Your First Print: Bed Levelling Made Easy

Logan F.

The Foundation of a Good Print

If your first layer is rubbish, the rest of your print will almost certainly fail. Bed levelling — technically called "bed tramming" — is the process of ensuring the print bed is at a consistent distance from the nozzle across its entire surface. This distance needs to be within about 0.1mm across the whole bed for reliable, consistent first layers. Getting this right is the single most important skill a new printer operator can develop.

The terminology can be confusing. "Levelling" implies making the bed perfectly horizontal, but that's not actually what we're doing — we're making the bed parallel to the motion plane of the print head. If your printer is tilted slightly, a "level" bed in the spirit-level sense would actually print terribly. What matters is the relationship between the nozzle and the bed surface.

The Paper Method: Manual Levelling

Even if your printer has automatic bed levelling (ABL), understanding the manual paper method is essential — it's faster for quick adjustments and doesn't depend on the probe being calibrated correctly. Here's the process step by step.

First, heat your bed and nozzle to your normal printing temperatures. This is critical: metal expands when heated, so levelling a cold printer and then printing hot will give you incorrect results. For PLA, that's typically 60°C bed and 200°C nozzle. Auto-home your printer (G28 in the terminal), then disable the stepper motors so you can move the print head by hand. Slide a standard piece of A4 paper (80gsm is ideal — it's close to 0.1mm thick) under the nozzle.

Adjust the bed adjustment knob under that corner of the bed until you feel a slight resistance — a gentle drag — when you slide the paper back and forth. The paper should move freely but with noticeable friction; it shouldn't slide with zero resistance, and it shouldn't be impossible to move. Work through all four corners of the bed (and the centre on larger beds), then do a second pass. Adjusting one corner always affects adjacent corners slightly, so multiple passes are always needed.

Reading the First Layer

After manual levelling, print a first-layer test (a large single-layer square or grid pattern from the calibration section of your slicer). Watch it cautiously as it prints. What you're looking for is a smooth, continuous sheet of slightly squished plastic with no visible gaps between the lines of extrusion and a flat, matte top surface.

If the lines are rounded on top with gaps between them and they peel easily off the bed, your nozzle is too high — the filament isn't being pressed against the bed firmly enough to bond. Bring the nozzle closer. If the nozzle is scraping, the first layer looks translucent or transparent, or you hear a grinding sound from the extruder, your nozzle is too low — you're crushing the plastic rather than depositing it cleanly. Raise the nozzle slightly. Finding this "Goldilocks zone" is a matter of feel that becomes intuitive very quickly.

Automatic Bed Levelling (ABL) and Mesh Compensation

Many modern printers include automatic bed levelling probes — the BLTouch, CR Touch, and various inductive/capacitive probes are common examples. These probes measure the Z height at multiple points across the bed before each print and create a "mesh" of the surface. During printing, the firmware adjusts the Z axis dynamically to follow this mesh, compensating for any bow or warp in the bed.

ABL is a genuine quality-of-life improvement, but it doesn't eliminate the need to set your Z offset correctly — the distance between the nozzle's home position and the bed surface. See our guide on live Z calibration and baby stepping for how to fine-tune this whilst a print is running. A well-configured PEI spring steel build plate paired with accurate ABL gives first-layer consistency that's hard to beat.