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Bed adhesion · Tool

Bed Adhesion Diagnostic

Three questions — what you are printing, what you are printing on, and what is going wrong — and you get the fixes in the order worth trying them, with the bed and nozzle settings that material actually wants. The free fixes come first because they are usually the answer. The bottle appears where they run out.

Run the diagnosticThe full guide

Vijay Raghav Varada

12 materials6 plate surfaces6 symptomsFree fixes first
A part keyed into the build plate beside one held by a film of adhesive

What Are You Printing, and What Is It Doing?

Three choices. The answer updates as you change them, and it puts the free fixes before the bottle every time.

1 · Material
2 · Build plate
3 · What is happening
Bed0-60 °C
Nozzle190-220 °C
EnclosureNot required
Part cooling100 %
Plate it wantsPEI

Do these in order

  1. 1
    Check the nozzle gap first

    Print a single-layer square. Correct looks like a continuous sheet with faint lines where the strands met, at roughly 0.8 times the nozzle diameter. Round, separate strands mean the nozzle is too high. Adjust the Z-offset in 0.02 mm steps.

  2. 2
    Wipe the plate with isopropyl alcohol

    Skin oil from one fingertip is enough to stop the first layer bonding over a patch several centimetres across, and the plate looks perfectly clean. Do the whole plate, not the middle, and handle a flex sheet by its edges.

  3. 3
    Give the bed five minutes at temperature

    A bed that reads its set point at the sensor is not yet at that temperature across the whole plate. If the centre holds and the edges do not, this is usually why.

  4. 4
    Check the plate is flat

    Print a single-layer square across the whole plate and look at where the strands sit proud. A failure in the same place every time is flatness; a failure that moves is contamination.

Smooth PEI

Grips chemically. Goes glassy after a few hundred prints and stops gripping — wash it with soap and water before deciding it is worn out. Never acetone.

Which formula

Standard, and often nothing at all — a clean plate at the right temperature holds these without help. Reach for it on a large flat footprint, a worn smooth PEI sheet, or a tall narrow part on textured PEI.

Add PrintStick Standard to cart ₹1,199

Print not sticking to the bed — the eight causes, in order

Digital calipers measuring a printed part
How it decides

Cheapest Thing First, Every Time

The order is the whole point. Nearly every adhesion complaint is a nozzle sitting too high, a plate with skin oil on it, or a bed that never reached temperature — and all three are free. A reader who buys a bottle when the nozzle was 0.1 mm out has been sold something that was never going to work, and will say so.

So the tool opens with the free fixes for every combination, adds a material-specific note only where it changes the answer, and names a formula last. On PLA it says outright that you probably do not need one. On polypropylene it says that neither formula will help, because nothing bonds to PP except PP.

Every bed, nozzle, enclosure and cooling figure is read from the same materials database the twelve material pages use, so the tool cannot drift away from what those pages say.

It works with JavaScript off

The answer on this page is rendered by the server, not assembled in the browser. With scripts blocked the choices are still real radio controls and the panel still shows a complete, correct answer. It just will not change until the page reloads.

Answered

Questions About Diagnosing Bed Adhesion

How do I diagnose a 3D print that will not stick to the bed?
Work in order of cost. Print a single-layer square and look at it: round, separate strands mean the nozzle is too high; a continuous sheet means the gap is right. Wipe the whole plate with isopropyl alcohol, because skin oil from one fingertip stops bonding over a patch several centimetres wide. Give the bed five minutes at temperature. Only then look at the material, the surface and an adhesive.
Does a failure that moves around the plate mean something different?
Yes, and it is one of the most useful signals there is. A print that fails in the same place every time points at flatness or bed-temperature uniformity. A failure that moves between prints points at contamination — skin oil, residue or dust — because the plate is not consistently dirty in one spot.
Which PrintStick formula do I need?
It follows the bed temperature, not the brand of filament. Standard covers the materials that print at or below about 85 °C: PLA, PVA, TPU, PET-G and CF-PET-G. Plus covers the hot-plate materials from 80 to 115 °C: Nylon, CF-PA, ABS, ASA, PC-ABS and Polycarbonate. Polypropylene needs neither — it only bonds to PP.
Do I need a bed adhesive at all?
Often not. A clean plate at the right temperature with a correctly squashed first layer holds PLA and PET-G without help. An adhesive earns its place on a large flat footprint, on a smooth PEI sheet worn glassy, on a tall narrow part on textured PEI, on anything printed above 80 °C, and on PET-G where it is used as a release layer to stop the part chipping the sheet.
Why does the tool ask which build plate I am using?
Because the surface changes both the failure and the fix. Textured PEI holds by mechanical key, so it grips a wide flat base well and a tall narrow one badly. Smooth PEI grips chemically and goes glassy with age. Glass is inert and usually wants a film on it. Garolite is what Nylon keys into. PP bonds to nothing but PP.
Related

The Rest of the Guide

Or Let Someone Else Fight the First Layer

Fracktal prints in all twelve of these materials on its own floor in Bengaluru, on machines it builds and supports. Send the file and get the part.

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