Favorite Bed Heater / Print Surface / Hot End Upgrade?

I'd tend to suspect that you'd almost have to have a better bed heater with a block of granite that needs heating up. I've got all the bits for a qu-bd print bed, but haven't yet got up the energy to change the connectors and solder the helper wires onto my printrboard that are probably needed to supply the power to the bed heater.

I actually have a solid state relay lying around coincidentally from another project. Nice 30 amp 120 volt one too. A one minute heat up time sounds really really appealing. Soak time may be more, but still.

Where did you wire in the DC side of your solid state relay?

Exposed aluminum and wall source not a good idea? J/k

Also thanks for the picture.

Yeah, I'll be sure to be good and ground it well if I go with the AC source.  You bought your pad from mcmasters? How much did you put down for it, and is that a SD3 or SD2?

I love the idea of a super fast heater, but I suppose annoyed with the idea of two plugins for my printer.  No good reasons, and I think I am leaning that way, especially since I have two of these beautiful solid state relays just begging to be used for something important. 

I also posted pictures of my setup above, (or will shortly) that show my upgraded power supply, and setup. 

That is the other thing though that makes it easy for me to go the qubed route.  The pictured supply is a 12V 54 amp supply. Plenty of extra power to run a qubed.  And as pictured has an upgraded cooling fan that keeps it just a few degrees warmer then room temperature when the printer is running full bore.

What size is your heating pad? I'd like to get a 200mm so it get's heat out to the ragged edge.

Yes Tomek it's just that heavy.  And that is one of my favorite features, really helps dampen vibration. I did a .1mm resolution print last night after adding the wellnut upgrade and it looks AMAZING! You can look at the original post to see a picture of the granite.  Honestly I am liking it a lot better than glass.  Plus the black really is nice to print on, and calibrate with. For $5.57  to buy the 12" x 12" tile and have it cut at lowes it was a no-brainer upgrade.

Also what is z-lift?

I have done quite a few changes in my firmware default settings since I had a Panelolou 2 before there was any solidoodle/solidoodle community firmware support for it.  But no changes to the default z-axis acceleration.  I have however upped my max extruder acceleration to 200 instead of 45.  Seems to help.  I have successfully printed at 300% at .3mm layer resolution.  Of course there is some print quality degradation. Also I have never used the Z-lift feature.  I've always been concerned about moving my z-axis in any other direction but down after a print starts in fear of any backlash that my well nut has not taken out.  But with the new filament change command in the latest marlin release and in a beta by Adrian I may have to lose that fear. 

But usually I solve any crashing issues with puckered edges by lowering extruder temp, or bed temp by a degree or two. I hear an extruder mounted fan solves these puckering issues on difficult prints.

My heat pad is 6x9 I also wanted to get out to the edges.  The screws get in the way or I would have gone with an 8x8.  and I couldn't find a 6x8.  It sticks out a bit on the sides but has never caused an issue.  I really like your Idea of using granite and may give that a go... I have had such good results with glass and I am not sure I want to part with any more Z-height.

I thought I really liked glass until I used my granite.  I think it's really worth it to get rid of the clamps.  How do you secure your glass down?

I didn't get rid of the screws rather added a few layers of fiber glass and then a thin sheet of stainless steel I had laying around to hold the fiberglass in place.   The springs are just really compressed.
I don't think you will find a spot to just poke the screws through I had the same though back when I did this and I'm glad I didn't go that route.  The pad I got just doesn't have that much space between the coil wires.
As far as holding the glass I never used clips just sprayed some Aqua-Net on the bottom and it sticks to the kapton very well.  It doesn't move even when a print goes bad and the extruder hits it.  Yet I can easily remove it by sliding a razor blade in between the two.