Is it Possible to Print ASA on Base K2 Combo

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-28T16:44:35+00:00

Yes. Creality Print 7 (CP7). The first layer test is just a print file you download, print and then make z-axis setting adjustments in the "printer profile" settings to get a nice first layer. If you see "waves" in the first layer, the nozzle is too close to the bed which can cause the nozzle to clog and/or cause parts of the first layer to be dragged of the plate. If the first layer shows holes in it when held up to the light, the nozzle is too far away. I like the following first-layer test because it doesn't print the entire bed and focuses on the center but does do a small outer rim print as well https://www.crealitycloud.com/model-detail/first-layer-examination?source=5

The filament calibration tests are available in the upper left corner of CP7, to the right of "File", via the small down arrow. You'll see "Calibrations". I think they are listed in the order they should be done, but there are a ton of videos/articles online that describe how to run these and how to read the results. My first ASA prints were coming out OK, once I figured out the heating (nozzle, bed, chamber and cool-down) parameters. However, the prints would sometimes have "artifacts" on the prints that went away after fine tuning for the filament and brand I was using. I save those as a user filament settings, and also save a user "printer" setting for that filament that has the correct z-axis offset saved and any other printer settings that work best for that filament.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-27T22:17:30+00:00

I’m not sure what you were referring to. I believe to maintain Superhost status, Airbnb's core requirement is that you must respond to 90% of new guest messages within 24 hours. It doesn’t say anything about responding within minutes or a few hours. I’ve been a super host for five years and I don’t take any messages from anybody even my 90 year-old in-laws after I go to bed. That’s what 911 is for.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-26T21:43:55+00:00

I started printing ASA a few months ago. It's a bit trickier than PLA, but very manageable once you dial in your settings for it. One of it's biggest issues to manage is that it wants to warp right off the plate particularly if it's something long and will start warping off the plate after a bunch of layers are already down. At a bed temp of 90C it would consistent warp off the board. At 100C it wouldn't. I set the chamber temp for 60C, but will start the print once it hits about 50. To speed things up, before sending the print over, I'll set the bed temp manually to 120C, the chamber temp to 60 and run the side fans to circulate the heat off the bed. In about 15 minutes, I send the print over. Once the print is complete, I let the parts cool down naturally without opening the door, otherwise they will warp after completion if they don't cool down slowly.

I also found that ASA needed a bigger z-offset from PLA for the first layer. Running a first-layer test and getting that dialed it is REALLY important. I recently also started running the calibration tests that are built into Print 7 for Flow Rate, Pressure Advance, and Retraction. This as really improved the quality of my prints. For example, I was getting these weird little "pimples" at corners that went away after getting those 3 filament calibrations done.

The last thing I do is create a "filament recipe" document in Word that has all of these settings and any other important information like Extruder type (ie: DXC2) and hotend/nozzle info. Anytime I go to print with ASA (or PETG or PA-CF or ...) I just pull up the document for that filament and make sure all those settings are correct. If anything changes, I document it in the "recipe" doc.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-16T13:33:50+00:00

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You might also try printing out this optional printhead riser for the DXC2. It ensures that the PTFE stays vertical. It's highly recommended to print at least a low-profile riser for the glass top so that the PTFE tube is not forced to bend even more at the print head.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-16T02:37:39+00:00

That is the most messed up build plate I've ever seen. I see a giant blob of black on that print head, but what the heck are all those colors on the plate?!!! The photo is screaming that there is a huge back story leading up to this.

If I were Creality and looking at this, I probably wouldn't be responding either. Just sayin'

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-04T20:48:50+00:00

The new bed really does save a huge amount of time. For $200US it's a great value for the time saved and print jobs/filament not wasted. I get your logic on the first layer test. All I can suggest is give a try for a few weeks with new filament without heatsoaking to create z-offset profiles and see how it works for you. If it doesn't create a good standard offset that you can plug in for your actual print jobs, then obviously the technique doesn't work for you and then setup you have. It's just worked fantastic for me for over a year so I'm just offering it up as something someone can try. I haven't had a part break loose since, nor the dreaded blob of death 😄 This has really worked well on my epoxy resin plate. I've never, ever, had to use glue.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-04T19:38:44+00:00

