So I just got an ender 3 in case you didn't gather, and while I don't hate the textured
bed....much, I do absolutely detest how hard it is to get this line of filament off after
it's finished printing. Parts come off OK, but this line? Absolute pain in the bed!
Side tip by the way on the topic of removing stuff from this style of bed. If you have
anything that's stuck then before you reach for the bed destroyer, then heat the bed up
to 60C and gently pick up a corner of the stuck bit. If it's thoroughly warmed up then
it should have the right texture to peel up.
But that's not what we're here for. What about if you just stopped the line altogether? No
line, no annoying peeling of the line. No damage to the edge of the bed from frustration,
winner all round.
To turn it off in cura, go to the printer settings under settings, printer, manage printers.
Make sure you're picking the active one so you can edit the settings and click machine
settings.
You can drag this window out to make it bigger, then find the bit that draws the purge line.
It's time for a quick Gcode tutorial I guess. Gcode is the language that the printer understands,
and it's really not technical at all. Every command starts with a G, except the ones that
don't, and the numbering next to the G tells the printer which command you want. So G0
is move without extruding and G1 is move with extruding. The rest of the command is just
the parameters of the instruction, so for a G1 we are giving the X, Y and Z locations
to move to, and then the E command for how much to extrude.
You can look at a list of available gcode commands on the link below in the description.
It's worth knowing that gcode was not invented for 3d printers, in fact it goes back to the
1950s and was invented for CNC machines, which is weird because I didn't know CNCs existed
back then, but there you go. This of course means that there's a lot of commands that
categorically make no sense for a 3d printer or have been implemented differently. But
there you go, history lesson officially over.
So for the time being I've just commented out the part that makes the line which should
now make sense how and why it creates the line, and I've replaced it with just two commands,
the first spits out some filament to prime the nozzle, the second just lazily wipes it
on the edge and corner of the board. It's dirty and I'm not proud, but you know what?
It works for me, and I can just remove this without getting out the bed destroyer.
You of course can code whatever you want in here, you could draw a whole level of pacman
as a purge sequence if you want to, go crazy.
I hope that helped you, if so, comment, and if not, also comment. Remember to click those
two buttons down there and I will see you next time when I have, I think, something
about food safe PLA. Assuming I don't get distracted again. Thank you for watching!