3d Printing 101 - Cleaning, Prepping and Using a Glass print surface

Hey folks, TechNibbers here. Had to turn off the chroma key for a minute because a couple of the things I'm about to show you are green and so is my shirt. So, hashtag no filter. But basically, I ran to the store today. I had to get some supplies. Now, I don't know if you've ever had this happen to you, but through enough clipping and trimming with these guys, or if you have ever accidentally used them for, accidentally used them for something that they are not intended to be used for, like trying to snap a piece of wire or a paperclip or anything metallic or harder than the shears themselves, well, you end up with these little notches in them and then it makes it impossible to clip through your filament in a clean and straight line. So, I did go and grab another pair. These are about five, six bucks, but that is a very necessary item. And funnily enough, last time I did this, I said, you know, I'm not going to use these for anything but filament. And then here I was being a fool trying to snap a paperclip for some reason, which is ironic because I had the tool probably five feet away that is meant for that. I just had some stuff on my lap and didn't want to get up. Another thing is I had to get some more glue sticks, so I scored a giant pack. This also was about five bucks. These are the purple ones. They go in purple and they dry clear, apparently. It's pretty, pretty obvious. It says that right there. Some people don't like these ones. They work just fine for me and I like them because I can see what I've covered pretty much. And then I had to get some super glue as well. This is a very necessary component if you plan on putting pieces together. So, there's that. Today we are going to be cleaning off these glass beds. I'll show you how I scrape them, wash them, and then reapply some glue before we go and throw them on the printer. So, obviously, printer maintenance and having the right supplies are a big deal when it comes to 3D printing. You can get by using makeshift items in certain circumstances, but these things are vital, the clippers especially. You can't really cut filament with scissors. You can, but it's kind of a pain. It rarely comes out straight. Of course, you can use a straight edge, but you're going to be holding it against a table and cutting into it and stuff like that. So, without any more further ado, let's get to the video on cleaning glass beds. Alright, so basically the first thing we're going to do is take our scraper and put the flat edge up against the glass and brace the glass, making sure that whatever we're on is a flat level surface and it is also braced. So, we don't want it to wobble and we don't want it to be able to put pressure unevenly on the glass. We want it to be something smooth on the bottom. So, once you have that surface, go ahead and place your glass down and start scraping up the excess glue and filament remaining from the prior print. And it comes up pretty easy. You might have to go over it a couple of times and go back over and get some of the more stubborn pieces that wouldn't come up before. And go ahead and get rid of that. I'm going to take it to the garbage there. It's all gone and now I have a wet soapy rag, just a little bit of dish soap and some warm water. We're going to wipe everything off and clean up any gobs that may be there and then dry it off. As you can see, this is not quite perfect yet. But it is getting there. Still a little bit of slime and residue from the glue sticks on there and now it is clean. So, a couple times with the soapy rag and we're going to move on to the next piece here. And before we need to apply adhesion to the bed, we need something to print. So, I always like to look at where my print is going to be located on the bed and apply adhesion specifically to that area. So, we're going to be adding glue stick to pretty much the center of our bed today to print this little model that I knocked up right here. Now, this is pretty straightforward. So, I'm going to come into the frame here. I have my glue stick. We are going to twist up some of the glue and glue down the parts where we know that model is going to be from where we just had it in the slicer. So, it's pretty much the whole center of the bed here. So, let me get in here and we'll get a good coating of glue to cover as much of that as possible. At the very least, we want to cover the corners because those are the tricky spots. And we want to cover all of the edges that we possibly can and make sure that those adhere to the bed as well. From there, everything else should work its way out without any problems. Things are starting to get a little bit more interesting in there. You can see it moving a lot more back and forth as it advances forward and backwards. So, there are a lot of tiny little circles in there and stuff. So, it's important that adhesion is spread across the full surface when you're printing something that doesn't have a raft or a completely flat bottom. This has some intricate holes in it. So, in order to get the corners of those to stick down as it lays them onto the glass, you want to make sure that you have coverage of the entire glass bed. So, how successful was our print after our cleaning and reapplying our glue to the adhesion surface? Well, as you can see, it came out pretty square. Almost perfect, actually. And everything is nice and functional. So, this is just a little toy I made I was playing around with. But you can see the fine details in there. And those went down a single layer thick and pretty much released from the bed without problem, without breakage, any issues, or anything like that. So, very, very pleased. And this is the kind of product you should expect to get if you're taking good care of your glass bed. As always, this channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to support the channel on Patreon, head over to www.patreon.com slash technivorous. That's going to be it for this video. As always, I am Technivorous, and thanks for watching. Don't forget to check out our main channel page, where we do a free giveaway for our subscribers every month. So far, we've given away things like a Capricorn PTFE tubing kit and spools of filament. So, the giveaway videos are always pinned to our main channel page. So, all you have to do is subscribe and leave a comment on the giveaway video for the current contest. Feel free to check out this video right here. 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