Howto: level your z stage

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
is what Salman Rushdie said.

We've all seen our Z stage crash into the build platform. The Z stage design is frail and prone to flaw. If you haven't payed allot of attention to the horizontal level of your stage, reconsider. Some print errors can come from a miss calibrated stage.

The problem with the z-stage comes from two issues:
- The nuts that hold the stage horizontaly in place
- The differing height variation between those 4 nuts respectively.

From personal experience i've found that leveling the z-stage horizontaly as a whole compared to the build platform is not 'THAT' important. I've found that the build stage can be off by millimeters and still result in a good print. What IS important however is that the nuts support the stage on all 4 points. The Z-stage can not have a tilt in it or it will result in bad prints. When all four nuts support the z-stage, the stage itself can (even visualy) look slanted - provinding there's no more then 5mm (give or take) height difference between the nuts. If you end up with more, you'll have to take a closer look at your build.

At first i tried to straighten it to perfection but no matter what i did i always had a variance.  Accepting that variance and trying out that very variance on all four corners i concluded it doesn't matter a single bit! (correct me if i'm wrong!).

For the howto part - here's how i do it: I move the nuts up the rod by hand high enough so i can insert the z-stage without much tilting it around (usualy that's about halfway the rod/cupcake). I never loosen the belt that's connected with the Z-stepper and pulleys. In the beginning that's how i went about leveling the z-stage by loosening the belt and then manualy turning the rods to desired height. I found that no matter what i tried, whenever i tightened the belt again - i would loose my perfect alignement. So now i simply unscrew the pulleys on the rods. Just unscrew the tiny inset screw on all four rods, then go crazy and OCD on the rods 'till they reach your satisfaction and tighten the inset screw again. And there you go, that - to my knowledge - is the best way to level a z-stage without having to take apart most of the bot.

Make sure that when you tighten the rod pulleys again, you respect the height on the rod compared to the height of the pulley on the stepper motor. If you have the z-wobble arrester mod, take extra care in adjusting the two nuts in the back.Also keep an eye out for the two front nuts and the clamps for the z-wobble arrester. If the variance in height is mainly on the front you could end up with friction on the bushings.