not allways better it depends on the use case that's why they make them in different thicknesses ... for e.g. if you wanna add a heatsink on top of some pcb where you have multiple parts, even if all the parts are same (e.g. you have 4 dpack fets) if the amount of solder paste was different they can have different heights so you want your pad to have some "give" so it will have good contact with all parts so for e.g. there you might go with 1 or even 1.5mm or if you have situation like on some rpi's where you have parts that are not the same height it is much cheaper to have 3-5mm pad and a force cooled heatsink than to mill the heatsink to properly fit heights of the parts etc etc .. (and a single force cooled heatsink with 5mm pad will cool better than a smaller passive heatsink with .2mm tape)
but of course thinner the material less will it resist thermal flow
Yes, a senior moment! However, it is a good forum and whilst we can all help each other it is a very good thing. I think the topic of printer beds causes more debate than anything else. Thanks for the comment.
well I personally think it's because most ppl that join discussion on that opic on most forums have very little experience, both with different surfaces and with different materials... mostly there will be a person who switched from original crappy prc cloned surface to whatever new (usually glass) and printed PLA only ever and is now full of the truth how there's nothing better than what he had setup ... on the other hand ppl that are printing many different materials and tried every print surface out there know that none works for every material and are very reluctant to offer opinion on what's best so usually keep quiet .. that leads to very bad information being propagated as truth while valid and useful info is kept back
Yes, I definitely agree, I have got a Creality glass bed that I bought with the printer, as an extra, a couple of years ago. That bed isn’t flat either. I have just re-levelled the bed after installing a direct drive so I am in the process of setting that up.
Experience is necessary to get consistently good prints and to know / understand all the settings.
not only that, there are so many surfaces to print on out there and so many materials to print with, all that combined with all media you can use between the print surface and object to print on and varieties of the same surface type ... there's no "one fit all" scenario here ... and even ppl that have some street cred among young players often share stupid info or do stupid things ( just look how joel "the 3d printing nerd" fscked up the bed on 38000 US$ machine 'cause he decided he knows better )...
get 2 pei sheets from 2 suppliers they will not have same color nor will behave same, compare to pei coated steel from prusa and it's 3 surfaces that are all totally different behaving... add glue stick, magi gue, nano polymer from visionminer, hairspray, diluted vood glue, abs slury, pva slury, pla slury .. and each will change the experience completely, then sand it a little bit, then try clean glass with pla, then change to petg, then try PC, add modifiers to glass, try different glass, something like borosilicate, different, try sital glass - totally different behavior, switch to printbite try pla, abs, asa, pc, pa all works great without modifiers, then try TPU, rip out your head as you can't remove it, go back to gecko ......
there is so much available today that saying something is "best" is irresponsible .. I know what I use (printbite for everything except TPU and glass with gluestick/hairspray for TPU) and why, but that does not mean anyone else should
Agree with you completely on that one - well said! I tried the blue tape at the start (couple of years now), then glass, then PEI, then back to glass now with PVA. I found it works well for me, and I only have to change the PVA coating if I scratch it or break the surface. However I've never recommended it to anyone - even I had issues with a different bottle of PVA. There's so much variation in plastics, materials, temperatures that there is no one solution. It would be nice to see something engineered that does work everything, but we will have to wait and see on that one.
@Charlie_Powell well there are "engineered" solutions ... for your "normal" use (PLA, ABS, ASA, PETG ..) you have magigoo, devildesign, printafix, printaglue, monocure platebond, pritt.. and that's just what I remembered from top of my head, have not tried all of them (actually did not try most of them) but magigoo is most popular of all, dunno if it's best .. and for your "hot" materials (PC, PA, PEEK, PEAK ..) you have the nano polymer from visionminer that's supposed to be best thing after sliced bread .. it works also with "normal" temp plastics it's just bit on the expensive side
there are also "engineered" solutions that work without any glue like builtak, gecko, printbite, pei coated steel .. now again, what they are engineered for is a question, I tried them all and all work awesome with PLA (talking about originals, not PRC knockofs that usually don't work at all) and have different issues with other materials... I personally settled with printbite on all my printers as it works best for me for all non flexible plastics I use (never tried it with PEEK and PEAK but IDK if it works with them or not ) and flexibles I print on glass with any glue or on glass with bluetape (actually gray tape here in eastern europe but irrelevant for this discussion) ...
so there are a lot of "engineered" solutions just "everything" is bit too broad
I have only tried PLA and PETG, on my Prusa PEI textured sheet they both stick with no problem. On the Ender 3 Pro with coated glass bed I do not get such good adhesion and I have to increase the bed temperature to stop warping. I have never heard of some of the adhesion products you mentioned. In the UK we do not have the wide choice of 3D printing stuff that are available in, say, the USA. I’ll have to look up ‘printbite’.
Certainly no one size fits all, but I think the varied input from ppl is helpful to get a broad idea of what can work.
dude I'm in east europe, we have zero choices here compared to UK it's like I'm middle of desert somewhere.. but the Internet is vast and before this crazy situation with corona the world wide shipment worked rather nicely and it looks like it's picking up again
printbite is UK product ( https://flex3drive.com/product/printbite/ ) but if you have no issues with your current system I don't see a reason for you to change it, I mention it as it is the "best for me", not 'cause I think everyone should use it, and as example of a very good print surface very few ever heard about let alone tried
Hi, thanks for that link, I like to support UK companies when I can provided the prices are reasonable. My experience with goods from the far East has been that in the past few weeks it has been better than pre Covid times.
I wanted to try an alternative surface on my Ender so I’ll look into printbite.
So I ordered the silicone sheet on the slow boat from China and in the interim I'm using these clips SovolGlassBedClip.stl (8.4 KB). I beefed up a clip I found on Thingiverse. Printed in PETG and still working with bed at 90C. I suspect that the corners are no way near 90C. I got some ASA so I'll use that if they start to fail.
I've set up X and Y to 10mm inside the glass and will tell Octoprint and slicers that the bed is 278x233 giving a 10mm margin all round.
it depends on the use case 
... for e.g. if you wanna add a heatsink on top of some pcb where you have multiple parts, even if all the parts are same (e.g. you have 4 dpack fets) if the amount of solder paste was different they can have different heights so you want your pad to have some "give" so it will have good contact with all parts so for e.g. there you might go with 1 or even 1.5mm or if you have situation like on some rpi's where you have parts that are not the same height it is much cheaper to have 3-5mm pad and a force cooled heatsink than to mill the heatsink to properly fit heights of the parts etc etc .. (and a single force cooled heatsink with 5mm pad will cool better than a smaller passive heatsink with .2mm tape)