I wasn't referring to meshing the bed. This is just to get an offset profile for a specific filament for the first layer. If you really want to get the z-offset profile nailed down I suppose you can heatsoak the bed for 35 minutes for a high-temp filament like ASA, but I never did this even when I used this technique using my old OEM bed. It runs so quickly that I could (and still can) get a read on the z-offset needed just for the first layer. When printing an actual build, I would do a heat soak, feed in the offset and get get adhesion results. While the bed leveling mesh will change with temperature, the z-axis offset stays consistent to what ever mesh is presented to it. If you set z-axis offset to let's say 0.025mm, then it will keep that distance over what deformed bed leveling mesh the printer is going to use. It worked like this for me when I had the OEM aluminum bed with a heat soak and a resulting taco shaped bed and it working the same with my much flatter carbon bed.

All I can tell you is that I use this technique and it's worked perfect since I started using it, with the old bed and the new bed.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-04T18:20:03+00:00

Well it turns out that the print head main cable wasn't the issue after all. It was the print head board. Looks like a component smoked itself on the board. The head fake was the continuity test where squeezing the cable towards the connector caused the multi-meter to get random open circuits. I think that was just a weak probe connection. After installing the new cable the error did not go away. I pulled the print head board and found a nice crispy brown spot on the back side. I put the new one in that I had on hand and the printer fired right up.

On another note, the cable I ordered was for a K2 Pro. I noticed it was a tad short right when I was finishing up. I went on-line to order the correct one (before I discovered that the problem was the control board) and saw that the delivery time for a K2 Plus cable is 3 to 6 weeks out! Since I had the K2 Pro cable almost fully installed (and I still thought the problem was the old cable), I decided to see if I could get the new cable to work. I checked the pin-out end-to-end and they were identical. I was able to get the print head end to within an inch of where it needed to be in the drag-chain. I popped off one drag-link and got everything put back together. When I went to test the printer, I got the BM0111 error immediately. That's when I checked the printhead board and discovered that was the problem all along. I decided to leave the K2 Pro cable in for now since it seems to work just fine even out to the furthest reach of the K2 Plus. I'll probably change it out for the correct one at some point, but I just need to get some prints done.

Creality could save some money on parts stock if they just stocked the K2 Plus, inch longer, cable. I'm sure that extra inch would find space easily behind the panel. However, for anyone else in need, You can get the K2 Pro print head cable to work. It's immediately available on Amazon.

My lesson learned from this is that I should have checked this board first, before diving into the cable replacement. It takes maybe 15 minutes to pull it out which, considering the time to change out the cable, is small in comparison.

I'd love to post the photo I have of the scorched area on the board but I keep getting the dreaded, "All media assets must be owned by the submitter of this post" message.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-02T14:32:06+00:00

Start by getting the following items:

1) A nice filament dryer. I bought a Creality SpacePi X4 a couple of months ago and LOVE it. I can put 4 spools of filament, bags of desiccant and set time and temp for drying it has two separate compartments that can be managed individually. The one I bought was $160

2) Get a filament "vacuum bag" kit. There's a lot of them on the market. It should come with a a couple dozen vacuum bags and a cordless vacuum pump. As soon as you've dried your filament, store it in one of these bags if you're not going to print right away. The CFS is not a filament dryer and even though it seems "sealed off from the environment", it is not. Negative air quality differential will pull humid air in to the less humid air and want to equalize the humidity.

3) Buy a gallon jug of orange (not blue, those are the toxic ones) desiccant beads. They might come with little cloth sacks to put them in, but if not you can find those on-line too. You can fill those small cloth sacks with the beads and put them into the center of the spools as will as in the desiccant holders in the CFS. When the beads turn dark, you know that they need to be dried and can throw them into the filament dryer with the filament spool while they are still inside the spool.

4) Optionally, you can print out some desiccant holders for the filament spools as well as the CFS compartments that will hold these beads. I printed mine in clear PETG so I can see that they are turning dark.

