tl;dr: G10 is pretty neat stuff, although Angus is wrong and you can’t score-and-snap the thick stuff.
I knew, starting out, that I wanted to print PETG on my Ender 3v2. But that led me down the notion of printing nylon and other interesting materials. It turns out that a lot of what I want to do is functional printing that frequently benefits from careful material selection.
I went in various directions when I got the printer because getting the bed leveled enough to properly print PETG was annoying. I’d assumed that the build surface that came with the printer was somehow bowed or something. I ended up impulse-buying a glass build surface from Gulf Coast robitcs as well as a BuildTak FlexPlate system both of which sat in my closet after I’d realized that the real thing that had gone wrong was that I just needed to get a BL Touch sensor and once I had the sensor, I was able to get the build surface nice and level and print reasonably.
So I was just using the stock Ender textured glass build plate for a long while. And when I printed PETG, I’d put some blue-tape on it. And so things were static, for a while.
I knew that one of the recommended build plate materials for printing nylon was G10 (a.k.a. FR4), so I’d had it in the back of my head.
However, I was using Taulman3D Bridge Nylon with the recommended combination of PVA glue and a glass build plate and it was at least reasonable for some set of prints. Except that I was having problems with my Nylon parts pulling off the build plate still.
Anyway, Angus Deveson from Makers Muse did a video on G10 where he explained that not only was it good for nylon but actually pretty much everything.
One of the points made in the video was that I’d want to use a thicker sheet of G10 if I wanted to print nylon because it apparently bent the thinner sheets out. so, I figure, I’ll get the 1/8” thick, which is about 3mm in metric, and is about the same thickness as the stock glass. I decided to just get a 12x12 sheet from McMaster Carr and use the score-and-snap method.
It turns out that the score-and-snap method only works on the 1.5mm sheets. My sheet is around twice as thick and I carefully scored it with a knife, discovered it didn’t snap. I scored it again, deeper, did for a bit, actually… and it just wouldn’t snap.
So I ended up using my dremel and a cutting disk and that finally got it in the right shape. I’d highly recommend, if you go down my road of using a 1/8” sheet, you find somewhere that will cut it for you because, damn, it’s way way way too much trouble and you don’t want to do it.
My conclusions thus far is that it does, in fact, work for pretty much everything you can throw at it, although I still use TPU with the glass build plate.
I did find that I needed to use a bit more clipping power to hold it in place. The glass sheet came with a pair of standard clips but the G10 sheet required me to add a pair of tiny binder clips to really keep it locked down.
Furthermore, it heats up much faster than the glass sheet.
Even better, I was having problems with PETG sticking properly so I was pushing the starting bed temperature up to 100°C, which works, but it tended to cause the first layer to bulge outwards a bit, but now with G10, I can use a lower temperature, maybe 75-85°C, and it works fine.
Of course, I managed to crash my nozzle into the bed so I guess I need to get another sheet or two, but this time I need to find someone who will cut it for me.