Best Aluminium Grade for Bed (UK)

[Graymattor]

Hi, 

There is a lot of information out there about the best material for a printer bed! MIC6 keeps cropping up but you cannot get this in the UK! what grade should I be looking at? I assume a 6000 series and needs to be a cast tooling plate (however a lot I have seen use a trade name and are actually 5083 aluminium). Does anyone have any recommendations? 

I will be using this on an CR-10 Smart Pro, so I think about 5 to 6 mm thick? (so cant use the likes of a Voron 2.4 bed) I am also looking to replace the carriage to carbon fibre to counteract the additional weight

Open to any suggestions

Thanks 

[Crashdown]

ATP-5 can be easier to find outside the US than MIC-6 

As long as its cast Aluminium and blanche ground on both sides it will be good. The very slight differences in the trace additives in different grades of Aluminium doesn't matter for our purposes.

https://www.pentaprecision.co.uk/material-resources/aluminium-resources/cast-tooling-plate-machining

[Graymattor]

Perfect, thank you so much for the direct information, much appreciated

[7milesup]

Just a slight correction to @Crashdown's comment.

The term is blanchard.  If you search for blanche, I am not sure what you will come up with.

Also, there is a difference between Blanchard grinding and precision grinding, whereas Blanchard grinding usually holds a tolerance of .001"  Also, I would think that a ground piece of aluminum would be difficult to find since grinding aluminum is not very common due to specialized grinding wheels that prevent the build-up of the aluminum in the grinding wheel.

Alpase K100-s is another brand of cast aluminum plate.  Not sure of its availability outside of the U.S., though. 

When I built my Voron 2.4 from a Formbot kit, it was very evident that the heat bed was machined, and somewhat poorly at that.  I toyed with the idea of putting it in my vertical mill and getting a better finish, but decided in the end that by the time the magnet is glued on and the flex PEI sheet is placed on top of the build plate, that any micro errors in the build plate would essentially be "covered up."

[Rushmere3D]

As mentioned tooling plate is what you want. I purchased a 315*315 plate a few years back and it was working great for until I moved the printer on.

You would have to drill holes etc yourself but that's easy.