Hi everyone,
I have a Creality Ender-5 Max, and I’ve noticed a loud noise when the heated bed reaches its lowest position — you can hear it clearly in the video I attached.
This model only has physical limit switches on the X and Y axes, while the Z-axis relies on driver stall detection (sensorless homing) for the lower endstop.
The official reseller (Slim 3D) told me this noise is “normal,” since the printer uses driver exception to detect the Z-axis limit. However, my instinct says it shouldn’t sound like a hard impact.
Could anyone who owns an Ender-5 Max confirm if your printer also makes this sound when the bed reaches the bottom?
I just want to be sure this is normal behavior and not a sign of excessive force on the lead screws or motors.
Thanks in advance for any feedback or short videos for comparison!
If that’s during the initial setup, the “bed leveling” yeah… it just rams the Z down into the floor. It should only do that once, or if you ever do another full calibration. That’s how it determines that the deck is on the same spot on both screws; it just grinds the damn thing against the floor until both sides stop moving. Boom, it’s mechanically leveled.
Subsequent prints it will drop Z down at the end of the job but they’ll be enough room under the print bed that you could still a roll of filament under there and it’s still clear.
If it’s doing it more often than that, you’ve got a problem. I’ve got that problem too. The command to lower the bed is apparently baked into the firmware, not the slicer gcode. When it gets a “print done” it executes and runs the command to drop the bed down to the safe-bottom-height.
Problem is, my touchpad started rebooting randomly. Like every couple minutes it’ll just blink out, pop up that “machine is starting” message, and go about like nothing happened. Print doesn’t stutter at all. (Of course Creality’s non-existent support has no idea what’s going so I’m left with swapping parts till something works.) But when the print is done, it’ll sit down there with that print finished press OK button… but when that screen blinks out and comes back on, it’s like it re-sends the “print is finished” command to the printer, and it again tries to lower down the Z. Except it’s already at the bottom. So it’ll grind painfully for a few hundred mm then just chill again. Until the next reboot.
Good news is, despite TWO of these pieces of ■■■■ doing that for potentially hours after an overnight print, they don’t seem to be damaged. So they’re pretty built, wouldn’t worry much about anything getting damaged just during the starting calibration.
It’s a garbage way of doing it, but it’s garbage that works the way it’s supposed to with very low tech required, so…
