The Vertex Delta 3D printer is great! BuildTak tips?

I’m totally new to 3D printing and decided to take advantage of the Black Friday deals to get involved - I know the Pimoroni crew only sell booty they would use themselves so I took the plunge, and I love my new Vertex Delta!

I’m still playing around trying to find better software (Cura seems best fit so far!) & settings combos, printing out silly things like those sharkz grippy things and benchmark boats on Thingiverse.

I’m also using a Pi with OctoPrint after someone I know mentioned it to me and it’s incredible, check it out if you haven’t already!

Now, the only major issue I am facing is that the BuildTak surface is so good that it’s hard to get your prints off. I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the temperature or nozzle height I’m using, but the PLA has bonded to the bed and is VERY hard to remove

My BuildTak sheet looks like a bombsite now from all the scraping, so I’m having to print on the relatively fresher outer parts of the bed 😢

A few questions for anyone that might know:

  1. How can I dial in my settings to get the right amount of stick using PLA on BuildTak?
  2. Can/should/shouldn’t you use hairspray on BuildTak, is that a bad idea - or a redundant one?
  3. After Auto calibration, is it possible to set the nozzle height after and then save it?
  4. What’s the best way to calibrate the nozzle height?

Would love to know what I’m doing wrong!

BTW: @pimoroni crew, thank you so much for including a UK PSU plug for the printer - you didn’t have to do that but you totally did it, much abliged.

Turns out the firmware (Marlin v1.x) was the main culprit for all of my above issues and nothing to do with calibration/mechanics of the printer.

See my post about this here!

And see a post on how to perform a firmware upgrade here!

I hope for any beginner users, this saves your bundled BuildTak sheet from an untimely death like mine suffered because of using the bundled (outdated) firmware 😿!

Thankfully my replacement sheet is surviving. Oh, and while I had previously been using Isopropyl alcohol, it seems methylated spirits seems to be better for cleaning the BuildTak IMO