Holding your 3D prints down using sugar. First, get a half a teaspoon of table,
sugar. Next, add a little bit of tap water. Just a few drops of tap water to make a paste. Once
you have that paste, put it into your microwave, put it on high for maybe about five seconds or so,
it's going to bring it to a boil, very rapidly. I wouldn't let it
boil for more than two or three seconds. And very carefully without burning yourself,
give that thing a swirl around. You're gonna notice that within only a few seconds, it becomes
clear. This is going to be your bonding agent. Next, grab a piece of paper towel, tear off, one
quarter of it. And that's all you're going to need any more than that, is trouble. Once you get to
your printer, I would suggest turning the printer on and preheating the bed to between 50 and
60 degrees Celsius. And level the bed before you apply this mix to the bed. Take your paper towel,
fold it up into a little square. Dip, it only part way into the mix. You don't want too much on that
paper towel, wipe it onto the bed, across the bed evenly, where you'd like to print. And then
perpendicularly in the opposite direction. Okay, it is normal to see water droplets at this point,
so don't be worried. If you see that, what will happen is the water in your mixture is going to
quickly evapourate out! It's going to leave a concentrated sugar base on top of that bed,
after about 20 to 30 seconds, do exactly the same thing you did the first time. This time,
when you wipe across, you're going to see it's going to be much smoother. And now you're going
to see that the surface.....you're going to see the surface of the bed is going to resemble a candy,
okay. It's going to be flat. It's going to be consistent. It'll be a steady "haze" across the
glass. That is the goal, okay! You can do this two, maybe three times if you like. I'm fine with
twice, I've never had a problem. You're ready to print. In my experience, I printed about 15
or 20 prints so far using this method, I've never had a print fail yet, okay. I am printing using
PLA. If somebody else is printing with ABS, I'd be interested to know how that thing works, and
maybe you could comment in the bottom, let us know how that works for you? Okay.
You will see that as long as the bed is hot, the print is going to be stuck onto
the bed. It will not let go no matter how hard you pull on it, okay. But if you let
the bed cool down, the print will let go. When do you take the print off, you're gonna see
a little bit of sugar is going to be taken off with the print. Use, a damp cloth to wipe
that off, it wipes off instantly, and but you're going to need to also, if you're going to print
in the same spot on the bed, give a quick wipe of your mix to make sure that there is no bare
glass showing or else your prints will lock to the glass. You don't want that to happen, okay! So,
I wanted to do a couple of test prints, okay, I wanted to try to make this system fail, right? I
want to show you what this can do. I printed a little I-beam, just a basic I-beam with almost
no "base" contact area to the surface. Um, and there's no raft or anything. As you can see, it's
very tiny, and it overhangs. It's a few inches long. It's lightweight though, but it works.
So next I printed a larger print. It's also overhanging. This print is going to be 6
inches long. It has a contact area less than an inch thick and,,, take a look!
It's locked on solid. It will not come off, until the bed cools down.
So that's it. They're locked on as
long as the bed is warm and then release quickly, when the bed is cool. Once you are done printing,
you might be wondering about cleanup. Well, that's easy! I already gave you a hint of that. This
is all water soluble, so just take a damp cloth and wipe your bed off. All the sugar comes off,
alternatively, you can take the glass, top off your printer, take it over to your sink
and rinse it lightly with mildly warm water. No soap required, the sugar will all dissolve,
completely and instantly. Please leave your feedback and if this works for you,
please like and share. Okay, that would be great. So there you go. Simple, 3D printer bed,
adhesion method, where you don't have to buy anything. The ingredients are already
in your kitchen. See you next time.