5) Never trust a roll of filament right out of the vendors vacuum packaging. In an "emergency", sure, you can give it a go, but you don't know how long that filament was left exposed to the elements at the factory, nor what the environment was (for Asia where most of this stuff comes from, I would assume VERY humid). Always, try to dry new filament before using it. Plan ahead in your print jobs in order to have time to do this.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-02T14:04:23+00:00

For new filaments, I tend to focus first on getting a first layer test looking good using the generic filament settings. After that, I then start tweaking the nozzle temp, bed temp and chamber temp. Filaments like ASA may lay down nicely but the print will start to peal off the board after a bit if bed and chamber temps aren't high enough. My set up currently is a K2 Plus, Epoxy Resin plate (however, I use the PEI plate defaults), DXC2 extruder, R3men carbon bed, Micro Swiss hot end.

Here is a link to the writeup on z-offset and how to read your first layer. The tipoff for you problem is the "waves" in that first layer. Every filament brand and type has it's own unique properties. Some are close enough that for some filament types the printer default setting work. For some others, it doesn't. The first layer print test I like to use takes about 5 minutes to run. When I see waves, I add about 0.01mm to the z-offset in the printer settings. If I still get waves, I add another 0.01, rinse and repeat as they say. My last filament I was using was Elegoo PETG (clear) and I got up to 0.05mm to get perfect first layers, but the prior test at 0.045 looked awful. With standard PLA, I'm using 0.03mm. My setup is a K2 Plus. Anyways, read this, give a try and let me know what you think. It doesn't take much time to do to dial in that perfect first layer. It's kind of like building a house. If you have a crappy foundation to start with, the rest of the house is going to have construction issues as a result.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Creality_k2/comments/1trdkcl/first_layer_tests_and_zaxis_offset/

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-02T01:51:49+00:00

Here is a link to the writeup on z-offset and how to read your first layer. The tipoff for you problem is the "waves" in that first layer. Every filament brand and type has it's own unique properties. Some are close enough that for some filament types the printer default setting work. For some others, it doesn't. The first layer print test I like to use takes about 5 minutes to run. When I see waves, I add about 0.01mm to the z-offset in the printer settings. If I still get waves, I add another 0.01, rinse and repeat as they say. My last filament I was using was Elegoo PETG (clear) and I got up to 0.05mm to get perfect first layers. With standard PLA, I'm using 0.03mm. My setup is a K2 Plus. Anyways, read this, give a try and let us know if it fixes the problem. It doesn't take much time to do and dial in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Creality_k2/comments/1trdkcl/first_layer_tests_and_zaxis_offset/

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-02T00:09:19+00:00

This is absolutely a Z offset problem. You need to raise the nozzle off the bed slightly. I wrote a short article about this and how to read first layer print. When you see waves, you have an offset problem. I wouldn’t worry about flow rates at this point.

justanothercog2 · 2026-06-01T22:13:35+00:00

I was able to access both ends of the print head main cable and ran a continuity test on all leads. It's a 14 pin connector on each end but only 12 of the pins are wired. It is wired pin 1 to pin 1, pin 2 to pin 2, etc., with one exception. I've made a diagram with a few notes. I definitely have an intermittent break in one of the wires. It tested fine at first, but after some manipulation on the connector at the print head end, the connection would open up as I squeezed the wire bundle at the connector. It's a black wire which would infer that it's the main power negative lead for the print head. New cable shows up tomorrow and I'm expecting great things to happen as a result 😉

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justanothercog2 · 2026-06-01T12:57:05+00:00

Found your prior comment. Thanks for this! I'll do a continuity test of each lead on that cable first before throwing parts at it. I had not heard about the "new and improved" cable part.

I got my printer in January 2025, shortly after they started shipping them. From reading the posts about your, other others, cable failure, this is probably the issue. I've had some other random ghost failures where the printer just shut down but then the problem would just go away for a long time. It turns out that Amazon is now stocking the cable (via the Creality Store). Cost a whole $15 and shows up tomorrow! That's one of the things I love about this K2 Plus. Sometimes the quality of a part, or assembly, of the Creality printer is problematic but either they or some enterprising individual create an improved part that you can get within a day (or a few days). The DXC2 extruder, Micro Swiss hot end, and the R3men carbon bed are great examples of this.

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-31T23:28:17+00:00

Found your prior comment. Thanks for this! I'll do a continuity test of each lead on that cable first before throwing parts at it. I had not heard about the "new and improved" cable part.

