Many people tell me when they try to level their Ender 3 bed they find out it's warped.
Well a quick solution to that is to use rafts. I know, you've been told they're horrible, they're
hard to remove. Actually, they're not. I'll show you how to use them on today's Filament Friday.
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of these patreon supporters. The first thing I'll tell you, if you have a warped bed, is to
replace the bed. Put a glass bed on it, replace the bed. That's the first thing you should do.
Some people decide to go with an auto-level system and that can help solve the issue
but all it really does is adjust for that inaccuracy. You still should have a flat
bed before you put an auto level system on it. Odds are you want to start printing now,
so use a raft. It's a very easy thing to do and it's free. All you do is enable it in your slicer.
There's three simple mods that I made to my ender 3v2 and I used rafts to print them all. Let me
show you the first one. Its covers for the belt tensioners. Little pieces of plastic or dirt can
get inside these so putting these covers prevents that. I found them on thingiverse from user
federica. These covers come in an x and y version and also two blanks. I'm going to print them all
at the standard quality in Cura which is the 0.2 layer height. I slice them and this thing just
does a skirt around it and then the prints. But if my bed's not level and I'm not getting a good
first layer, the top of these things are going to look terrible. That's where the raft comes in.
So I'm going to search on raft and it brings up the build plate adhesion. I go to the drop down,
select raft and there's a whole bunch of settings available for this. I'm not going
to change anything. I'm going to slice it and this is what it produces. A huge raft. Now if
your bed is really badly warped this may help you. In most cases you don't need that big of a raft so
I'm going to adjust the extra margin here from 15 down to 5. Slice it again and then this raft looks
only slightly bigger than the print so this is good. I'm not wasting a lot of plastic.
Now the other thing is how easy do they remove from the raft? The key here is air gap.
The air gap is the gap between the final raft layer and the first layer of the model.
This is their default 0.3 and I'm telling you it works. I'm not going to change
anything else. So let's slice this and print it. And here it is printing on my Ender 3v2.
And let's see how easy they pop off with that 0.3 air gap. All I'm doing is flexing the raft and it.
You can feel it breaking away as it does this but I just don't know how much plastic will be
left behind but it appears they're breaking off really really easy. And the raft you can see is
still very smooth so we'll take a close-up look at these after I get them all off. I really think
the raft did a good job. Now here's the x and y and here's the blanks they look fantastic.
So I chose the x and y and these actually fit really nice. And they look pretty good. They
snap in place and protect the hole. The raft worked great on these smaller prints but let's
try something bigger now on my printer. I get this build up of little pieces of filament. I hate it.
I'm always cleaning it out. Well I found these covers, slot covers, by sport 77 on thingiverse.
So I'm going to print these. I actually printed four of them on a raft. Same settings as I did
before. So let's take this off and see how they break away. It almost looks like a big KitKat bar.
So I'm going to break off this first one. It's doing the same thing. Feels like
it's breaking away and no warping. This thing is flat. So it looks really good. Let's see about the
other three. Well, the other three pull right off. These look great. No warping, the surface looks
really smooth and if I look at the raft it didn't leave a lot of plastic. Now let's install them.
So the first one goes in the rail here and it kind of snaps in place nicely. The second
one same thing. So now once there's little stringing of plastic I can just brush it
off because these things are flush to the surface and keeps my printer clean. I like them so much I
put two on the other side and then I printed another set of four and put them in the back.
They slide right under the stepper motor. They're awesome. Here's a third mod and it's a knob for my
ender 3 V2. And the top of this is not completely flat so this will be interesting how this prints
on a raft. I printed it on a raft using my new time-lapse setup that I showed in a previous
video and it came out really nice. So let's see how well the surface looks though when I pull
the raft off because this is not completely flat. And it was a little bit tighter to pull this off
but the surface looks good. Even that recessed little spot looks decent. So I'm happy with
the results. So I'm just going to pop my knob off my ender 3 v2 and pop this one on in place
and now I've got a little detent that makes it easier to spin this thing. And it's handy because
let's say I want to move the z-axis I could just scroll down to z press and then just spin this
thing to get it to the height I want. I like that rather than just spinning with my fat fingers. So
don't be afraid of rafts. They're not that evil and Cura has a great setup that makes them easy
to remove. And try out these mods if you have an Ender 3 v2. Some of them will even fit on an Ender
3 or Ender 3 pro. So try them out let me know what you think about them in the comments below. If you
like what I'm doing here maybe check out some of the videos that are popping up. And if nothing
else click on that CHEP logo and subscribe. I'll see you next time right here at Filament Friday.