Reducing warp on a FlashForge Finder

Many of my Camera Trigger project experiments were made significantly easier after picking up a 3D printer. The one I opted for was a FlashForge Finder, mainly because of its ease of setup, the dropping price and a recommendation from a colleague who already had one. Overall, I've been quite happy with it but the recurring corner warping was an issue that detracted from an otherwise good product. The ideal solution would be to replace the bed with a heated one, and some people have apparently done that successfully, but for such a sleek bit of kit it seems a bit of a kludge. There are numerous DIY kits that would be better suited to that kind of hacking.

A reply in this reddit post states the answer to the warping issue in capitals, so it must be correct ;-)

MAKE SURE YOUR BED IS COMPLETELY FLAT AND LEVEL. biggest improvement for me right there.

OK, sounds good. Now to figure out how to do that.

My particular solution involved a dial gauge, one similar to this. On the side of the FlashForge Finder print head there is a rectangular slot that is sufficiently deep to use as a mounting hole for a bracket to hold the dial gauge. A quick bit of TinkerCAD and this design was ready to be printed.

If you want to try this technique, the plan is available here. Note that this printed out with a degree of warping but it proved to not be a major issue. It still fitted in the slot in the print head.

This photo shows the bracket placed in the slot.

This photo shows the bracket supporting the gauge from the front.

The procedure I used to level the bed was to use the built in bed level function then move the build plate out of the way, attach the dial gauge then raise the plate up until it compressed the tip of the gauge by a few millimeters. I could then slowly move the head around the plate and see where the dial indicated the extreme spots were. The adjustment knobs were then tweaked to try and get everything as close as possible.

Here is a quick video showing how it was used. It looks like the back right of the plate is slightly high so this would be adjusted and checked again. Ignore the incorrect date & time stamp in the top left...

I've been able to print relatively warp free since using this procedure. Future posts will go over some of the items that have been created for the project.

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CameraTrigger

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