ANET A8 Hotbed Insulation & Build Plate

thingiverse

From research on the web I have found lots of options and general advice on how to set up the ANET A8 build plate for best adhesion, leveling and to reach and hold the best heat bed temperature. While all very good advice and reasonably efficient I wanted something more positive and purpose designed. My first requirement was an easy way to set and maintain a level bed. I found when using standard corner spring arrangements and wing nuts that it was difficult to maintain a level bed and with variations in bed temperatures the leveling was always changing. I then realised the ANET acrylic frame was lifting/distorting with the bed adjustment and hot plate heating. I fixed that by attaching the printer to a 19mm MDF board that now keeps it rigidly fixed in place. I also didn't like the spring system as springs are meant to compress and change with different settings and not really intended to hold their tension/compression settings. I have done away with the springs in my setup and now mount my Hot Bed assembly to the sliding 'H" frame with 3mm bolts and adjustment nuts so it is rigidly fixed in place - so far I have not had any problems with the print head crashing in to it and causing damage. I then installed a glass build plate held in place with bulldog clips. I didn't like the look or functioning of that and was constantly concerned the print nozzle would crash into the clips. I also realised that the plastic filament showed great adhesion to polycarbonate plastic. I replaced the glass build plate with 220 x 250 x 3mm polycarbonate and machined 4 countersunk holes in the corners to accept 6mm countersunk screws. Way overkill I know but I wanted something easy to remove and replace. These hold down bolts fall outside the 220mm x 220mm ANET A8 build box My final improvement was to add 4mm of cotton wadding insulation purchased off Ebay to the underside of the aluminium heat plate below the heating element. To hold all this in place I designed and built corners, edge supports and a bottom support to hold the insulation snug against the underside of the hotplate. All were printed in PLA and the corners had appropriate nuts inserted to accept the 3mm and 6mm bolts I used. The result of all this is I can set my bed level - I use manual leveling - and it stays level day after day and probably would for weeks but I do check it every week at least. I can also now reach and hold 110 degrees Celsius for my hot bed. Not used often as I usually print with PLA at 60c which gives me 55c on the surface of the PC build plate. The heat up time has been reduced by about 25%. And I dont have the Heath Robinson bulldog clips which makes me very happy:-) I am sure these designs can all be improved on and hope that someone does just that and lets me know what they achieve so I can look at improvements for my setup. Probably the biggest immediate improvement would be to reduce some thicknesses so the items use less filament and print quicker. I also recommend you carefully measure your ANET "H" frame bolts centers as I think they vary from unit to unit. Also the build plate holes on my printer were not perfectly symmetrical. I do all my modelling in Fusion 360 and can supply the Fusion 360 solid model file if requested. Just send me a message and I will send them through. Beats playing around with converting mesh files to solid models.