Klipper Bed Leveling without Messing about with Paper

Are you tired of the “old school” paper method of bed leveling on your 3D printer? Do you find yourself constantly questioning if the resistance is consistent across all corners of your bed? Fear not, my friend! There’s a new way to level your bed that will make your life so much easier and more precise.

I’ve recently grabbed myself a Creality Sonic Pad, and moving from mriscoc Professional Firmware (Marlin) to Klipper has been a journey to say the least, but I’m slowly getting to grips with it and I’m liking it so far.

One thing I didn’t like however was going from the great tramming wizard on mriscoc to manually messing about with paper to tram my bed when going through the levelling process so I went on the hunt to find something similar to the mriscoc tramming wizard and would you believe it, it’s baked into Klipper, called SCREWS_TILT_CALCULATE and very quick and easy to set up.

The SCREWS_TILT_CALCULATE function simply probes the 4 screws in you bed and tells you how much you need to raise or lower each screw so your bed is trammed,

The Manual leveling section of the Klipper Manual explains in detail how to set up SCREWS_TILT_CALCULATE as an alternative to the paper level andhere’s a quick rundown of how I did it for my Ender 3 V2, S1 and V2 Neo

Setting Up SCREWS_TILT_CALCULATE

For all Ender 3 style printers the process is the same opening the printer.cfg add a few lines and then restart, for the Ender 3 V2 and V2 Neo the first thing to do is find the [stepper_x] section and slightly adjust the position_max setting to 248, which will allow the probe to get over the screw on the right hand side (whilst still not going too far to crash into the end.) I didn’t have to do this on the S1, but I did have to Adjust the [stepper_z] section to position_max: 275 which isn’t quite enough to get the probe over the back screws but, close enough.

Then I added the following under the [bed_screws] section the following section which tells the firmware where the probe needs to be to be over each screw

Ender 3 V2 and V2 Neo:

[screws_tilt_adjust]
screw1: 75, 35
screw1_name: front left screw
screw2: 246, 35
screw2_name: front right screw
screw3: 246, 205
screw3_name: rear right screw
screw4: 75, 205
screw4_name: rear left screw
horizontal_move_z: 10.
speed: 200.
screw_thread: CW-M4

Ender 3 S1:

[screws_tilt_adjust]
screw1: 57, 73
screw1_name: front left screw
screw2: 237, 73
screw2_name: front right screw
screw3: 237, 229
screw3_name: rear right screw
screw4: 57, 229
screw4_name: rear left screw
horizontal_move_z: 10.
speed: 200.
screw_thread: CW-M4

Then you can save the config, restart klipper and you’re ready to start tramming without messing about with paper.

simply tighten the front left screw to where you want it (tight -1 turn is as good a start as any), home all then run the command SCREWS_TILT_CALCULATE in the console. The printer will probe all the screws one after the other and then it’ll tell you if you need to adjust the other screws and by how much

I found it easier to concentrate on one screw at a time, so started with the back right (furthest from the control screw) adjusting it in the direction it said, then rerunning until it was close enough then moving to the next screw until all screws were showing as close as you can get (within 00:06 is apparently the sweet spot)

Then adjust your z offset as usual, run an auto bed level and you should be good to print.. worked pretty good for me.

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