, on the other hand, is completely water soluble and just washes right off.
And gluesticks are actually PVA based and is a lot like printing with PVA support material.
Happy printing!
Hi @Chris_Prestol I’d definitely go with the glass bed - and don’t worry about cracking it, as long as you make sure you tighten the adjustment screws all the way before levelling, and have fitted the adjustment shim, it shouldn’t be a problem. When adjusting, make sure you turn the back ones as well as the front when making the first front adjustment, if you don’t it can be difficult to get a good level.
For the sticking problem (which I also had), I’d recommend looking at a PEI sheet. I tried everything - glue spray, blue tape, slurry - but the PEI sheet has been the winner so far in terms of consistent adhesion/lack of warp and of course, there’s no mess (no need for any adhesive). I got the large Lulzbot sheet (see here: Amazon.co.uk 14 ) which was big enough to cut (you need a very sharp knife and a good grip) into two pieces that would fit my glass plate. Get some isopropyl alcohol at the same time - whatever you do don’t use Acetone to clean it when warm, it’ll ruin the adhesion.
Different coloured filaments work at different temps , and a glass bed will improve levelness issues.
My experience with my Flash Forge CP has been excellant my Creator Pro has over 3700 hrs on it, its an absolute workhorse.
Replicator G was slow and minimalistic compared to simplify 3D. The Base settings in simplify should produce a great start point for excellant prints and has 100’s of options to tweak.
HERE IS YOUR PROBLEM…
You mentioned you cant get the bed level without it being tight in the middle, You Heated Bed is Warped!, Here is you solution.
1/8 or 1/4 glass is perfect to print on and will resolve the warped bed issue
download and print these bed clips they are the best so far, FlashForge Creator Pro - Corner Glass clips by jherridge - Thingiverse 13
use a 3 x 5 note card for leveling.
I havent had a lifted print since … i cant even remember…
ABS
Glass +
6in Kapton tape Scuffed with scotch bright or brillo pad
cleaned with acetone
Aquanet Hairspray
110-115 Bed Temp
220-230 Extruder temp
For glass smooth prints dont scuff up just add the hairspary or abs slurry
PLA
Glass +
6in Kapton tape
cleaned with acetone
Aquanet Hairspray
55-62 Bed Temp
195-205 Extruder temp
If You are still having lift problems try rotating the part 90 degrees or add “feet” in your drawing you can break off later.
I never use a “raft” its a proven way to adhear the part but you never be able to clean it up to look professional.
Hope some of this helps