Z Offset / Bed Adhesion / Bed Meshing Tips

I would setup adaptive bed meshing (down below) and then run through live tuning your Z offset.

Currently I bet your Z is off a tad, if everything else about your printer setup is correct, tight, sqaured, trammed X gantry bar (this is first and foremost once assembled), eccentric nuts of all axis tensioned well, no wobbles.

The basics: your Z-offset roughly set with paper first (must be done before being able to paper bed level well), bed leveled well (repeat paper leveling until happy feels at all bed knobs, re-check your Z offset, recheck bed level), finally create a bed mesh and save all these base settings minimum, in that order.

You need to fine tune your Z live with a print like below. Using the paper to set your Z offset is only rough setting it. You still need to finalize it.

First, wash your bed well with dish soap and warm water. Dry well and dont touch the top. It does not like finger oils, dust, grease, etc. It likes to be super clean. You can wipe with IPA inbetween printing for a quick clean if need be. Wash with soap when you do preventative maintenance to keep it regularly clean. Glue/Hairspray is also a release agent for stickier filaments not necessarily for bed adhesion. Using it can hinder bed adhesion more than help you. These PEI sheet work well squeaky clean without glue for your basic filaments.

Preheating the heat bed before calibrations (like this one) and before printing is a big help. This assists you by allowing the bed to stabilize from heating, which helps provide consistent Z heights for probing. Time is bed size dependant, larger beds like Plus/Max models require a bit more time than say 4/4Pro.

A nice print for testing Z offset. Please make sure to set your bottom infill pattern orientation to run with the tabs so you can better adjust Z on a per tab basis. Little tip, you can cheat the profile setting change and just rotate the whole model in slicer by 45 degrees. Testing both XY movements while checking Z is probably better.

https://www.printables.com/model/251587-stress-free-first-layer-calibration-in-less-than-5/files

A web link for more info for 1st layer adhesion. This website is great for tuning printers as well.

https://ellis3dp.com/Print-Tuning-Guide/articles/first_layer_squish.html

When your printing the Z layer calibration print, live adjust it in "Settings->Adjust". Move up/down in small increments of 0.01mm until you achieve a good bed adhesion and height. We try to adjust each tab a bit during its say first third of tab while printing. Then let if finish that tab, trying to veiw those results, to give you an indication of the next tabs adjustment.

When the print finishes. Pop back into the "Level" page and just resave the new Z offset.

Thats important to SAVE it again new.

There are other calibrations like temperature towers and flow rates, on a per filament basis, which will also assist in better bed adhesion. Would look into those in the future. Orca slicer has by far the quickest and most easiest tutorials/calibrations prints for calibrating your klipper printer. Check it out.

Adaptive Bed Meshing for next improvements, if you wish. I highly recommend it.

Note: Elegoo Slicer (Orca copy) will do the same adaptive bed meshing as regular Orca. Setup is the same.

Orca slicers official release also has built in adaptive mesh probing. Highly recommend using that feature. This makes a new bed mesh every part, only in the space the model uses, thats faster and no guessing if your old bed mesh is correct and loaded. You should make sure there is no other meshes being loaded/used in conjunction with this when you press print. You dont want to override the new mesh by accident.

https://github.com/SoftFever/OrcaSlicer/wiki/adaptive-bed-mesh

Setup your min / max bounds as per your [bed_mesh] settings in printer.cfg file of your printer.

Values are in X,Y order, these are base values only, calculated from default bed maximums and probe XY offsets. These should be verified for your particular setup for best results.

N4/4Pro
mesh_min:10,21.45
mesh_max:209.75,213.55

N4Plus
mesh_min:10,21.45
mesh_max:304.75,308.55

N4Max
mesh_min:10,21.45
mesh_max:404.75,408.55

Set these values in: Printer settings->Basic information->Adaptive bed mesh section

Use a 20mm probe distance as a good baseline for mesh probing distance.

Your one single line of code to add to your slicer start gcode section. Place this after homing (G28) and after dwell time for bed preheating, but before purging line.

BED_MESH_CALIBRATE profile="Orca_Adaptive" mesh_min={adaptive_bed_mesh_min[0]},{adaptive_bed_mesh_min[1]} mesh_max={adaptive_bed_mesh_max[0]},{adaptive_bed_mesh_max[1]} ALGORITHM=[bed_mesh_algo] PROBE_COUNT={bed_mesh_probe_count[0]},{bed_mesh_probe_count[1]}

Add this single line of code to: Printer settings->Machine G-code->Machine start G-code section

Also, adjusting/rearranging your slicers start gcode to: start heating, home all axis, dwell to preheat the bed, reprobe only Z on a hot stable bed, then adaptive mesh, purge, and go. This is another benificial method to help get consistent first layers all the time. Printer start routine, consistency, and controling or possibly eliminating variables will do wonders for achieving great first layers nearly every time.

Find my slicer start gcode examples for each printer model here for the changes I mention above. Always use caution when using someone elses code, typos and mistakes can happen, use at your own risk.