How to Manually Level an Ender 3V2 3D Printer

Keep having sh*tty bed leveling and printer bed-filament adhesion? I’m not quite sure this will help but it’s worth a shot!

Today I wanted to create an extra resource to anyone wanting a clear and concise way to manually level their Ender 3 printer bed.

I have gotten pretty proficient at this over this last year, but I hope to soon manually do this for the last time.

Manually leveling the bed works just fine for doing single prints. As I have started to do more complex prints and projects, I need to upgrade to a more precise and efficient leveling method.

How to Manually Level 3D Printer Bed

Start with ensuring you have a clean extruder (nozzle):

And printer bed if you use a glue stick:

Select Auto-Home and allow the extruder to return to its origin.

Disable the stepper motors. This allows you to move the extruder to the four corners, over each leveling knob.

On each corner, use any piece of paper and slip it between the nozzle and bed. I personally have great success when you go from no friction to a nice buzz you can feel and hear when you move the paper back-and-forth.

In my experience, it has been worse to have the extruder too high than too low.

Aim to be closer to the over-damped end than the loud buzz, under-damped end of the spectrum.

I end this process with moving the extruder to the center of the bed and wiggle the paper back-and-forth. On my printer, it is usually more damped in the middle, and that’s generally okay.

I then apply the glue stick to the area I think I’ll be printing on.

And start printing:

As you get more comfortable, you’ll see this truly is an easy process. I definitely got more careless as time went on and ran into bad filament-bed cohesion from my leveling. Something I’m looking forward to never seeing again with the auto-leveler.

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below! I will get back to you when I have time!