I have been having problems with levelling the printer bed, with and without (using the built in levelling function) the cr touch. Every time I try levelling it the display always says the corners are high and no matter how much I lower the bed it doesn’t help. I finally went old school and levelled the bed manually with paper, like a caveman and that worked. Sometimes it will print all right and sometimes the nozzle is too high, there is definitely a Z height problem. I can adjust the Z offset to correct it for that print but the next time it will be different again. I tried running the G48 test to check the repeatability of the probe. The averages for each test (4 counts) are
.050
.281
.080
.041
.137
.467
.064
.075
.024
.044
.153
.083
I’m guessing this is not in spec.
At this point it looks like the probe is bad but maybe it is the printer Z axis movement, so I put a DIAL TEST INDICATOR on the gantry, ran several tests and at the point that the CR touch trips on the bed the indicator showed that the position of the gantry was repeating within 0.0005” every time.
Is there any way to fix or clean one of these probes? Someone on Redit says they get dust in them and it screws them up.
I hate to but a new one if there is an alternative or if it is not the problem. Any ideas???
Very not in spec from the quick research I did.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3v2/comments/v41c84/im_getting_wild_results_with_the_cr_touch_the/ indicates a far lower deviation than you have as being out of spec.
I’d agree with you about a possible cleaning issue if it werent for those 3-4 values that are somewhere between an 8th and a half inch out. You can certainly try to open it, but unlike the BL touch and its clones I don’t see a way to remove a screw at the top and remove the pin which would let you blow out the chassis.
Well I bit the bullet (.5 BMG AP incendiary) and ordered a new one.
I think, only when absolutely necessary, that it has been failing for awhile. When I print now there are slight inconsistency’s in the first layer, consistent with a Z height problem, that have been there for a while but I didn’t notice them since there didn’t hinder my prints. The fact that I can’t level the bed with the probe only becoming obvious after I reassembled the printer is because I haven’t had to re-level for over a year. If I had done this earlier it would have shown up then I wouldn’t have confused the problem with the printer upgrades.
3D printing is very useful, can be fun but it is always a major pain in the but.
P.S. thanks for the links to the Guide to building your FDM Printer