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Rat Rig Community [Unofficial]•11mo ago•

9 replies

njneer

Bed/Gantry Leveling VCore 4 IDEX 500

I am having a hard time leveling the bed on my VCore 4 IDEX 500. During the commissioning process, I tried to follow the directions and lower the extrusions at the rear to get rid of the low spots. However, even with a lot of movement, I wasn't able to get less than ~0.55. (See image w/tape for how far I tried moving them.)

After going through the rest of the commissioning steps relatively fruitfully, I found that my prints were failing oddly (see below) and thought the bed leveling may have been leading to the issue.

Therefore, I tried returning to the bed leveling efforts. I tried releasing all the downward tension I had put on the extrusions, and as is visible in the images ("RealseTension"), it gave me the same range and shape as always.After reading a couple threads on here I thought maybe it was the X-Axis, so I tried tightening it ("TightenedXAxis") and then fully loosing all screws and retightening ("ReattachedXAxis"). None of this seems to make a real difference in the shape of the bed - and annoyingly the final solution is even worse.

My two big questions: Am I just chasing a ghost and really the range is small enough on a 500mm machine, I should just live with it? If so, would love another diagnosis of printing problems. Else, is there a good way to tell if the bed or gantry are bent and that is what is causing this issue?

Printing issue - in short, my first layer is not sticking well, but especially the skirt and outermost edges while infill does a much better job sticking. Can make a separate post with a video if this is likely to be unrelated

Solution

I ended up using some shim stock from amazon to level the X-axis. The more I thought about it the more it made sense the issue was a warped X-axis or bed because the curvature in X is consistent front to back. The front to back lean comes from the Z-tilt calibration trying to enforce a plane across its three measurement points. So if the middle is higher the rear value will be off and cause the while thing to tilt.

I created a quick spreadsheet to find an average offset value for the area between each bolt on the X rail and then shimmed between each of the bolts. I ended up having to make small changes about 6 times before I got something I am happy with (partly because using snips on the shim stock caused the edges to be a little thicker than the rest of the shim). may revisit at some point as still not perfect but I have other issues to chase now.

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