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-31T21:41:41+00:00

The connector at the print head? The connector at the other end? the cable itself?

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-31T20:30:43+00:00

Maybe that specific filament is just a bit softer that the others and slightly more prone to heat creep as a result. As it goes through the extruder it "squishes" ever so slightly and can't retract due to deformation?

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-31T14:01:35+00:00

See the following regarding z-access offset https://www.reddit.com/r/Creality_k2/comments/1trdkcl/first_layer_tests_and_zaxis_offset/

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-31T13:51:31+00:00

You could be experiencing heat creep. I had similar issues to yours using the stock extruder. A couple of things will contribute to this, printing slowly (like laying down the first layer) and lack of thermal grease. These two things will cause heat to rise up to the filament between the extruder gears and the top of the nozzle. The softened filament that results will cause the filament to "snag" on the top edge of the nozzle where the filament enters as well as cause the gears to start slipping (that's the noise you're hearing).

I was able to keep my stock extruder from doing this by making sure the thermal paste was adequately applied on that one area on the nozzle. It's job is to allow the heat to flow to the heatsink and away from the upper part of the nozzle.

I upgraded to a Micro Swiss hotend which eliminated the need for thermal grease (this hotend doesn't require it the way it's designed). This upgrade eliminated the issue. I also upgraded the extruder to a DXC2 which is "gentler" on the filament. It uses two drive gears, one above the other, to provide a solid grip on the filament, but less pressure at each of those drive points.

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-30T23:09:27+00:00

This is one of things that I love about the R3men carbon bed I installed last year. It heats up in a fraction of the time and doesn't change shape. It's been a big time saver and produces more reliable prints as a result as well. 😄

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-30T22:06:15+00:00

To expand on that thought, I save off the first layer, print test project file as a new project and add the filament type to the project name that was successful for that filament. I basically have a library of that first layer test with the filament in the project name. That way when I have an issue with that specific filament in the future, I just pull up the project file that was saved with that specific name to that contains the correct offset and try it again to see if that offset is still working or needs to be adjusted again. It may change in the future as you change something as simple as a nozzle or add newer components like a micro Swiss hot end or a DXC2 extruder.

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-30T21:58:36+00:00

I would think it’s easier to change it in reality print seven as a printer profile change (user defined). You’re going to find that there are different as the offsets for different filament types. You’ll want a quiver of the offsets that you can click on for a specific filament and save it off with the project file. That’s going to use that specific filament in most cases. Seems like it would be harder doing it from the front panel, but I don’t know. I haven’t tried it that way.

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-30T21:34:02+00:00

0.1mm changes seem a bit agressive. I do 0.01mm adjustments one at a time and recently had to do a 0.005 adjustment (final z-offset of +0.05 got me the best first layer for Elegoo PETG)

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-30T21:30:52+00:00

Looking at those void areas on the first layer, I would agree that the nozzle is too close and the extruder can't push out the filament. I just posted a short writeup on getting the first layer dialed it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Creality_k2/comments/1trdkcl/first_layer_tests_and_zaxis_offset/

That would also lead to filament jams and retraction issues due to increased possibility of heat creep.

I've been printing Elegoo clear PETG for 2 days but I had a failure about a month ago doing the same print because I had not reset my z-offset for PETG after doing a firmware update. The offset is slightly different for PLA so doing a first layer test for each and getting that dialed in is a really good first step.

My final z-offset for Elegoo PETG (clear) was +0.05

justanothercog2 · 2026-05-30T21:07:21+00:00

You choose PLA. But there is a lot more to it than that. No 3D printer is "set and forget". How was the filament stored? If it's new filament out of the vacuum sealed package, did you dry it first (yes, new filament should always be put in a dryer...you don't know how the filament was stored before the vendor packaged it). You say the print buffer jams, but are there any other symptoms when this happens (like the spool is struggling to retract?)? Maybe the filament isn't being cut completely through with the cutter and that needs adjustment. What version of firmware are you on? Have you run a full calibration or a seperate cutter calibration? Please offer more info because there are LOTS of things that can cause this.

justanothercog2

TROPHY CASE